DevFest DC is both an annual event and an organization devoted to the software developer community in and around Washington, DC. The organizer asked if I’d deliver a fun keynote on the world of applied AI, and what it means to software developers.

I flew in from California, drove around a bit, and found the hotel on the outskirts of DC. The room was packed! Speaking in front of several peers who also write software for a living was a bit intimidating, that’s for sure. I took a shot at summarizing the advances in deep learning, how they came about, and the potential future of our industry. We introduced the notion of modeling the world as tensors, building programs that manipulate these tensors through piecewise, nonlinear modifications, finally producing an output tensor. We then use traditional methods to interpret these tensors as predictions, artificially created images, control system vectors, and more.