Brian Sletten

Forward Leaning Software Engineer @ Bosatsu Consulting

Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

Presentations

Machine Learning Workshop

Monday, 9:00 AM EST

Machine Learning is all the rage, but many developers have no idea what it is, what they can expect from it or how to start to get into this huge and rapidly-changing field. The ideas draw from the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Numerical Analysis, Statistics and more. These days, you'll generally have to be a CUDA-wielding Python developer to boot. This workshop will gently introduce you to the ideas and tools, show you several working examples and help you build a plan to for diving deeper into this exciting new field.

We will cover:

  • The differences between data science, AI and machine learning
  • The Five Tribes of Machine Learning (as defined by Pedro Domingos)
  • Walkthroughs of some of the main algorithms
  • Examples in Java, R and Python
  • Tools such as Tensorflow and Pytorch
  • The impact of GPUs on machine learning
  • Stories about how companies are being successful with machine learning
  • A discussion about the likely impacts of machine learning on the job market and society

Web Security Workshop

Tuesday, 1:30 PM EST

If you're not terrified, you're not paying attention.

Publishing information on the Web does not require us to just give it away. We have a series of tools and techniques for managing identity, authentication, authorization and encryption so we only share content with those we trust.

Before we tackle Web Security, however, we need to figure out what we mean by Security. We will pull from the worlds of Security Engineering and Software Security to lay the foundation for technical approaches to protecting our web resources. We will also discuss the assault on encryption, web security features and emerging technologies that will hopefully help strengthen our ability to protect what we hold dear.

Topics include:

  • Security Engineering
  • Software Security
  • Encryption
  • Authentication and Authorization Mechanisms
  • Emerging Web Security Technologies

Web Security Workshop

Tuesday, 3:15 PM EST

If you're not terrified, you're not paying attention.

Publishing information on the Web does not require us to just give it away. We have a series of tools and techniques for managing identity, authentication, authorization and encryption so we only share content with those we trust.

Before we tackle Web Security, however, we need to figure out what we mean by Security. We will pull from the worlds of Security Engineering and Software Security to lay the foundation for technical approaches to protecting our web resources. We will also discuss the assault on encryption, web security features and emerging technologies that will hopefully help strengthen our ability to protect what we hold dear.

Topics include:

  • Security Engineering
  • Software Security
  • Encryption
  • Authentication and Authorization Mechanisms
  • Emerging Web Security Technologies

Inside TLS

Wednesday, 9:00 AM EST

Encryption is great, especially when it works.

You put a lot of trust that the encryption offered by browsers, frameworks and libraries is giving you the protection you need to exchange sensitive information over the web. E-commerce, remote shells, bearer token-based authorization schemes and more would not be possible without technologies like the Transport Layer Security (TLS). Come listen to how it works, how it breaks and how you can become more confident that it does what you think it does.

WebAssembly

Wednesday, 11:00 AM EST

What happens if web applications got really fast?

We are increasingly able to do more in the browser because of faster networks, optimized JavaScript engines, new standard APIs and more. There is a new initiative to allow a binary format called WebAssembly that will provide a compiled, cross-platform representation that will take us to the next level. Complex business applications and 3D video games will alike will benefit from this new standard. Come hear about what it can do for you.

CUDA, OPENCL and the GPGPU Revolution

Wednesday, 1:30 PM EST

At some point, graphics cards became serious business computationally. We'll explore why and how this switch has happened.

The most basic introduction to computers spells it out: software runs on the CPU. At some point, this became not entirely true. Graphics cards now support general purpose computing via apis such as CUDA and OpenCL. This talk will introduce you to how and why you can take advantage of these capabilities for a wide variety of applications. Moore's Law may have petered out, but we have plenty of other ways to make our applications run faster.

Taming the Blockchain with Ethereum

Wednesday, 3:15 PM EST

Bitcoin has roundly entered the public consciousness, but it is limited in its use beyond the specific constraints of the cryptocurrency. Ethereum is a new platform that has enabled developers to innovate in creating their own cryptocurrencies, platforms, smart contracts and more.

This talk will introduce the larger concepts of blockchains and decentralized applications as well as details on how to build running applications on the Ethereum platform.

These ideas and tools will help innovators disrupt organizations, markets, entire industries and even aspects of society. It's sounds like science fiction, but these thing are already happening. Come learn how.

We will cover:

  • The basics of Bitcoin and blockchains
  • Smart contracts
  • The Solidity Contract Language
  • Setting up Ethereum clients
  • Running private networks for development and testing
  • Sample Decentralized Applications (DApps)

Machine Learning: Overview

Thursday, 9:00 AM EST

Machine Learning is a huge, deep field. Come get a head start on how you can learn about how machines learn.

This talk will be an overview of the Machine Learning field. We’ll cover the various tools and techniques that are available to you to solve complex, data-driven problems. We’ll walk through the algorithms and apply them to some real but accessible problems so you can see them at work.

Machine Learning: Natural Language Processing

Thursday, 10:45 AM EST

Documents contain a lot of information. We'll introduce you to a variety of techniques to extract them.

Machine Learning techniques are useful for analyzing numeric data, but they can also be useful for classifying text, extracting content and more. We will discuss a variety of open source tools for extracting the content, identifying elements and structure and analyzing the text can be used in distributed, microservice-friendly ways.

Machine Learning: TensorFlow

Thursday, 1:30 PM EST

This open source machine learning framework from Google has taken off. Come learn what you can do with it in your own organization.

TensorFlow is a powerful data flow-oriented machine learning framework developed by Google's Brain Team. It was designed to be easy to use and widely applicable on both numeric, neural network-oriented problems as well as other domains. We'll cover the over view as well as apply it to several fun, realistic problems.

The Decentralized Web

Thursday, 3:15 PM EST

While the Web itself has strong decentralized aspects to how it is used, the backend technologies are largely centralized. The naming systems, the routing systems and the traffic that all points back to the same place for a website are all centralized technologies. This creates both a liability as well as a control point.

In order to break free of some of these limitations, new technologies are emerging to provide a more decentralized approach to the Web.

This talk will walk you through some emerging technology to provide decentralized content storage and distribution, edge computing and more. We will touch upon the Interplanetary Filesystem, WebTorrent, Blockchain spin offs and more.