I’m back to work for the new year, with a new office! I’ve moved into the coworking space at MADE, my friendly local co-operative hackspace, and so far it’s working out great. As well as providing all sorts of facilities for tinkering and making (I’ve been making progress on my BELA Pepper build and have some nascent plans involving our laser cutter), there’s also a really friendly and interesting community of folks here. Plus, getting out of the house to work is proving to be a good decision – I’m practicing my Spanish more and getting into a more sustainable routine.
I’ve come back from the break to another round of work for Adia – we’ve come to the end of a sustained load of product development on the personalised fertility profile we shipped before Christmas. This month is going to be spent looking at how that goes down out in the wild, as well as doing some discovery and research work on some interesting data-driven services. I’m also keeping my hand in at Retechnica, assisting with keeping their NLP platform ticking over.
Alongside those however, I’ve got a potentially very exciting new project on the horizon – a delivering a short training course on Machine Learning and IoT for the folks from MosulSpace who’re planning to come to Barcelona to visit MADE. MosulSpace is a great initiative – a youth-focused hackspace in Mosul, Iraq, supported by the FieldReady NGO. We’re still working out the logistics of this, but if it all goes ahead I’m looking forward to meeting them all in early February!
As always, I’ve got plenty of personal projects on the go too. My proposed workshop on waste and sustainability has gone through to the next round of selection for IAM weekend (please vote for it!), so I’m spending some time on research and planning for that. I’ve also started work on a very interesting project about poetry and film with good friends Cris, Clara and Carmen, and am getting stuck in to planning, wireframing and design for that.
Finally, I’m looking forward to welcoming Jakub to Barcelona at the end of January, when we’ll be reviving Alluvial Sharawadji for Eufonic Urba 2020, and giving a talk on the initial installation at Eufonic 2018, the ideas behind it, and the process of creating it.
Interesting links
- Dominic’s Basilisk part one and two (prompted by that job ad). Essential reading on Dominic Cummings, the online ‘rationalist’ movement, and the right.
- The Invention of Ethical AI: How Big Tech Manipulates Academia To Avoid Regulation
- Beyond Bias: Contextualizing “Ethical AI” Within the History of Exploitation and Innovation in Medical Research
- From Manchester to Barcelona – an excellent piece from Ben Tarnoff on the role of capital in online harms, and how the history of collectivisation might ameliorate them.