April nor(DEV): A.I. and Cognitive Computing with Watson & Keep Secure and Under the Radar

What: A.I. and Cognitive Computing with Watson & Keep Secure and Under the Radar

When: Wednesday 4th April, 6.30pm to 9pm.

Where: Whitespace, 2nd Floor, St James' Mill, Whitefriars, NR3 1TN

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/242231165/

A.I. and Cognitive Computing with Watson
Colin Mower

Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Computing have become the latest buzzwords in the industry, with companies big and small rushing to work out how they can take advantage of this emerging technology.

In this discussion, we’ll look at the myths behind the hype, how mature the technology is and how IBM’s Watson has evolved from game show winner to one of the market leaders.

Colin works for IBM as a Technical Leader, crossing all the IBM technologies and services. Prior to Big Blue, he worked in Aviva for over 14 years and has contributed to nor(DEV):con and Norfolk Developer Meetups.

He still lives in Norfolk and apart from plenty of travel working for some of the big blue chip companies, he tries to get out in South Norfolk running and cycling in a vain attempt to lose weight and keep fit.

Keep Secure and Under the Radar
David Higgins

Some basic and some not so basic steps to keep you and your business safe in the on-line business arena.

David is ex UK Gov contractor discusses simple steps you need to take to stay ahead of current data security legislation and keep yourself / your business secured.

Comments

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

I, Robot

The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

Paul Grenyer

Search This Blog