At Demo Day, ten startups take the stage to pitch their business and show you why their startup will succeed. It is the culmination of three months of hard work inside Orlando’s first technical accelerator, StarterStudio. If you like watching Shark Tank or just enjoy looking for the next hot tech startup (to use, or to invest in) you won’t want to miss Demo Day. Join them on May 1st at 7PM for a night of networking and celebration of Orlando’s blossoming startup community.

WHEN: May 1, 2018 @ 7 PM
WHERE: Dr Phillips Center for the Performing Arts

Purchase Tickets at: https://www.drphillipscenter.org/

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.

The Science Events Summit is convening for the first time in 2018, but is a continuation of the International Public Science Events Conference (IPSEC).

IPSEC has met six times since 2011, and brings together public science event organizers, evaluators, collaborators, and sponsors. This year’s event will take place the first week of June in Saint Petersburg, FL.

Nerd Nite is collaborating with Science Events Summit and will be producing a special event for the conference.

And we’ve got a discount for you!!

For 25% off your conference registration, use the Promotional Code: TheNerdAwakens

https://www.science.events/

Every Friday at 5:30pm, you can join makers at MakerFX Makerspace for free! See what they do, how they do it, and how you can become involved. Its fun, educational, and a great way to make some new creative friends.

MakerFX Makerspace
8600 Commodity Cir #158
Orlando, Florida

P.S. That’s where we make our buttons!

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

This series celebrates the transformative moments that awaken our connections to the natural world and allow us to find light within the darkness. Those unexpected, magical instances that deepen the understanding of ourselves and the peaceful feeling of being connected to something larger than any one individual. Christie’s own experiences of connection to nature came unexpectedly while on a solo night walk, which she has attempted to capture in this series. She has translated these feelings into fourteen new paintings which showcase wild, luminous, supernatural night skies set against the grounded and ghostly silhouettes of trees.

Click here to RSVP on Facebook

On Thursday, April 12th, Nerd Nite is back at the newly-renovated Geek Easy with a World Space Party. We’ll have 3 brand new space-themed presentations and a space costume contest. Details here: bit.ly/worldspaceparty

But we’ve decided to keep the party going– on Friday, April 13th, we’ll be joining Yuri’s Night Space Coast for a special event at the Kennedy Space Center and we want you to join us! You can get your tickets at http://spacecoast.yurisnight.net Nerd Nite attendees can get a discount using the code: NERDNITE10

Nerd Nite Orlando World Space Party on Thursday, April 12th: bit.ly/worldspaceparty
Yuri’s Night Space Coast on Friday, April 13th: http://spacecoast.yurisnight.net

In a show titled “Somebody’s History”, Amy Selikoff will take the stage at the 2018 Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival.

Described as “a white woman’s journey to understand race in America.” The show is part spoken word, part stand-up comedy, crossing six centuries of history fraught with tragedy, trial, and tradition.

FOR MORE INFO, visit: https://somebodyshistory.com/

Part spoken word, part stand-up comedy, crossing six centuries of history fraught with tragedy, trial, and tradition.

Speaker schedule for the second quarter has been announced. We have some pretty remarkable people joining us over the next three months.

Are you interested in speaking at Nerd Nite?

Sign up here: bit.ly/nnospeakerform

Attention nerds, we have some good news!

Over the past year, we’ve received tons of feedback from you all about the process concerning our online ticketing services. From some people not getting the automated email confirmation, to being forced to use paypal, or to your charge not going through at all.

At first, we thought these were a few isolated incidents due to site maintenance or maybe even user error (I’ll be honest, a few times I just thought it was your fault), but as the issues have grown in numbers and expanded in scope, we have decided that the best course of action is to discontinue using Ticketbase as our event management platform and starting today we will begin the process of weaning off of paypal for online money transfers.

You may have already noticed that we are using eventbrite for our upcoming event and we will continue to do so for the time being.

We truly value your input and thank you for staying engaged through these little hiccups that can become huge annoyances.

Please continue to send us your comments. Your feedback is important and it makes a huge difference. Thank you and we hope to see you again on April 12th for our World Space Party!

Be there and be square,
Ricardo Williams

P.S. We’ve had a few issues with PayPal as well, so we’re happy to now have a large enough reason to not use them.