Friday Hacks #28, Sep 7
Posted on by ejames
This week we have Thomas Gorissen, web developer and organiser behind JSCamp, and Tan Liling, an NTU graduate student working on word sense disambiguation.
We are making one change this week:
- We are going to serve pizza after the talks, not before, to encourage more relaxed mixing with speakers. Attendees are encouraged to eat a light dinner before the event.
So the updated event details:
Location: COM1 SR3 [COM1/212] Time: 7pm - 9pm. Talks start promptly at 7pm. You are welcome to stay and mingle (or hack!) after the talks.
Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks
Talk 1: The technology behind the online advertisement machine (Thomas Gorissen, JSCamp organizer)
Talk Description:
You're visiting websites that show display advertisements many times a day and every time, millions of times a day, a complex real-time process involving hundreds of requests to different servers of different companies is triggered. In an effort to show you the most valuable message at the time of your visit, your ad-impression opportunity is literally traded in the background in a way that closely mimics a financial stock market. It is a massive, for the consumer invisible machine, involving the biggest internet companies, you've never heard of.
Prep:
A basic understanding of the way the internet works (web programming, servers, clients, requests, cookies) is required.
Speaker profile:
Thomas is a web developer 14 years in the making. He has lived and helped startups in Germany, Panama, Singapore and the US with his experience in technology, architecture and design. Currently he is working for ADZ, the online audience marketplace for Asia (//www.adzcentral.com ) as Technologist. As the first employee he helped design and build ADZ advertisement technology stack from the ground up.
Talk 2: Do computers REALLY understand the human language? (Tan Liling, NTU Graduate Student)
Talk Description:
A brief introduction on Natural Language Processing, giving an overview of the science behind the technology that uses NLP. The talk is meant to be introductory and giving a brief overview of the different small parts that makes an NLP application like Siri works. Nothing in-depth will be discussed and if necessary more can be explained off- the presentation or during the QnA.
Speaker Profile:
I am a graduate student from NTU working on my thesis on word sense disambiguation. I deal with mostly the "knowledge" side of NLP rather than the "speech" side, so I do know a little from the courses I've taken on speech technology ( voice recognition, synthesizers, speech corpora, and processing) but I know just enough to talk about it generally. What I do is mostly on letting the computer understand grammar and meaning of human language, sometimes it involves applying some machine-learning techniques and statistics but most times, it is to think of novel ways to impart knowledge to computers.
Please sign up at //bit.ly/friday-hacks
For a map, more details, as well as guidelines on giving a talk on Friday Hacks, see //nushackers.org/fridayhacks/
For more info on NUS Hackers, See: //nushackers.org/about
For more Friday Hacks talks: //nushackers.org/