Watson Rock, Paper, Scissors

A simple hands-on activity to let kids train a machine learning classifier to be able to play Rock, Paper, Scissors.

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I’ve written and spoken before that I think we should do more to introduce children to the idea of machine learning. And I’ve tried introducing my two kids to it, such as by making a Code Club-style game with them: we built a system to play Guess Who, that they trained both to understand what you say and to recognise the characteristics of faces from photos.

This weekend, we tried out another idea – Rock, Paper, Scissors from a web app, using the web cam to see your moves, and training a system to recognise your hand signs.

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In many ways, this was simpler than the Guess Who project, and one I would’ve tried before if we’d thought of it! I’ve made getting the system to choose it’s next move very simple, as it just chooses one of the three options at random.

The machine learning element comes from the fact that I got them to train a custom image classifier to recognise what a ‘rock’, ‘paper’ and ‘scissors’ hand sign looks like.

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Last night I hacked together a quick single-page training web app for them to use. Unlike with the Guess Who game, where we worked on it together to come up with the project, this time I made it myself to see how they’d get on with using it. (I was thinking that if it went well, I’d try using it with one of my school groups).

They got off to a good start… although I hadn’t counted on how much time Grace would spend checking out her hair once she saw the web cam video. 🙂


Video of the kids getting started

I’ve got it so that you can take photos from the web cam by clicking on a button, and put the photo into one of three training groups – one each for rock, paper and scissors.

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My hope was that the three hand signs – a fist, a flat palm, and two fingers – are distinct enough that an image classifier could quickly start to distinguish between them.

Although I should probably add some overlay to the live video to suggest where to put your hand, how close to the camera, etc. as their initial attempts were fairly inconsistent.


Video of their first attempt at training

As before, I’m using one of the Watson developer APIs available in Bluemix, called Visual Recognition.

To train it, you just need to upload zip files, where each zip file contains examples of photos of something you want to recognise.

In this case, we want to upload three zip files – one of photos of “rock”, one zip file of “paper” photos, one zip file of photos of “scissors”. And you can do all of that in a single HTTP POST, so the code behind the training app is very simple.

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That said, I should still share the code.

It was hacked together in an evening, so it’s a complete mess. But I’ll try and find some spare time this week to tidy it up, and put the code somewhere in case it’s helpful. Some of the code for driving the webcam, zipping up the photos, and uploading them, might be useful to someone.


The first test

To test it, I made a simple game. I’ve got it keeping score to see how many moves you win against the random choices the game makes. Although Grace seemed more interested in counting the number of times the game correctly identified our moves. It wasn’t perfect!

(The “Watson’s move” images used in the game bit were made by Faith. She took photos of her own hand using an iPad, and did the weird grid background effect using PopAGraph. It wasn’t quite what I expected, but I think it looks kinda neat.)

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As with the Guess Who activity, what most interested me was the girls’ reactions to the behaviour of the ML system. I was surprised that even after last time, their initial assumption was still that they could take one photo of each, and that would be enough. (Another reason why it’s worth doing a few of these activities to reinforce it).

But with a little nudging, they quickly saw how that the more examples they gave, the better the system performed.

Other than that, a lot of the lessons they learned were reminders of what we talked about before about what it’s like doing supervised learning projects.


The second attempt… another test after more training this time

One thing I was impressed with was when they thought that the training would be more effective if they used an actual rock, actual scissors, and a sheet of paper. Doing that made the accuracy a hundred times better. That makes sense, as they are much more distinct than all photos of hands, so that was a neat idea!

And that’s pretty much it. My second experiment at getting the kids to play with machine learning seemed to work pretty well.

I’ve put the app I made for them up on Bluemix so you’re welcome to give it a try it you like. It’s at https://watson-rock-paper-scissors.eu-gb.mybluemix.net.

You’ll have to get your own Visual Recognition API key to use it, though, but that supports a free trial, so hopefully that won’t put you off!


Third time lucky? Another test


Update 1:

A couple of friends pointed me at another recent IBM rock, paper, scissors project when I mentioned planning to do this.

It looks like a great project and is well worth a look – they’ve gone into using Apache Spark to create a system able look for patterns in how people play rock-paper-scissors and learn strategies to win the game.

More recently, they’ve even gotten a NAO robot to play the game for them!

I wasn’t aware of this work before, but decided to go ahead with our project anyway. Partly because my focus was different for this, but mostly because I think that the Agonies of Parallel Creation should never stop us from creating and sharing stuff. There’s no new idea under the sun, so if we wait for an idea that no-one has ever got close to, we’d stop creating anything.

That said, it’s a particularly surreal coincidence in this case, as this is not only an IBM project, but the author of that post is the great David Taieb who I used to work for when he worked on Watson! Small world.


Update 2:

Yes, I know you can see my API key in the video. But don’t worry. Bluemix makes it easy enough to revoke credentials so I’ve deleted that API key. Doing that was much quicker than learning enough video editing to be able to mask it out. 🙂

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An introduction to machine learning with Guess Who

I tried introducing my two kids to machine learning by helping them make a game this week.

In this post, I’ll try and explain why, how we did it, and how it went. And if you make it all the way to an end, I’ve got some videos and a link to a demo to show you what we made.

Why

I think we need to introduce the basic concept of machine learning to children.

I think the current approach to introducing coding using things like Scratch aren’t enough. This isn’t to say Scratch isn’t great (I’ve been running a Code Club every week for the last couple of years, delivered almost entirely using Scratch, so I’d be the last person to say it isn’t a fantastic tool). It lets you snap together blocks representing actions to teach the programming mindset of getting a computer to do something by you breaking the task down into a series of steps.

I think we need to add to this with something that introduces the model of machine learning – getting a computer to do something by training it with examples of doing that task.

I’ve been saying this for a while – I gave a talk about it at an education conference last year, I’ve written about it here before, and it was the theme of a lecture I gave at a science society in London last month.

This week is half-term and I have the week off work, so I thought I’d finally spend a bit of time trying it out by experimenting on my own two daughters (Faith and Grace, who are aged 7 and 11).

In Code Club, I mostly try to introduce programming concepts by helping the kids to create games. Sticking with what seems to work, I’ve helped them to make a game by training an ML system how to play it.

How

We’ve been making a sort of Guess Who? game – a game that I’ve played with the kids for years and that they know inside out.

Guess-Who-Closeup.jpg

The idea is that the computer shows a bunch of faces and chooses one of them at random. You have to work out which one it’s chosen by asking Yes/No questions about their appearance.

I introduced this to Grace and Faith mostly using analogies and anthropomorphising.

“We need to teach the computer how to play the game instead of telling it how to”.

“We’ll do it the same way that you teach a small child to do something, not by telling it the series of steps to take but by showing it examples of how it should be done, over and over, until it learns how to do it”.

And so on.

I went with a couple of opportunities for trying out machine learning approaches.

Understanding the question

As a player, we let you ask questions in natural language. You’ve just got a text box to type in anything you want to ask. In practice though, there’s a reasonably predictable set of questions you might ask – it’s a very constrained domain. So it lends itself well to using a text classifier.

I got the kids to make a list of all the types of questions they ask in a Guess Who game. These were the classes we’d train the system with (e.g. “has brown hair” or “is wearing a hat”). Then for each class, they had to come up with as many ways as they could think of to ask that question.

the kids using Watson NLC

We used this to train IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier.

I chose it mostly because I’m familiar with it, it’s a hosted readily available service so there was nothing to install or configure, it has a simple web interface for training that the kids could use to enter the classes and texts they thought of, and for this sort of kicking-the-tyres-with-minimal-usage it’s free.

With a little training, they had a trained classifier that would be able to take a question from the player and map it to one of the classes they’d come up with for the questions they ask when they play Guess Who.

Answering the question

The next step was to train the system to be able to answer the questions. We needed it to be able to recognise visual characteristics in a photo. Again, this is a constrained domain, although less so than for classifying questions. But still, this was basically a classifying task, albeit with the extra challenge of using images.

We looked for a collection of face images that we could use, both for training, and for the game itself. We initially started trying out Labeled Wikipedia Faces, but ultimately settled on using Labeled Faces in the Wild – a set of over 13,000 photos of faces.

Grace, preparing the training for Visual Recognition

I got the kids to group examples of the faces based on the characteristics they’d come up with in their list of text classes. We just used the built-in OSX Finder to do this.

One folder open on the left with all the unsorted faces in, and a bunch of folders open to the right – e.g. “short-hair”, “long-hair”, “bald”, “hat”. They scrolled through the unsorted pictures, and trained by dragging the photos across into the relevant folder.

We used an IBM Watson API with this, too : IBM Watson Visual Recognition

Again, I chose it because I’m familiar with it, and it’s a hosted service I didn’t need to install or run, and while it’s in beta it’s all free to use.

Putting it all together

While they did that, I hacked together up a quick game to drive it. They were in charge of training, I wrote a simple REST API to make the requests to the Watson APIs, and a UI to let the player interact with it.

We had our game!

How it went

I asked them what they’d learned from doing it, and they came up with things like:

“You need a lot of training data”

When I explained how we’d train the visual recognition classifiers to recognise characteristics in photos, Faith said “We could take photos of each other and use those!”. I said that we’d need more than that, so she said “I could take photos of my friends as well!”.

But we needed so many more than that. We started by looking to Wikipedia (always a good starting point for getting data!), before eventually settling on the LFW set.

Getting them to help me find the training data gave them an idea of the sort of scale you need for these sorts of projects, as well as giving them an insight into ideas like gathering existing data rather than trying to manually create it.

“The more training you give it, the better it gets”

We did this project off-and-on throughout half-term week rather than all in one sitting. And we re-ran the training after each go. It was really clear the way that the results improved the more that we did.

I’m a big fan of learning by doing, and I think that seeing that for themselves was more effective than if I’d just told them. Trying it out with virtually no training, and seeing that it’s rubbish. Then trying it out with a bit of training, and see it start to get better. Then trying it again after a few days and see it really improving – there was a definite light bulb moment.

“Training is fun at first, but can get a bit boring after a while”

This was more an issue with the visual recognition training rather than the NLC text classifier training. Even after the first afternoon they’d already come up with a classifier that was doing a decent job of most questions. But grouping the photos into the training sets took much longer. And to be honest, it really needs more training than they did if you wanted to turn this into a proper demo or game – I let them do enough to get the idea, but stopped them before it became a miserable chore!

But this was a positive thing. As a takeaway, that’s a really valid and valuable insight. I’ve seen commercial ML projects fail to recognise this at the outset! Training ML systems is a repetitive, manual and very time-consuming task that does get boring for the people involved.

We talked about ways that people try and get around that, like trying to turn it into a game. Grace thought that if we did this as a school activity, with all her class helping out with the training, then split between 30 kids, it wouldn’t take as long.

All of these points – the amount of time and work needed to train, approaches like getting a large number of people to train, etc. – these are all great lessons about the practicalities of using machine learning.

“It’s a bit like magic”

If you had to describe the steps involved in working out if a photo included a face that has a moustache, that would be pretty complicated. But dividing 100 photos into two groups – faces with a moustache, and faces without a moustache – that’s easy.

There were a bunch of things they talked about here that was really positive – that doing this is easy, and you don’t need you to understand the deep detail behind how it works. With Faith (my youngest) we didn’t go into too much detail about how the training works, but Grace and I did find some videos on YouTube that explained the principles behind deep learning which were interesting.

More generally, what I wanted them to learn was that computers can spot patterns in data, without you needing to be able to specify rules that they should follow. And I think that’s a more effective lesson as something they saw and did for themselves rather than just reading or hearing about it.

The result


https://youtu.be/oguzXlRT4NQ

I’ve put what we came up with on Bluemix at http://guesswho.eu-gb.mybluemix.net

I’ve also put some more videos below to show us trying it out.

As I explained above, it’s not really “finished” – I think it needs more training, and the UI was hacked together in a hurry. But even as a quick half-term project, I think it already shows a glimmer of what is possible.

More importantly, it shows that you can give kids a hands-on introduction to machine learning.


https://youtu.be/1AkSVBzE5io


https://youtu.be/6ay7MqhW53g


https://youtu.be/Z3UReJzzY4Q


https://youtu.be/GNcz_D62_0w


How to use the IBM Watson Relationship Extraction service on Bluemix

Before Christmas, I wrote about how I used the Watson Relationship Extraction service on Bluemix to pick out the things mentioned in news stories, as part of a mobile app we built on a hackday. I’d still like to do something more with that app, but in the meantime I should at least share how I did the Relationship Extraction bit.

From the official doc for the service:

From unstructured text, Relationship Extraction can extract entities (such as people, locations, organizations, events), and the relationships between these entities (such as person employed-by organization, person resides-in location).

This is provided as a hosted service on IBM Bluemix where any developer can sign up and give it a try.

It’s available as a documented REST API, but as part of using it in the hackday, I needed to write a bit of code around that, just to prepare the request and parse the response. I think it’ll save me time to reuse this the next time I want to build something with the API, so I’m sharing it as a standalone package.

In this post, I’ll walk though how you can use it, with a small app that grabs the contents of a BBC News story and picks out the names of people mentioned in the story.

First, a simpler example. Consider this exciting text:

Dale Lane works as a developer for IBM. He started in 2003. Dale lives in the UK, in a town called Eastleigh. Before that, he was a student at the University of Bath.

A few lines of Javascript are enough to run that through the service.

var text = '';
var watson = require('extract-relationships');
watson.extract(text, function(err, response) {
    // response has got all the info  
});

The full contents of response is in a gist if you want to see it, but I’ll show just a few examples here to give you the idea.

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It has picked out all of the references to me, recognising that they are all describing a person, and that ‘developer’ is my occupation.

The ‘begin’ and ‘end’ numbers tell you where in the text each bit was found.

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It’s picked out the reference to IBM, and recognised that this is a name of a commercial organisation.

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It’s recognised that ‘2003’ is a reference to a date.

As well as identifying those entities and many others, it’s also picked out the relationships between them.

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For example, it’s identified the relationship between me and IBM.

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And the relationship between me and my old University.

I’ve written a more detailed breakdown of what is contained in the response including how to find out what each of the fields mean, and what the different possible values for each one are.

That’s the basics with a few input sentences. Next, we start throwing a lot of text at it.

In about thirty lines of Javascript, you can download the text from a news story on the BBC News website, and pick out the names of all of the people mentioned in the story.

If you run that simple example, you get the list of people that are included in the story text.

Where it starts to get interesting is when you combine this with other sources and APIs.

For example, once you’ve picked out the names of people from the story, try looking up their profiles on Wikipedia, and finding out who they are.

Or, instead of people, pick out the names of places from news stories, and use a geocoding API to plot them on a map. (There are geocoding services available on Bluemix, too, if that helps.)

Hopefully you can see how you could start to use this in your own apps.

Finally, some practical points.

How do you install the package I’ve shared so you can use it?

npm install --save extract-relationships

How do you configure it for the Watson Relationship Extraction Service?

The API we’re using is an authenticated service hosted in IBM Bluemix, so there is a tiny bit of config you need to do first before you can use it.

If you’re running your app in Bluemix, then there isn’t much to do. Add the Relationship Extraction service to your app from the Bluemix dashboard, and the endpoint and credentials will automatically be provided and should just work.

If you’re running your app on your own machine, there are a couple of extra steps instead.

Go to Bluemix. Sign up for an account if you haven’t already got on

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From the dashboard, create an app. You need something as a placeholder to bind the Relationship Extraction service to, even if you don’t use it.

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Create a web app and give it a name.

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Add a service.

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Choose the Relationship Extraction service from the group of Watson services.

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Click on ‘Show Credentials’. Everything you need to configure your app is in here. You need the url, username and password.

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Copy this into an options object like this:

var options = {
    api : {
        url : 'https://url.of.your.watson.service...',
        user : 'your-watson-service-username',
        pass : 'your-watson-service-password'
    }
};

To reiterate, this isn’t the username and password that you use to sign in to Bluemix. It’s the username and password specifically for this service that Bluemix has generated for your app.

It’s not a good idea to hard-code passwords in your code, so I’d suggest putting them outside of your app and grabbing them in when needed. Environment variables are an easy way to do this, and are what I’ve done in the few samples I’ve written.

That’s all there is to it.

I’ve put more info on github with the source for how I’m using the API.


Watson News Companion

newscompanion screenshotWe recently ran a hackathon at work: people within IBM were invited to try building a mobile app aimed at consumers using Watson services. It was a fun chance to try out some new ideas, as well as to build something using our APIs – dogfooding is always a good thing.

I worked on a hack with David which we submitted on Wednesday. This is what we came up with, and how we built it.

The idea

A mobile app that will help users to digest the news by explaining references in stories and providing greater context.

Background

It’s difficult to find the time nowadays to properly read and understand what’s going on in the world. We rarely have the time to sit and read through a newspaper. Instead, we might quickly read news stories online from our smartphones and tablets. But that often makes it difficult to understand the broader context that a story is in. There might be references in the story to people, places, organisations or events that are unfamiliar.

Watson could help. It could be an assistant as you read the news, explaining unfamiliar references and the broader context.

Features

Our Watson News Companion demo is a mobile news reader app that:

  • anticipates questions and suggests areas where it can help improve understanding
  • provides answers to questions without needing the users to lose their place in the story
  • allow the user to dig deeper with their own follow-up questions


A video walkthrough of the hack

Implementation

The hack was built as a mobile web app using the MEAN stack: using express as the framework on a Node.js platform, storing some information in a MongoDB and building the UI with AngularJS.

It uses RSS feeds from news websites to fetch content, which are shown in a simple newsreader app built using Ratchet.

The contents of the story is run through the Watson Relationship Extraction API to pick out the people, places, organisations, and other entities mentioned in the story.

The API output includes co-references, to identify the multiple mentions of the same entity. These are combined and reviewed, and together with the type of the entity are used to generate likely questions about the entity.

These questions are sent to the Watson Question and Answer API. For questions which are returned with answers with a high confidence, annotations are added inline to the news story. Pressing the annotation brings up a sliding panel at the bottom of the screen with the answer to the question. The links and footer annotations are built using bigfoot.

Every screen in the app also includes an “Ask Watson” button which lets the user enters any free text question to let them dig deeper into what they’ve read.

Could you build this?

This was a proof-of-concept built in a hurry, so we’re not calling this a finished app. But everything we used is freely available – both to people inside IBM and the public.

We developed on an instance of Bluemix (our Cloud Foundry-based development platform) available internally within IBM. You can sign up for free to a public instance of Bluemix at bluemix.net.

The technologies used to build the hack are all freely available : Node.js, MongoDB, AngularJS, Ratchet, bigfoot, jQuery.

A beta version of the Watson Relationship Extraction API is freely available for apps hosted on Bluemix.

A beta version of the Watson Question and Answer API is freely available for apps hosted on Bluemix. But this is a demo instance of Watson that has only read a small number of general healthcare documents. That’s not a useful corpus for our hack, so to record our demo we stood up our own instance – using an untrained instance of Watson which we gave a small subset of Wikipedia to read. We used the Question and Answer API on this instance instead of the Bluemix one. For people outside IBM to do this, they need to sign up to join the Watson Ecosystem. This is also free, but there are criteria for who is eligible at this point, and an application process to go through.


Tackling Cancer with Machine Learning

For a recent Hack Day at work I spent some time working with one of my colleagues, Adrian Lee, on a little side project to see if we could detect cancer cells in a biopsy image.  We've only spent a couple of days on this so far but already the results are looking very promising with each of us working on a distinctly different part of the overall idea.

We held an open day in our department at work last month and I gave a lightening talk on the subject which you can see on YouTube:


There were a whole load of other talks given on the day that can be seen in the summary blog post over on the ETS (Emerging Technology Services) site.



Talking about IBM Watson (again)

As I mentioned in May, I was lucky to be able to go to Thinking Digital this year and talk about what we’re doing with Watson.

I’ve just noticed that they’ve made a video of my talk available. I haven’t dared watch it (does anyone like watching videos of themselves?), but I figured I should share it anyway!


Monkigras 2014: Sharing craft

After Monkigras 2013, I was really looking forward to Monkigras 2014. The great talks about developer culture and creating usable software, the amazing buzz and friendliness of the event, the wonderful lack of choice over which talks to go to (there’s just one track!!), and (of course) the catering:

coffeecheese

The talks at Monkigras 2014

The talks were pretty much all great so I’m just going to mention the talks that were particularly relevant to me.

Rafe Colburn from Etsy talked about how to motivate developers to fix bugs (IBMers, read ‘defects’) when there’s a big backlog of bugs to fix. They’d tried many strategies, including bug rotation, but none worked. The answer, they found, was to ask their support team to help prioritise the bugs based on the problems that users actually cared about. That way, the developers fixing the bugs weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer numbers to choose from. Also, when they’d done a fix, the developers could feel that they’d made a difference to the user experience of the software.

rafe
Rafe Colburn from Etsy

While I’m not responsible for motivating developers to fix bugs, my job does involve persuading developers to write articles or sample code for WASdev.net. So I figure I could learn a few tricks.

A couple of talks that were directly applicable to me were Steve Pousty‘s talk on how to be a developer evangelist and Dawn Foster‘s on taking lessons on community from science fiction. The latter was a quick look through various science fiction themes and novels applied to developer communities, which was a neat idea though I wished I’d read more of the novels she cited. I was particularly interested in Steve’s talk because I’d seen him speak last year about how his PhD in Ecology had helped him understand communities as ecosystems in which there are sometimes surprising dependencies. This year, he ran through a checklist of attributes to look for when hiring a developer evangelist. Although I’m not strictly a developer evangelist, there’s enough overlap with my role to make me pay attention and check myself against each one.

dawn
Dawn Foster from Puppet Labs

One of the risks of TED Talk-style talks is that if you don’t quite match up to the ‘right answers’ espoused by the speakers, you could come away from the event feeling inadequate. The friendly atmosphere of Monkigras, and the fact that some speakers directly contradicted each other, meant that this was unlikely to happen.

It was still refreshing, however, to listen to Theo Schlossnagle basically telling people to do what they find works in their context. Companies are different and different things work for different companies. Similarly, developers are people and people learn in different ways so developers learn in different ways. He focused on how to tell stories about your own failures to help people learn and to save them from having to make the same mistakes.

Again, this was refreshing to hear because speakers often tell you how you should do something and how it worked for them. They skim over the things that went wrong and end up convincing you that if only you immediately start doing things their way, you’ll have instant success. Or that inadequacy just kicks in like when you read certain people’s Facebook statuses. Theo’s point was that it’s far more useful from a learning perspective to hear about the things that went wrong for them. Not in a morbid, defeatist way (that way lies only self-pity and fear) but as a story in which things go wrong but are righted by the end. I liked that.

theo
Theo Schlossnagle from Circonus

Ana Nelson (geek conference buddy and friend) also talked about storytelling. Her point was more about telling the right story well so that people believe it rather than believing lies, which are often much more intuitive and fun to believe. She impressively wove together an argument built on various fields of research including Psychology, Philosophy, and Statistics. In a nutshell, the kind of simplistic headlines newspapers often publish are much more intuitive and attractive because they fit in with our existing beliefs more easily than the usually more complicated story behind the headlines.

ana
Ana Nelson from Brick Alloy

The Gentle Author spoke just before lunch about his daily blog in which he documents stories from local people. I was lucky enough to win one of his signed books, which is beautiful and engrossing. Here it is with my swagbag:

After his popular talk last year, Phil Gilbert of IBM returned to give an update on how things are going with Design@IBM. Theo’s point about context of a company being important is so relevant when trying to change the culture of such a large company. He introduced a new card game that you can use to help teach people what it’s like to be a designer working within the constraints of a real software project. I heard a fair amount of interest from non-IBMers who were keen for a copy of the cards to be made available outside IBM.

wildducksgame
Phil Gilbert’s Wild Ducks card game

On the UX theme, I loved Leisa Reichelt‘s talk about introducing user research to the development teams at GDS. While all areas of UX can struggle to get taken seriously, user research (eg interviewing participants and usability testing) is often overlooked because it doesn’t produce visual designs or code. Leisa’s talk was wonderfully practical in how she related her experiences at GDS of proving the worth of user research to the extent that the number of user researchers has greatly increased.

And lastly I must mention Project Andiamo, which was born at Monkigras 2013 after watching a talk about laser scanning and 3D printing old railway trains. The project aims to produce medical orthotics, like splints and braces, by laser scanning the patient’s body and then 3D printing the part. This not only makes the whole process much quicker and more comfortable, it is at a fraction of the cost of the way that orthotics are currently made.

projectandiamo
Samiya Parvez & Naveed Parvez of Project Andiamo

If you can help in any way, take a look at their website and get in touch with them. Samiya and Naveed’s talk was an amazing example of how a well-constructed story can get a powerful message across to its listeners:

After Monkigras 2014, I’m now really looking forward to Monkigras 2015.


 

Monkigras 2014: Sharing craft

After Monkigras 2013, I was really looking forward to Monkigras 2014. The great talks about developer culture and creating usable software, the amazing buzz and friendliness of the event, the wonderful lack of choice over which talks to go to (there’s just one track!!), and (of course) the catering:

coffeecheese

The talks at Monkigras 2014

The talks were pretty much all great so I’m just going to mention the talks that were particularly relevant to me.

Rafe Colburn from Etsy talked about how to motivate developers to fix bugs (IBMers, read ‘defects’) when there’s a big backlog of bugs to fix. They’d tried many strategies, including bug rotation, but none worked. The answer, they found, was to ask their support team to help prioritise the bugs based on the problems that users actually cared about. That way, the developers fixing the bugs weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer numbers to choose from. Also, when they’d done a fix, the developers could feel that they’d made a difference to the user experience of the software.

rafe
Rafe Colburn from Etsy

While I’m not responsible for motivating developers to fix bugs, my job does involve persuading developers to write articles or sample code for WASdev.net. So I figure I could learn a few tricks.

A couple of talks that were directly applicable to me were Steve Pousty‘s talk on how to be a developer evangelist and Dawn Foster‘s on taking lessons on community from science fiction. The latter was a quick look through various science fiction themes and novels applied to developer communities, which was a neat idea though I wished I’d read more of the novels she cited. I was particularly interested in Steve’s talk because I’d seen him speak last year about how his PhD in Ecology had helped him understand communities as ecosystems in which there are sometimes surprising dependencies. This year, he ran through a checklist of attributes to look for when hiring a developer evangelist. Although I’m not strictly a developer evangelist, there’s enough overlap with my role to make me pay attention and check myself against each one.

dawn
Dawn Foster from Puppet Labs

One of the risks of TED Talk-style talks is that if you don’t quite match up to the ‘right answers’ espoused by the speakers, you could come away from the event feeling inadequate. The friendly atmosphere of Monkigras, and the fact that some speakers directly contradicted each other, meant that this was unlikely to happen.

It was still refreshing, however, to listen to Theo Schlossnagle basically telling people to do what they find works in their context. Companies are different and different things work for different companies. Similarly, developers are people and people learn in different ways so developers learn in different ways. He focused on how to tell stories about your own failures to help people learn and to save them from having to make the same mistakes.

Again, this was refreshing to hear because speakers often tell you how you should do something and how it worked for them. They skim over the things that went wrong and end up convincing you that if only you immediately start doing things their way, you’ll have instant success. Or that inadequacy just kicks in like when you read certain people’s Facebook statuses. Theo’s point was that it’s far more useful from a learning perspective to hear about the things that went wrong for them. Not in a morbid, defeatist way (that way lies only self-pity and fear) but as a story in which things go wrong but are righted by the end. I liked that.

theo
Theo Schlossnagle from Circonus

Ana Nelson (geek conference buddy and friend) also talked about storytelling. Her point was more about telling the right story well so that people believe it rather than believing lies, which are often much more intuitive and fun to believe. She impressively wove together an argument built on various fields of research including Psychology, Philosophy, and Statistics. In a nutshell, the kind of simplistic headlines newspapers often publish are much more intuitive and attractive because they fit in with our existing beliefs more easily than the usually more complicated story behind the headlines.

ana
Ana Nelson from Brick Alloy

The Gentle Author spoke just before lunch about his daily blog in which he documents stories from local people. I was lucky enough to win one of his signed books, which is beautiful and engrossing. Here it is with my swagbag:

After his popular talk last year, Phil Gilbert of IBM returned to give an update on how things are going with Design@IBM. Theo’s point about context of a company being important is so relevant when trying to change the culture of such a large company. He introduced a new card game that you can use to help teach people what it’s like to be a designer working within the constraints of a real software project. I heard a fair amount of interest from non-IBMers who were keen for a copy of the cards to be made available outside IBM.

wildducksgame
Phil Gilbert’s Wild Ducks card game

On the UX theme, I loved Leisa Reichelt‘s talk about introducing user research to the development teams at GDS. While all areas of UX can struggle to get taken seriously, user research (eg interviewing participants and usability testing) is often overlooked because it doesn’t produce visual designs or code. Leisa’s talk was wonderfully practical in how she related her experiences at GDS of proving the worth of user research to the extent that the number of user researchers has greatly increased.

And lastly I must mention Project Andiamo, which was born at Monkigras 2013 after watching a talk about laser scanning and 3D printing old railway trains. The project aims to produce medical orthotics, like splints and braces, by laser scanning the patient’s body and then 3D printing the part. This not only makes the whole process much quicker and more comfortable, it is at a fraction of the cost of the way that orthotics are currently made.

projectandiamo
Samiya Parvez & Naveed Parvez of Project Andiamo

If you can help in any way, take a look at their website and get in touch with them. Samiya and Naveed’s talk was an amazing example of how a well-constructed story can get a powerful message across to its listeners:

After Monkigras 2014, I’m now really looking forward to Monkigras 2015.


 

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At ThingMonk 2013

I attended ThingMonk 2013 conference partly because IBM’s doing a load of work around the Internet of Things (IoT). I figured it would be useful to find out what’s happening in the world of IoT at the moment. Also, I knew that, as a *Monk production, the food would be amazing.

What is the Internet of Things?

If you’re reading this, you’re familiar with using devices to access information, communicate, buy things, and so on over the Internet. The Internet of Things, at a superficial level, is just taking the humans out of the process. So, for example, if your washing machine were connected to the Internet, it could automatically book a service engineer if it detects a fault.

I say ‘at a superficial level’ because there are obviously still issues relevant to humans in an automated process. It matters that the automatically-scheduled appointment is convenient for the householder. And it matters that the householder trusts that the machine really is faulty when it says it is and that it’s not the manufacturer just calling out a service engineer to make money.

This is how James Governor of RedMonk, who conceived and hosted ThingMonk 2013, explains IoT:

What is ThingMonk 2013?

ThingMonk 2013 was a fun two-day conference in London. On Monday was a hackday with spontaneous lightning talks and on Tuesday were the scheduled talks and the evening party. I wasn’t able to attend Monday’s hackday so you’ll have to read someone else’s write-up about that (you could try Josie Messa’s, for instance).

The talks

I bought my Arduino getting started kit (which I used for my Christmas lights energy project in 2010) from Tinker London so I was pleased to finally meet Tinker’s former-CEO, Alexandra Dechamps-Sonsino, at ThingMonk 2013. I’ve known her on Twitter for about 4 years but we’d never met in person. Alex is also founder of the Good Night Lamp, which I blogged about earlier this year. She talked at ThingMonk about “the past, present and future of the Internet of Things” from her position of being part of it.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, @iotwatch
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, @iotwatch

I think it was probably Nick O’Leary who first introduced me to the Arduino, many moons ago over cups of tea at work. He spoke at ThingMonk about wiring the Internet of Things. This included a demo of his latest project, NodeRED, which he and IBM have recently open sourced on GitHub.

Nick O'Leary talks about wiring the Internet of Things
Nick O’Leary talks about wiring the Internet of Things

Sadly I missed the previous day when it seems Nick and colleagues, Dave C-J and Andy S-C, won over many of the hackday attendees to the view that IBM’s MQTT and NodeRED are the coolest things known to developerkind right now. So many people mentioned one or both of them throughout the day. One developer told me he didn’t know why he’d not tried MQTT 4 years ago. He also seemed interested in playing with NodeRED, just as soon as the shock that IBM produces cool things for developers had worn off.

Ian Skerrett from Eclipse talked about the role of Open Source in the Internet of Things. Eclipse has recently started the Paho project, which focuses on open source implementations of the standards and protocols used in IoT. The project includes IBM’s Really Small Message Broker and Roger Light’s Mosquitto.

Ian Skerrett from Eclipse
Ian Skerrett from Eclipse

Andy Piper talked about the role of signals in the IoT.

IMG_1546

There were a couple of talks about people’s experiences of startups producing physical objects compared with producing software. Tom Taylor talked about setting up Newspaper Club, which is a site where you can put together and get printed your own newspaper run. His presentation included this slide:

IMG_1534Matt Webb talked about producing Little Printer, which is an internet-connected device that subscribes to various sources and prints them for you on a strip of paper like a shop receipt.

IMG_1550Patrick Bergel made the very good point in his talk that a lot of IoT projects, at the moment, are aimed at ‘non-problems’. While fun and useful for learning what we can do with IoT technologies, they don’t really address the needs of real people (ie people who aren’t “hackers, hipsters, or weirdos”). For instance, there are increasing numbers of older people who could benefit from things that address problems social isolation, dementia, blindness, and physical and cognitive impairments. His point was underscored throughout the day by examples of fun-but-not-entirely-useful-as-is projects, such as flying a drone with fruit. That’s not to say such projects are a waste of time in themselves but that we should get moving on projects that address real problems too.

IMG_1539The talk which chimed the most with me, though, was Claire Rowland‘s on the important user experience UX issues around IoT. She spoke about the importance of understanding how users (householders) make sense of automated things in their homes.

IMG_1587

The book

I bought a copy of Adrian McEwan‘s Designing The Internet of Things book from Alex’s pop-up shop, (Works)shop. Adrian’s a regular at OggCamp and kindly agreed to sign my copy of his book for me.

Adrian McEwan and the glamorous life of literary reknown.
Adrian McEwan and the glamorous life of literary reknown.

The food

The food was, as expected, amazing. I’ve never had bacon and scrambled egg butties that melt in the mouth before. The steak and Guinness casserole for lunch was beyond words. The evening party was sustained with sushi and tasty curry.

Thanks, James!

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Why am I still at IBM?

Ten years ago.

6 August 2003.

I was a recent University graduate, arriving at IBM’s R&D site in Hursley for the first time. I remember arriving in Reception.


Reception – the view that greeted me when I arrived

Ten years.

It was a Wednesday.

I’m still at the same company. I’m still at the same site. I still do the same drive to work, more or less.

For a *decade*.

How did that happen?

It was never The Plan. The Plan (as cynical as it sounds in hindsight) was that I’d stay for two or three years. I figured that would be long enough to get experience, and then I’d leave to work at a small nimble start-up which was where all the “cool” work was.

The Plan never happened. A few years passed, and then another few… I kept saying that I’d leave “later” and before I knew it a ten year milestone has kind of snuck up on me.

I think I’m more surprised than anyone. I’ve never been at any place this long. I was at Uni for five years. The longest I was at any school was four years.

It’s a serious commitment, and one I never realised that I had made. I’ve not even been married for as long as I’ve been with IBM.

So why? Why am I still here?

I live here.

It’s been varied

I’ve spent ten years working for the same company, but I’ve had several jobs in this time.

I’ve been a software developer. I’ve been a test engineer. I’ve been a service engineer, fixing problems with customer systems. I’ve worked as a consultant, advising clients about technology through presentations and running workshops. I’ve done services work building prototypes and first-of-a-kind pilot systems for clients.

I’ve written code to run on tiny in-car embedded systems and apps that ran on mobile phones. I’ve worked as a System z Mainframe developer. I’ve written front-end UI code, and I’ve written heavy-duty server jobs that took hours to run (even when they weren’t supposed to).


IBM Hursley

It’s still challenging

I’ve worked on middleware technology, getting some of the biggest computer systems in the world to communicate with each other, reliably, securely and at scale. I’ve used analytics to get insight from massive amounts of data. I’ve worked on large-scale fingerprint and voiceprint systems. I’ve used natural language processing to build systems that attempt to interpret unstructured text. I’ve used machine learning to create systems that can be trained to perform work.

I’m still learning new stuff and still regularly have to figure out how to do stuff that I have no idea how to at the start.


Some views of the grounds around the office

I get to do more than just a “day job”

I do random stuff outside the day job. I’ve helped organise week long schools events to teach kids about science and technology. I’ve mentored teams of University students on summer-long residential innovation projects. I’ve prepared and delivered training courses to school kids, school teachers and charity leaders. I’ve written an academic paper and presented it at a peer-reviewed research conference. And lots more.

I’m a developer, but that doesn’t mean I’ve spent ten years churning out code 40 hours a week. There’s always something new and different.


Hursley House – where I normally work when I have customers visiting

I work on stuff that matters

Tim O’Reilly has been talking for years about the importance of working on stuff that matters.

“Work on something that matters to you more than money”

If you’ve not heard any of his talks around this, I’d recommend having a look. There are lots of examples of his slides, talks, blog posts and interviews around.

I can’t do his message justice here, but I just want to say that he describes a big part of how I feel very well. I want to work on stuff that I can be proud of. Not just technically proud of, although that’s important too. But the pride of doing something that will make a difference.

Working for a massive company gives me chances to do that. I’ve worked on projects for governments, and police forces, and Universities. I’ve done work that I can be proud of.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on Watson. It’s a very cool collection of technologies, and watching the demo of it competing on a US game show has a geeky thrill that doesn’t get old. But that’s not the most exciting bit. Watson could be a turning point. This could change how we do computing. If you look at what we’re trying to do with Watson in medicine, we’re trying to transform how we deliver healthcare. This stuff matters. It’s exciting to be a part of.


These are the views that surround the site

I like the lifestyle

Hursley is a campus-style site. It’s miles from the nearest town, and surrounded by fields and farms. It’s quiet and has loads of green open space.

My commute is a ten minute drive through a village and fields.

I don’t have to wear a suit, and I don’t stand out coming to work in a hoodie and combat trousers. Flexitime has been the norm for most of my ten years, and I am free to plan a work day that suits me. When I need to be out of the office by 3pm to get the kids from school, I can.

My kids are at a school half-way between home and the office, so I can do the school run on the way to work. As the school is only five minutes from work, I often nip out to see them do something in an assembly, or have lunch with them.

This is a nice aspect of the school – that parents are welcome to join their kids for lunch, and have a school dinner with them and their friends in the school canteen. But still… it’s pretty cool, and if I didn’t work just up the road from them, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

Once a month, I bring them to work in the morning before school starts for a cooked breakfast in the Clubhouse with the rest of my team.

All of this and a lot more tiny aspects like it add up to a lifestyle that I like.

More train tickets
Some of my train tickets from the last few years

I get to see the world

I enjoy travelling. I love seeing new places.

But I’d hate a job where I lived out of a suitcase and never saw the kids.

I’ve managed to find a nice balance. I travel, but usually on short trips and not too often.

In 2006, I worked at IBM’s La Gaude site near Nice. In 2007, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Paris. In 2008, I worked in Copenhagen, Paris and Hamburg. In 2009, I worked in Munich many times, and Rotterdam. In 2010, Stockholm. In 2011, Tel Aviv and Haifa in Israel, Austin in Texas, Paris and Berlin. Last year, I worked in Zurich and Littleton, Massachusetts.

This year, I’ve been in Rio de Janeiro and Littleton again, and it looks like I’ll be in Lisbon in December.

Plus working around the UK. It’s less glamorous, but it’s still interesting to go to new places. I’ve worked in loads of places, like Edinburgh, York, Swansea, Malvern, Warwick, Portsmouth, Cheshire, Northampton, Guildford… I occasionally have to work in London, although I tend to moan about it. And I spent a few months working in Farnborough. I think I moaned about that, too. :-)

Travelling is a great opportunity. I couldn’t afford to have been to all the places that IBM has sent me if I had to pay for it myself.

The officemy deskCarnage
My office today (left), compared with some of the other desks I’ve had around Hursley

The pay is amazing!

Hahahahaha… no.

See above.


Grace at my desk at a family fun day at work in 2008

Will I be here for another ten years?

I’m trying to explain why I’m happy and enjoying what I do. I’m not saying I couldn’t get exactly the same or better somewhere else. Because I don’t know. Other than a year I spent as an intern at Motorola I’ve never worked anywhere else. For all I know, the grass might be greener somewhere.

Will I still be here in another ten years? I dunno… I do worry if that’s unambitious. I wonder if I should try somewhere else. I wonder if only ever working for one company is giving me an institutionalised and insular view of the world.

I keep getting emails from LinkedIn about all the people I know who have new jobs. There are a bunch of people I used to work with at IBM who have not only left to work at other companies, but have since left those companies and gone on to something even newer. While I’m still here.

Am I destined to be one of those IBMers who works at Hursley forever? That’s a scary thought.

For now, I’m enjoying what I do, so that’s good enough for me.

Happy 10th anniversary to me.