Speaker: Dave Snowdon

By day, Dave Snowdon is a mild-mannered programmer working on cloud management of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) at VMware. By night, when not asleep, he plans world domination by social emotional robots powered by python and clojure. Before he was virtualised Dave worked for Xerox Research in France and, back in the mists of time, developed one of the first distributed multi-user virtual reality environments as part of his PhD work at Manchester. Dave wrote the software for Pete Townshend's (of The Who) Lifehouse Method - a system to generate unique pieces of music for each user based on Information extracted from audio, rhythms and images supplied by the user. More recently, he has been devoting his time to understanding machine learning with a particular emphasis on deep neural networks.