Boulder Startup Week wrapped up a couple weeks ago. Boy, what a week! These were some of my favorite events.

How to CTO

The format of this event was 3-4 local CTOs interviewed by Miles Matthias. It was great to hear what some of the up & coming engineering leaders in Boulder are doing.  Audio of these talks will be posted on Exec Podcast.

Building Virtual Reality

From Boulder Startup Week’s website:

Virtual reality is a really exciting tech that will rock our future. Developers in this field can share lessons learned, the current state of the field, and the future of VR.

This event was really exciting to me for two reasons; 1. It wast he first event I emcee’d.  2. Virtual Reality!  We had 3 excellent speakers:

Rob Harrington (COVR meetup): Playing with Scale in Your VR App
Greg Schafer (Web Engineer, Occipital): Connecting Humans in VR
Mark Manes (COVR meetup): What you need to know to build an app for VR

Like the “How To CTO” event above, audio of these talks will be posted on Exec Podcast.

The Human Brain, Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity

From Boulder Startup Week’s website:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen a lot of hype recently from big dollar startup acquisitions to doomsday predictions. These lead to more questions than answers such as – What is at the core of AI advancements? What’s driving the hype? And what are the true promises and perils of a “super intelligence?”

Join ThinkTopic CEO, Jeff Rose (formerly of DeepMind), as he walks through the design of the neocortex, how the mechanism of the human brain translates to AI software, and the reasons why machine learning is taking off today. Finally, get a “hype-free” view of its potential while engaging in some fun thought experiments on future AI utopias and dystopias.

What a heady title.   This was the most mind-bending talk that I went to.  Jeff knows his stuff, and it was a real treat to hear about the bleeding edge stuff that’s going on in ML

Noticing a theme here?  Like the events above, audio of this talk will be posted on Exec Podcast.

The World in 2026

From Boulder Startup Week’s website:

What will the world look like in 2026? How will cryptocurrencies disrupt finance? How is photographic technology changing the way in which the world processes information? How will machine learning and data science revolutionize the way in which trends are discovered and analyzed?

This was by far the most provocative event I was involved in.  My favorite talk was about the launch of ZCash — a privacy-centric cryptocurrency.

Cocktails in the VR Lab

I think the pictures below are the best way to show off this event 😛

 

VR Workshop: Building a small 3d scene for Oculus/Vive

This was the capstone event.  Unity Developer Julien Lynge led a session on 3d VR game development.  As someone who has always wanted to learn to create content for VR, this was a special treat!

 

More Info

Photos for the events I went to are available here.

Audio for the events I ran are available here.

See you in 2017!