Nerd Nite January [48]: Turing and Turrets
High Dive
Tuesday, January 19th
Doors open at 6:30, talks start at 7:30
$5
21+
2016 is off to a strong start! This month features a talk about castles by Nerd Nite veteran Sasha Myerson and Nick Vaidyanathan’s review of educational theory and artificial intelligence. Be there and be square.
Sasha Myer: The History of Castles
Castles are fascinating! They’re beautiful and imposing and (perhaps inaccurately) nostalgic. By design and function, a castle had to be both warm welcoming home and deadly war machine. My talk will journey back to “once upon a time” time and introduce the history and architecture of western European medieval castles. I’ll start from timber ringworks and move on through the Norman invasion, Edward Longshanks, the Reconquista, the Crusades, and discuss all the crazy killer (literally, killer) ways that castles evolved to be safer against siege.
Bio: Sasha got her BA in Medieval History with an Art History concentration. But since she would rather gaze lovingly at armor and triptychs and stained glass then write a paper on them, she works in hotel management. Yesterday she googled “beautiful castles” while looking for images to include in her powerpoint. The MSN slideshow that she found included Universal Studios’ Hogwarts and Euro Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle. She is really not okay with that.
Nick Vaidyanathan: Intelligence: Man, Machine, and Beyond
What is it? How is it different in humans and machines? How does it differ between experts and novices? In this talk, we’ll discuss findings from the National Research Council and other publications around the differences in thinking between experts and novices and man and machine. By the end of tonight you might just be an amateur cognitive or data scientist…or at least know enough to recognize bad ones on TV!
Bio: Originally hailing from The City of Angels, Nick Vaidyanathan decided to go to school to become a Devil of the Sun and along the way picked up merit badges in Computer Science, Business, and Computer Systems Engineering. He devotes his research energies to bringing science to the Art of Computer Programming and engineering better programmers. As a general irascible malcontent, he decided the best way to gain expertise in this would be through field experience, and can now be found swabbing the decks on the Dread Pirate’s Ship and striving very hard not to break the internet…or most only once a year. If you don’t learn anything about learning tonight, be sure to teach him a lesson!
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