InterConnect with us

Practical info for the big IBM conference March 19–23

If you’re an IBM customer or business partner, you’ve probably heard of the company’s InterConnect conference. If you’re unfamiliar, IBM InterConnect is a huge conference at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. It features the “what’s next” of tech innovation for cloud services, Internet of Things, and IBM Watson.

This event might sound overwhelming because IBM is such a big company. As developer advocates, however, we work to make things simple. Our team will be attending with a focus on delivering talks and presenting example code that’s open source, useful, and approachable — whether you do business with IBM or not.

Machine learning with Apache Spark™

Our robot pal Marvin took an early flight to Vegas—via UPS. You can find him in the InterConnect DevZone, where he plans to beat you at a high-stakes game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. With a little help from Apache Spark, Marvin uses machine learning algorithms to find patterns in human gameplay, then exploits them as he chooses his moves.

“Oh, human. Surely you are cheating somehow.” —Marvin

Marvin dishes out the sass. I expect he’ll be playing this card a lot as he kills time in Vegas waiting for human opponents to arrive:

“Nothing personal, human. But my brain is connected to Apache Spark.” —Marvin

Offline-first demo app

Voice of InterConnect is a web app that uses Hoodie for its backend, where it combines with several IBM services to measure attendee sentiment about the conference (and possibly about dinosaurs).

Hoodie is a complete backend for your apps, exposed as a JavaScript API and accessible from the browser. For the Voice of InterConnect app, it’s also hooked up to the following IBM services: Cloudant, Watson Speech to Text, and Watson Natural Language Understanding.

Architecture for the Voice of InterConnect sentiment app. Code on GitHub.

The app uses Offline First design principles by storing recordings locally, in the web browser, and then using Hoodie’s Apache CouchDB-style data replication to synchronize changes to the backend services, where the analysis happens. IBM’s developerWorks TV and The New Builders Podcast did a recent interview on Voice of InterConnect, with the partners building the app: Steve Trevathan of Make&Model and Gregor Martynus of Neighbourhoodie. Here’s the video:

Meetup

Speaking of The New Builders folks, they’re hosting a meetup this Sunday at Rí Rá Irish Pub at Mandalay Place, 7:00 p.m. — 10:30 p.m. This event is specifically for developers and data science folks, and will offer lightning talks on chatbots, Offline First development, and the PixieDust helper library for interactive notebooks. The event is free, but you’ll need to register here:

The New Builders: Ideas on Tap Event

Presentations

Members of our team will be presenting talks and leading Ask Me Anything sessions (AMA) and drop-in labs at InterConnect. AMAs and labs run on a drop-in basis during the times below. Labs take about 20 minutes to complete, and we’ll be there to help. For AMAs, you’ll lead the conversation with your questions. Here’s an overview:

Visualizing Big Data with Maps — AMA with Raj Singh

Ask Raj how to use map-based visualizations to sanity-check your big-data analyses. Tuesday, 3 p.m. — 5 p.m., DevZone AMA # 3

Using Notebooks with PixieDust for Faster, Easier Data Analysis — Lab with va barbosa and David Taieb

Explore data sets with PixieDust, an awesome helper library for data science notebooks on Spark, with help from Va and David. Wednesday, 1:15 p.m. — 5 p.m., DevZone Hello World Lab # 4

Mobile Mapping with the Watson Data Platform — Lab with Raj Singh

Learn to use location data and maps in your mobile apps, with help from Raj. Wednesday, 1:15 p.m. — 5 p.m., DevZone Hello World Lab # 1

Chatbot Architecture, Design and Development — AMA with Mark Watson

Ask Mark about chatbot architecture. He’ll have some example apps to share too. Wednesday, 2:30 p.m — 5 p.m., DevZone Ask Me Anything # 1

From Mobile First to Offline First — Breakout Session with Bradley Holt

Bradley will show how you can build fast, responsive apps that will keep users happy, even without a reliable network connection. Thursday, 9:30 a.m. — 10:15 a.m., Islander H

Find us there

Most of the Watson Data Platform dev advos will be in the DevZone at InterConnect. Where’s the DevZone? It’s in the back of the conference’s concourse (a.k.a. expo area). What does that look like? This!:

Get in the zone—the IBM InterConnect DevZone. We don’t want to be starring in “Zone Alone,” after all. LOL, ok, ok.

See you in Las Vegas!