Wednesday
Room 1
10:20 - 11:20
(UTC±00)
Talk (60 min)
From Ancient Greeks to Modern Geeks - Basic Machine Learning Algorithms
We've all heard the hype. Machine Learning is cool! Machine Learning is Rad! It'll change the world! End Poverty! Get George R R Martin to finally finish Game of Thrones! What actually is it though?
Talk Machine Learning to a lot of people and they'll probably get muddled up with AI in old SF films, and think of HAL 9000 or Holly in Red Dwarf. That - or there'll be a general sense that it's some sort of black magic - archaic and unknowable.
The truth is that Machine Learning isn't really complicated at all. A few lines of code will implement a lot of the techniques without much effort.
During this talk, I'll be demonstrating a few of the simpler ML algorithms in a code-neutral, easy to follow manner. No need to learn Python, or add any new libraries or frameworks to your existing Codebase. I'll be working from first principles, and keeping it as simple as I can.
We'll cover algorithms like:
- Naive Bayes
- Bayes Classifiers
- N-Nearest Neighbour
- Decision Trees
- Linear Regression
We'll only be covering the absolute basics of Machine Learning - maybe just enough to be dangerous! Enough also, to go away and continue your journey having taken a good first step.
Simon Painter
I've been working as a .NET developer for over 16 years now in a variety of industries including government, retail and manufacturing. But I've been hacking around with computer code since I was old enough to read my Dad's copy of the ZX Spectrum BASIC coders manual.
I've been speaking about Functional C# at various user groups and conferences around the UK, USA, Europe and Australia and am particularly interested in seeing just how far we can push C# without breaking it.
In 2023 I released my first technical book: "Functional Programming with C#", published by O'Reilly Media.
When I'm not coding, or running after my two small children, I have been known to enjoy the classic series of Doctor Who, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, Cryptic Crosswords, and rather more coffee than is probably good for me.