Open Source Festival 2020

Being a consumer of AR & VR products in the past and currently having the opportunity to work in Mixed Reality has made me discover endless possibilities for the application of this technology in Africa.
As we have seen with solutions from technology companies, the world is changing due to innovations in Perception, Mixed Reality and Artificial Intelligence. In this session, I would highlight a couple of mixed reality solutions that are changing the world and talk about the current trends. I would also talk about: - Existing open source projects in Perception, Mixed Reality and Artificial Intelligence, - How collaborations in these projects are bringing amazing things to life - How teamwork can help us build Mixed Reality Solutions that can creatively solve some of Africa’s problems - Basic things we can do to get to the point of building valuable Mixed Reality solutions for the region in fields other than gaming.

Using a listing of open source projects built by Nigerians for the world over the years with hundreds of projects which provides an insight into the current state of open source in Nigeria, this talk is going to go over some data insights that we can get from this list and what we can do about it.
This talk would go over the demographics of contributors, languages, types of projects and also people actively building stuff. It’d also shed some light on areas that we need to take note of including inclusion in open source.

My talk would walk the audience through building an AI-powered web app using Python and Flask running on Microsoft Azure. This web app analyses faces using AI and stores information about the emotion of faces in the image, notifying the user if it detects sad faces multiple times. The web app also serves up a simple HTML page showing the data captured.

How would this work?
Once a picture has been successfully taken, a Web API - built in Python - will receive the picture, and analyze it using the Azure Face API (an AI service that can recognize faces in images, as well as estimating the age of the face, if the person is smiling amongst other things) from Azure Cognitive Services.

The Web API will use this cognitive service to detect the emotion of all the faces, which will in turn be saved into a database called CosmosDB - a document database. These documents contain key/value pairs of data stored in a format called JSON. The API would also return a count of emotions, which the python app would use in asking wether the user is 'Okay' when the number of sad faces is greater than or equal to 3. This is a simple illustration around how this technology could be used as a self care app.

This is certainly going to be a fun learning experience :)

PS: It is pertinent to note that this is NOT a workshop, just an insight into what's possible with Azure's Face API. A proper workshop on this subject topic would take 3+ hours, which we - obviously - don't have.

This talk is an insight into what's possible with Azure's Face API (a member of the Azure Cognitive Services family). A workshop on this project is publicly-available, here: https://github.com/microsoft/hackwithazure

The speaker will describe the start of the Linux journey as it began with Linus and delve into the background status of how the technology developed over the years with open source as the backbone. 


The focus of the talk would not be technical but rather align on Open Source and Linux, along with the disruptions in the technical space that have come about from collaborations of people across licenses denoted for such purposes. 

When talking about Growth in tech we often emphasize the aspect of constantly learning, which is essential for growth. When you observe closely, not every beginner out there or even existing developers have resources and tools at their disposal that can facilitate their learning. Most times, resources obtained by starters or existing developers are not always sufficient to bring them to a point they are conversant with industrial practices and skills that makes a pro developer or even hireable.
In this talk we will observe closely how being engaged in open source can sporadically improve a developer’s growth and also how developers can leverage on Open source tools and resources that can help develop skills that are relevant.
This talk is going to cater to both starters and already established developers who desire growth in their field. I will be sharing some of my personal experiences in some of these areas and how I’ve been impacted through Open Source, not limited to how open source is changing what’s possible generally around the world.
A basic outline of what will be covered in this talk includes:

• How the Open source is rich for different levels of learning.
• Utilizing the things Open source offer
• How contributing to Open Source can help in Developing your problem-solving skills
• Opportunities available in Open Source
  • Google Summer of Codes
  • Google CodeIn
  • Outreachy Programs
  • GitHub Student Pack
  • Other opportunities.
• Open Source as a means of Feedbacks on your work through sharing
• Aligning the things available in open source for your growth.
• How can you get started? - This is definitely going to be the most important part of the talk as I want to ensure all the audience, for the ones who don’t know where to start, have a practical experience of how they can get started in Open Sourcing - both sharing and contributing.
• Questions and Answers.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are part of the future we were promised. Armed with phones, we control everything including cars and toasters. IoT bring us ethical quandaries. We must consider the implicates of the things we’re building and ask ourselves how they are being used for good and evil.

In this session, I will share personal anecdotes and well researched statistics relating to IoT devices. These will be used to examine the way that IoT devices are used outside of their intended purposes, and what that means for us as a society. I will point out ethical threats we’re facing when building IoT devices, and look at the kinds of things we can do to do better.