06/11/2017
FYC IS BACK and it's only three weeks away! Details below! And if you wanna know more, just keep scrolling!
Title: The Grand Data Joiner
Speaker: Dr Simon Angus
Date: Friday 1st of December
Time: Come as early as 6pm for drinks, cheese, fire, times. Talk starts at 7:30.
Where: 14 Milfay Avenue, Moonee Ponds.
Seats are limited so please RSVP to [email protected] and let me know if you're coming!
Jono
Blurb: It is impossible in modern society to live a life hidden from Big Data. I don’t mean ‘big data’ I mean the Big Data Corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and LinkedIn, to name a few. Every click you make, every like you take, their scripts are set to ‘record'. And then, quietly, continuously, they are processing. Using sophisticated technologies from the artificial intelligence movement, observations on your behaviour, along with the same on hundreds of millions or even billions of others, are used to allow algorithms to ‘learn’. And they can learn all kinds of things: what we’ll like, tag, read, view, and even vote for. All this power is either magical or spooky, depending on your perspective. Inevitably, talk of Google leads to talk of God. Or rather, God’s demise. But is it the reverse? Could modern data-wizardry actually help us to see God better? Could the magic of machine learning force us to ask, finally, the right question of our maker?
Speaker: Simon Angus
Dr Simon Angus is a complex systems, technology and computational scientist in the Department of Economics, Monash University. His interests extend to evolutionary game theory, evolutionary computation, systems biology and graph theory.
Despite his nerdy credentials, Simon's an incredibly down to earth guy, although he's unusual in that he's also the fittest bloke in the world and races in long-distance cycling competitions for fun. I've never seen him drive a car, he only ever rides his pushbike no matter how far away he's travelling. Earlier this year I saw him come first in a fun run whilst pushing his 2 kids in a pram the whole way. Plus he ran to the fun run and ran home again too.
Anyway, I'm excited by this talk because I sat down with him over coffee about a month ago, and we had an amazing chat about computer code that writes its own computer code, how the internet knows even more about us than we might imagine, artificial intelligence and all the scary/fascinating things on the digital horizon. And to be honest, I don't even like discussing computers or software, but this conversation opened my mind to the world we take for granted and I felt like taking a coding course afterward.
Basically, Simon's an interesting fella, and he finds connections between things you wouldn't normally expect, and in this case, how the most advanced computer programming can tell us something about God. I don't know if that floats your boat, but trust me, it's going to be an incredible evening and your mind will be blown!
