Sometimes it is difficult to guess where the key-influencers of a science/dev community are. I don’t want to find the typical old-school expert, because with the pace of discoveries, today’s expert is the enthusiast who re-learns everything every few years, or even months. What I want is to find the people who really are in the first wagon of the state-of-the-art train.

Twitter is an incredible tool to keep you updated on almost any topic, but choosing who to follow is not obvious. …

Quantum computing is based on how nature is connected, created and experienced, it is beautiful how we, from a hanging vertical computer at around 15 millikelvins, can mimic the most fundamental principles of the reality. I wanted to give a small artistic and natural turn to represent how the circuits we design in paper and composers can be imagined. Because sometimes we are closer to the old alchemist than to the modern developer.

The quantum challenge

I work at IBM, and last week we organized the IBM Quantum Challenge, where four problems, with a difficulty from zero to hero, were solved by almost two thousand participants. …

I was invited to the Qiskit.camp hackathon, an event organized by IBM Research, where they invited the best minds in quantum computing from Universities like Stanford, Yale, Pittsburg or Notre Dame, and researchers from all around the world: UK, Australia, Spain, and even from NASA!

I love hackathons, they force you to focus in a task in a short period of time with a team of brilliant people, so you end having a lot of fun, new friends and new knowledge, sometimes in new areas, like this time!

A few days ago, OpenAI announced that they have created a very sophisticated AI model called GPT-2, it has been kind of famous cause they have refused to release the full model due to its potential dark uses (Fake news generation, fake content generation, etc.) But they have released a small part of it, called 117M.

I tried it by launching the Tensorflow environment, and I was astonished with the results (some of them quite curious and funny). So right away I was thinking about sharing my GPU with some other cloud GPUs in a website, to open OpenAI a little bit more :-) The goal is also show to others what is the current state of the art on Artificial Intelligence and creating a higher consciousness on the challenges we will face very soon in our society. …

I usually teach to business students different times during the year, and I like to innovate and create new learning experiences to reduce the technology fear they usually have, I say fear cause they usually aren’t aware how easy is to create awesome things in few minutes, and the goal of my classes is creating more creators.

Some of the experiments I have made before are the IE Token, using a bot to collect the deliverables from the students, analyzing the deliverables using AI, and using my Mario Kart experience to teach the difference between 3DOF and 6DOF.

This time I wanted to do some that involves some gameplay, I know that including some games in classes is very useful to increase the engagement of the whole course (and this is valid for kids and adults!), so I used the Roblox platform to create a classroom experience. …

I am now part of the Oculus Launchpad 2018, a program Oculus runs yearly to help selected creators to launch their content to the Oculus ecosystem, they provide first-league mentors, funding and a new ecosystem of creators to collaborate with.

Is interesting that they are not limiting creators to launch their contents for other devices (Daydream, Vive, etc.) which is key when we are speaking about an early technology that still needs to be validated by the market.

The initial boot-camp

This weekend I have been in their initial boot-camp, where they have shown us the best practices to develop for the new devices, like the Oculus Go; and we have listen about the needs that Oculus have, like what kind of titles are they waiting to see in the store seeing the market demands. …

Medium has auto-tagged me as “Top writer in VR”, which is great cause I focus in very different stories, but it seems that all the VR related stories are performing much better than other topics I write about, like Blockchain or AI.

The best ones have been, the Oculus Go article comparing it with the Nintendo Switch, the Mario Kart VR, and the second article speaking about the application to the Casey Neistat job position.

So seeing this, and that I will be part of the Oculus Launchpad 2018, it is clear where my focus is going to be laser-focused the next months.

VR, here we go again!

The famous youtuber Casey Neistat has opened a position in his new 368 Studio called “Head of Gaming”, this week he has said that they have received more than 8000 applications. So it is going to be difficult even been seen by them. That was predictable, so I have created 2 projects as job applications that could have enough impact to at least to be seen.

The Roblox job application experiment

The job position is the Head of Gaming, so, again, I wanted to create something that involves some kind of gaming.

Casey has been flying one of the first “flying cars”, made by Kitty Hawk, a company backed by Larry Page, founder of Google, I love these manned drones, so I have made a simulator repeating each one of the frames in the video he published, I started using Unity, but a friend has recommend me trying Roblox, so I gave it a try, it took me three days from zero to…