Schedule
Devmoot is a one day, single track event.
Note: This is the planned schedule, but may change.
| 8:30 | Doors Open, donuts, tea, and coffee |
| 9:00 | Keynote: Jeff Prosise LLMs and Other Things That Go Bump in the Night: Understanding ChatGPT |
| 10:00 | Houston Miller It’s A Me, MarI/O – A Beginner’s Experience With Machine Learning and Super Mario. Super Mario Bros. is one of the most well-known games of all time. It is easy for anyone to grasp the concepts: Move to the right, jump on enemies, grab coins, and hit the flag to finish the level. But how easy is it for a computer to learn to play Mario? Inspired by the MarI/O program, and in an attempt to implement it on my own, I will share the struggles and triumphs of setting up and running a program that teaches itself to play Super Mario Bros. Along the way we will discuss what worked and what didn’t and some tips for getting started on setting up your own experiments with machine learning and artificial intelligence. |
| 11:00 | Lightning Talks! Katie Russell Don’t Fear the Reaper: Bouncing Back from Tech Layoffs The dreaded layoff email. Or perhaps the whispers of layoffs are starting to circulate through your organization. Fear not, for in the ever-evolving tech realm, where uncertainty lurks like a mischievous line of code, we’ll embark on a journey to conquer the layoff jitters. In this session, we’ll cover tips for how to conquer uncertainty, unleashing the power of networking ninjas, discover how to gracefully bounce back if it does happen, and find the ultimate upgrade in your tech career. Stefan Hodges-Kluck Using Flutter to Speed Up Cross-Platform Development Flutter is an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase. Interested in learning more about how Flutter compares to other app solutions such as native Android/iOS, React Native, Ionic, and Xamarin/MAUI? Then look no further than this brief overview. In addition to a brief overview of how Flutter stacks up to other app solutions, I will share some tools and patterns that will help you speed up Flutter development and create a more robust, maintainable codebase. During this presentation you will learn how to leverage Flutter to get the most out of your app’s development life-cycle. Peter Groszkowski Quantum Computing: current state of affairs and potential for the future Quantum Computing has recently generated a lot of interest, as it promises to tackle problems that are intractable on classical computers. In this talk we will review what quantum computing actually is, why it is important, and what those problems it hopes to solve are. We will also discuss most recent progress in building these early quantum machines, highlighting the key difficulties and describing potential ways to overcome them. Finally, we will give a brief overview of the related efforts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the US Dept. of Energy as a whole. |
| Noon | Lunch and socializing |
| 1:00 | Jamie Phillips Do you have a diagnostic routine? What we can learn from the automotive field. How do you currently diagnose an issue? Do you jump directly into the code or some other aspect to only discover that it’s a networking issue? I have spent hundreds of hours across my career troubleshooting to only discover that I was chasing my tail. It was only after I started watching automotive shops on YouTube that I noticed the one thing the channels I watch have in common. It is their uncanny ability to diagnose problems that have stumped other shops. The common trait is having a diagnostic routine and always following it. This presentation will look at a few case studies and share experiences of how developing a routine will save you countless hours bug hunting. |
| 2:00 | Amy Fletcher Augmentation or Automation: Jobs and Ethics in the Age of Generative AI ChatGPT-4 arrived in April 2023, one of many generative AI tools to hit the market in the last year. Advocates argue that it will democratize creativity and accelerate innovation. Skeptics worry about job losses and a steep decline in literacy and numeracy. This talk considers the future of work, ethics, and politics in this new era. Though previous waves of automation enabled more creative and remunerative labor, past performance does not guarantee future results. Today, insular “tech bros,” weak regulators, political divisions, and economic insecurity combine to make the current prognosis worrying. I argue that broad technological literacy and revitalized citizenship are the keys to the augmented—not automated—jobs future. |
| 3:00 | Gary Jackson The Future of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is Web3 As AI is reaching the pinnacle of its hypercycle, so are the fears of what AI could do. But what is not considered is how the internet is evolving. The future of the Web or Web3 domesticates data in the wild to prevent AI from feeding off everything and anything. The only thing that could make A.I. dangerous is if humans allow Web3 not to happen. We will delve deeper into how this new Web3 landscape could negate fears and could incubate innovation. |
| 4:00 | Zachary Kimble Transformers, Reinforcement learning, and Self-supervised Learning; the 3 technologies powering Chat |
| 5:00 PM | Happy hour and afterparty with heavy hors d’oeuvres |
| 7:00 | You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here |