Recent & Upcoming Talks

Imagine a busy pub on a Friday night. It’s crowded, lots of people are talking at the same time. They’re all exchanging information with each other which makes tiny changes in their brains. Some folks are taking it easy on the drink, a few are a bit tipsy after one too many beers, and my mate Stevo is plastered, falling off his barstool. Classic Stevo. Now imagine trying to get this crowd to agree on something when they can’t even agree on which footy team is the worst this week and some of them can’t remember their own names.

In comparison you’d think that getting a bunch of computers to agree on something, say a simple number would be pretty easy. Computers can do way smarter things than agreeing upon a number, right? Sadly not. Computers are often in various states of being wrong or crashing. Much like a bunch of drunks they all want to talk at the same time, and they’re confident they have the best opinion.

How have we have built such incredible systems on such a flakey foundation? In this talk we will visit classic consensus algorithms and see how they provide benefits of correctness and fault-tolerance for systems but at the price of reduced scalability. Then we’ll explore some new research which aims to provide both correctness and scalability for distributed systems. The talk will be interactive - you may need a drink yourself afterwards.

Generative AI has taken the world by storm, but it’s not always a reliable helper. It makes up alternative facts, has difficulty with number and logical reasoning, all while exuding the confidence of a used car salesperson. In this talk we’ll see how to use Knowledge Graphs to improve accuracy. The audience will hear several technology patterns where deterministic knowledge graphs complement generative AI to create systems that are compelling and truthful.

Getting two computers to agree on a value seems easy. One computer thinks of a value and tells the other. But in the real world where many values are shared, concurrency and race conditions are plentiful, and failures occur at inconvenient points, getting two (or more) computers to agree on a value is really hard work. In this talk we will discuss Raft, which is a a humane protocol for dealing with all these challenges. Raft is designed for simplicity to disallow tricky edge cases, and with a simple extension we developed, can be made to work over the WAN.

Generative AI has taken the world by storm, but it is not always a reliable helper. In some cases, they may invent alternative facts, have difficulty with numbers and logical reasoning and, above all, lack the necessary confidence. Learn the sometimes hilarious and counterintuitive problems with GenAI and how to use Knowledge Graphs to improve accuracy in using AI technology. See cases of technology patterns where Knowledge Graphs complement Generative AI to create systems that are attractive and reliable.