Join us on Thursday, May 10th for an evening of thinking and drinking.
Nerd Nite is an evening of entertaining yet thought-provoking presentations– all while the audience drinks along in a casual atmosphere. Speakers present for 15-20 minutes each on a fascinating subject, often in an uncanny and unconventional way. Following each presentation is a brief Q&A with the audience.
This is a FREE event. We only accept donations.
Make a contribution here: http://bit.ly/nnomay2018
We’ll also be giving out 2 free tickets to see BILL NYE!!
Guest speakers include:
Carlos Donze & Morgan Laco
Max Jackson
Felix Sosa
Hosted by Ricardo Williams
PRESENTATION #1: “How to help Grandma (or Grandpa) buy their first Bitcoin!” by Carlos Donze & Morgan Laco
Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency. What is it and what does it mean for our future. Carlos Donze is a bit of a renaissance man, crypto enthusiast and video game nerd. He works as a community moderator and loves his dog, Lolo. Morgan Laco is a software engineer with a Master’s Degree in Financial Math and she loves Physics, the ancient game of Go and her cat, Neko.
PRESENTATION #2: “Your Brain on Too Many SuperHero Movies – The Computational Neuroscience of Art, Heroism, and Madness” by Max Jackson
Have you ever gotten so carried away by a story that you felt – and I mean really felt – like you were a character in that story?
How does that happen? Is that dangerous? What does that tell us about the human mind?
In this talk we’ll be taking a look at the human brain to answer those questions and more, starting from the brain’s basic components and building our way up through the mind, touching on perception and attention and hallucination and imagination as we explore what it means to be human and how we can harness the power of the art we love to become who we want to be.
Max Jackson is a bioengineer at Hesperos, a Body-On-A-Chip company. He works to build new brains on computer chips to help fix our old brains when they break. He also builds apps with Code Hangar, a full stack web-app company that builds delightful apps for disruptive startups.
PRESENTATION #3: “Building Machines that Learn and Think Like People” by Felix Sosa
The field of intelligence research goes beyond the artificial. Researchers have been looking at the brain and how children learn for some time now to help understand how we can make machines smarter and now it’s starting to get real. I’ll talk about the research I do at MIT and Harvard on intelligence and how we work with people across institutions to uncover how humans learn in hopes of building smarter machines. The goal is to show everyone the incredible progress being made to uncover how the mind works.
Felix Sosa’s been around Orlando for about seven years. He just got his bachelor degree in Computer Science and is now on his way to continue his work at MIT and Harvard on computational cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He’s been a big A.I. and brain nerd for the last few years and has been actively trying to figure out how the human intelligence works, how it’s implemented in the brain, and how we can use these insights to build smarter machines.