 Good morning. Welcome to Lightning Talks on Sunday. The Herald notifice hasn't been updated, so I assume we need volunteers for AV as we just learned when we didn't have AV. Okay, and so we're going to do Lightning Talks. And each speaker I will introduce and I will set them off. And I will set a timer on my timing device. And so what we will do is we'll let the timer run. And if the speaker is still speaking when the timer ends, we'll cut them off with a loud round of applause. And so we could just try our ability to do loud rounds of applause in the morning. So I'm the count of three. One, two, three. Well, okay, that was really good. So we could just start. Hi, my name is Liz Eden, otherwise known as Altsomber. Spoiler alert, we're all going to die. And everyone's going to have their own ideas about what might or might not happen next. One of the things that might happen is somebody might dedicate a bench to your memory. It might be your family, your friends, or your colleagues, people who are connected to you during your life and who want to honor that connection. Quite possibly this bench will be somewhere that was meaningful to you and meaningful to your loved ones. It might be along the coastal path where you used to walk your dog. It might be at the beach where you went on your first date with the love of your life. It might be in the park where you would look at the trees. It might be in the gardens where you rejoiced in the beauty around you. About a year ago, the lovely Ateedin tonight decided to build something to celebrate these human connections that give our lives shape and meaning even after death. And so, openbenches.org was born. Because we like to do things digitally, some of the inscriptions we've seen are so old they're barely legible, so part of our mission is to preserve these data. By uploading a memorial bench to our site, we can safeguard these commemorations from the future, away from weather and pollution and pigeons. But it's also a way to help share that love more widely with people who might not be able to see the bench in person and with the wider digital community. At its heart, we simply wanted to engage with the way people remember each other. In just a few words, we get a tiny snapshot of a life lived and loved, of pleasures and treasures, of the moments that make life precious, however fleeting. We've seen messages of humour, shout out to the great Terry Pratchett there, messages of gratitude, and messages of appreciation, not only for the person who's left us, but also for the world around us. In brief lines of text, there are songs to the value of tranquility, poems to the importance of rest, stay for a while they implore, take in your surroundings. And to our great surprise and delight, those surroundings are from all around the globe. What started as a homegrown project in Oxford has developed into a truly international venture. We have ventures from Canada, the US, across Europe, in Africa, Asia and Australasia. We built this word cloud showing the most common words that come up, no surprise that loving a memory feature heavily. So hopefully at this point you're all thinking, oh, that sounds lovely, I wonder how I could get involved? Well, I'm glad you asked. Firstly, go out and find some ventures. All you need is a smartphone which can take geotact photos and an internet connection. If you see a memorial bench while you're out and about, snap a photo and upload it to the site. You can see from the interactive map where we've already got lots of ventures recorded. If you aren't sure if the bench is on the site already, you can search for it by the inscription. When you upload your photo, there's some text detection software running on the site, so the inscription should appear as if by magic. And for those of you that like to gamify your bench finding, if you log in using Twitter, you can track how many benches you have uploaded. We even have a leaderboard, but competitive benching is not mandatory. If you prefer to be an anonymous benefactor to our great library of benches, that is absolutely fine with us. We really hope that this will encourage people to engage with their local area and their local history. We found benches in cemeteries, shopping centres, and we even have one in a service station. Currently, we've got over 8,600 benches on the site, and it will be wonderful to get more. And the other way is on trusty GitHub. We're always tinkering around with the site, so if you have any suggestions for enhancements or solutions to bugs, then get coding, raise an issue, and send us a pull request. We'd love to hear your ideas for improving the bench recording experience. So, search for openbenches at github.com and get stuck in. Thanks very much for your attention and happy benching. Okay, that was great. Thank you. Next up, and smuggling photos out of Russia. No? Okay. Benjamin Bondel. Maybe they're easy to smuggle if you can't remember you have them. Hello, good morning everybody. So, I've been busy most of the weekend with the sidebar at the far end. I'm absolutely knackered, but I thought I'd like to do a quick little lightning tour because I moved to Washington DC for a bit, and I had this very strange moment where I had an email from someone in Russia, and I thought, yeah, this doesn't sound particularly legitimate. So, I had this email from this lady who said, hello, dear Benjamin, my name is Tatiana, I'm the picture editor, Esquire Russia. We like your amazing project and we want to publish it in our magazine, in our next issue. Looking forward to see your answer. It seems legit. So, I've looked up this person, tried to find out who they were, had a lot of email back and forth, but I was a little bit concerned because I'd never heard of this person before. They came completely out of the blue. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Russia and what it's been doing recently, particularly from what I read in the Cardin report, which you can Google. It's about a 50-60 page PDF, and it essentially talks about what parts of the Russian state have been up to with regards to countries in Europe, in the US, and what have you, with essentially what you might call cyber warfare and other sort of things they've been up to. So, I was a little bit like, I was kind of worried at this point. I thought, I've never had someone contact me like this before. And so, I thought I'd just ignore it. But I spoke to my wife about it, and she's a lady from Yorkshire, and she basically turned around and says, no, no, no, all you have to do is charge them all the monies. So, I sort of went, okay, yeah, we'll go with that. Why not? It'll be a giggle. So, I'll go back one. The photos in question, why they were so interested, was basically, I'd been on the Trans-Siberian railway journey for about five or six years ago. And what we did is we had a little technical project that we wanted to do, which was essentially a slit scan. So, if you're not familiar with a slit scan, what you do is you take a normal photo and then take either a single or a set number of pixels from the middle. And over time, you slice them and add them together. And what you get is an image that is at a glance, you can see what has changed. And it brings out very interesting sort of view on the landscape and what's passing. And it works for something that's essentially linear. So, you can still see it. It's up there on that particular URL. And so, you get something a little bit like this. So, zoomed all the way out, you get these really interesting strips of areas. So, for instance, there's a bit where we're traveling during the night, there's an awful lot of blue sky and one awful lot of snow. But then as the further you get along, you get the landscape changes. And so, you end up with really interesting photos like this. So, you get this appearance of this train here that's just stretched out. And then all these little trucks that are all squashed together. There's an image in there somewhere of someone standing on a platform where they're perfectly shot, but the actual platform just extends on almost forever. So, within it, there's quite a few interesting images. They actually sent me a copy of the magazine. It turns out they were writing for, there was a particular author, a famous poet, I can't remember his name. He was a Russian who went on this journey. And they wanted to do an editorial, just a piece describing this guy's life. And so, they ended up using some of the images as parts of the spread. So, in the end, it was, at first, it seemed like quite a scary thing with everything that sort of heard in the news. But in the end, it turned out to be reasonably legit. So, there I was, sitting in my little office in Washington, D.C., going, well, I can probably write this down as something else that I can do better than the current U.S. president. So, thank you very much. Okay, next up, we have the electric unicycles. Good morning. Okay, off you go. Thank you. I am going to try and ride my electric unicycle around this tiny little stage just to make the AV guy's life hard. Does that work? Cool. So, my name's Simon. You want me to... No, it's fine. I can ride around him. It's fine. Yeah. So, my name's Simon. I am an electric unicycle enthusiast. I brought one. Who seemed to be riding around EMF camp this weekend? Cool. So, I'm going to try and convince you in the next five minutes that electric unicycles are the future of transportation. I've been riding them now for eight months, every single day of my life. I live and work in Central London and East London, near the old London Hackspace. And I commute to and from work on this electric unicycle. It cost me £1,500. It has a 42-mile range. It has a top speed of 30 miles an hour. I have been riding here all weekend. I have not actually charged it, and I still have more than 60% of the battery. So, basically, in 1999, a guy called Dean Carmen hyped the crap out of this thing. He's like, it's going to change cities. It's going to change how we work. And it was the Segway. And Segways didn't really change much except tourism in places where you can go on Segway tours. And the reason it didn't really work was you can't take a Segway and keep it in your hall. It takes up too much space. And you can't lift a Segway up even one step. But electric unicycles, sort of 20 years later, I think finally actually fulfill the promise of hypermobile urban transportation. This takes up less space in your house than a bicycle. You can ride it to work without getting hot and sweaty. You can store it under your desk at work. You only have to charge it once a week, basically, for me, because I do about three and a half miles to work on it. And it has a 40-mile range. So I charge it on Sunday night. And then I don't charge it again until Monday morning. It can go anywhere. And quick show of hands. Who skis here? Okay. So imagine for a moment that you could ski anywhere. Like, the entire world was covered in like six-inch deep powder. And everywhere was downhill. And there's no lift passes. And you can do it anytime you want. Like that's basically what an electric unicycle is. You can jump on this thing and just... Oh, it's also got Bluetooth speaker in it. You can basically jump on your unicycle and just like head off into the countryside and do like a 20-mile ride. And it's like skiing the whole time. It's pretty cool. So I'm going to show you a little bit about this particular one. This is the Ninebot Z10. So Ninebot is a Chinese company that bought the Segway brand. So the original Segway is now owned by this company Ninebot. This is the Z10 that came out last week. This is the first one in the UK. There's now two more that I know of. So there's three Z10s in the UK. It has a 18-inch wheel, 18 by 4.5-inch wheel. To get on it, you basically do something like this. Pretty simple. Yeah. I don't know what... Does anyone have any questions? So it doesn't care about hills. Basically, the unicycle has a 2,000-watt motor, a one kilowatt hour battery. And the only thing that the CPU of this unicycle is doing is trying to stay under you and upright. That's all it's doing. It has 2,000 watts of power. And all it really wants to do is stay level. So when you hit a hill, it doesn't slow down. And it's quite a strange experience, because when you learn to ride one of these, on a bicycle, you subconsciously... You try and accelerate just before you hit a hill. So you'll have a little bit of momentum to go up a hill. And on a unicycle, you don't need to do that, because the unicycle just doesn't notice. It goes uphill as quickly as it goes downhill. It doesn't even know it's on a hill, except that the load on the battery goes up a little bit. So I've been using this to basically run shuffle beer back and forwards from our car, because it makes no difference to the unicycle whether it's going up or down. It's as easy to ride up a hill as it is to ride downhill. Cool. Does anyone have any more questions? No? There's no seat. This is a handle, so you can flip it out. You can push it backwards like this. It looks rather dapper, I think. What else do you want to know about the unicycle? No. So that's the question I get all the time. Are unicycles legal anywhere? And the answer is absolutely categorically they are not currently legal. There was a law in 1835 that says no powered vehicles are allowed on the pavement. So that sort of rules out riding on the pavement. And you can't ride any powered vehicle on the road unless you have insurance, MOT, or it is categorized as an E-PACE vehicle, which is the electric bicycle, electric powered electric power assisted transport regulations. But basically those say that you have to have a limit of 15 miles an hour and you have to have two redundant mechanical brakes. Now, I don't know if you know much about mechanics, but if you attempted to attach a mechanical brake to this, you would just go splat. There's no actual way you can mechanically brake one of these, and even if you could it would be kind of pointless. So they're not currently legal under UK legislation, but the police think it's funny, so they don't really care. Cool. Anyone else have any more questions? You. Can I? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you go on YouTube and look for Z10 Wipeout, you'll see me wiping out at full speed, wearing a full face helmet. When I got this, I've been riding unicycles for eight months, but I've been riding a different unicycle. This one has a much heavier wheel. So because the way you steer a unicycle is you lean over a little bit and the centrifugal force basically turns your leaning action into a turning action. But the different weight of the wheel mean like a heavier wheel basically means that a smaller amount of lean produces a larger, like your larger torque. And it takes about 70 miles of riding before your brain like adjusts to the new shape of the wheel. But my friends really, really, really wanted to get video of the first Z10 in the UK. So they kind of like pressured me into riding at full speed and I kind of knew I was going to wipe out, but it's still a pretty funny video. So yeah, look it up on YouTube. Any more questions? Cool. All right. Hands up if you're going to buy one of them. Yay. Thanks for coming to my talk. Okay, next up we have automated fact checking. One of these Simon automated fact checking. No. Okay. Next up I have David Carboni. Morning. Cool. So honestly, I are on a Sunday morning, but it's great to see you all here. So I'm David. I do a lot of work with technology. I've built a few things like nationalrail.co.uk with some friends over there. And if you've heard of the Office for National Statistics, I did all the technology design behind that. And I've really found that the best way to do technology is to think about people, which is probably obvious until you think about, until you actually try and do it. Sorry, I may have polished off a bottle of vodka last night. So this is one of my favorite quotes. We actually like what we do. We generally like the people we do it with. But there's something about the way that there's a particular form of leadership that just repels people. And it's usually called best practice. And that really upsets me because I quite like people. So I thought, you know, can we do something different? And this to me is the best piece of evidence that we have that best practice is absolutely devastating to actually just enjoying what we do because we like doing what we do. And to me, this says that almost all of the value in your company, your team, your organization, wherever you're working is left on the table. Nobody's interested. The way we manage, the way we deal with teams and people actually destroys 85% of the value in your company. And why would you do that? Right? There's got to be a better way. So I've probably been spending probably over 10 years now just thinking about, could we do this better? It all came from a particularly bad project experience back in 2001. And I just thought, okay, I'm not going to complain about this. I mean, I was a programmer at the time. I'm not going to complain about this. My only license to complain is if one day I do something better. So I think that kind of sort of became my mission. And I've gradually, I think I'm gradually figuring it out. So there's another one of my favorite quotes, people are not resources. It's sort of a, if you've ever heard an HR department talking about people, even though they call themselves human resources, they tend to talk about resources. And it's not always very human. And this lady called Margaret Heffernan. Some of you may have seen her TED talk, she talks about super chickens. And there's a really interesting piece in that where she's saying that if you take the best people you can to make the best team you can, what you'll end up with is conflict. You won't end up with a good team. So you can assemble a group of the best resources you can find. And what will happen is probably nothing terribly good. So simply finding a superstar team is not the way to actually create a good team. So some of you may have heard of Esther Perrell. I think she does absolutely fantastic work in a completely different sphere. But this I think is fundamental. So this is one of my reasons why I think Geeks particularly would make really good leaders. And that's because many of us have this idea of systems thinking. We know that no matter the quality of the parts in the system, the value reduces to zero if the interactions between them don't work. And so if you focus on the interactions more than the individuals, you've got a far higher chance of producing something useful. So this is the hard part. So this is what I've kind of had to learn over the last 10 years. So I'm a big fan of Brene Brown, if anyone's heard of her. She does a lot of work on vulnerability, but vulnerability is kind of a bit of a tainted word. So she's kind of trying to make the point that vulnerability is kind of having the courage to show up. So it takes quite a level of personal commitment and inner work, emotional intelligence, all these kind of things that perhaps as a geek, certainly I wasn't terribly into. I wasn't terribly good at. But I've sort of managed to train myself over the last 10 years to get better at this stuff. And it really does pay off because because you've got the systems thinking piece, if you can bring in the human side, which and let's be honest, this is hard work for everyone all the way through our lives. So this is just this is just the work of living. But the more you focus on it, the better you can create groups that work. And so Brene's put together a kind of a manifesto for leadership. And this is just sort of some of the first few lines out of it. But I think there's something really inspiring about this that you want to be doing work that's interesting. You want to be doing it with people you like doing it with. And wouldn't it be nice to be able to show up at work as a whole person know that you're welcome to feel safe, to feel part of the group. That's something really powerful about that. And there's a level of kind of something amazing that happens when that kind of team comes together. So if anyone's ever had the experience of working on a team that looks like this, and you probably know it's two, five, 10 times more powerful and 10 times more enjoyable, then you know, probably anything else you've worked on it'll probably really stand out in your memory. I know I've had a couple of experiences like this and really something special. So I just believe that this will be a really good way to live and a really good thing for human beings in general. So I love this picture. You know, the best received wisdom that we have is killing our companies. And lots of companies will say, you know, they'll they'll whinge about productivity or they'll whinge about millennials. They'll say, you know, why are our people so lazy? And it's like, well, maybe it's not that your people are lazy. Maybe it's just that what you think is right turns out to be wrong. And that's what's destroying your company. So. So this is what I think geek leadership looks like. And I love that this is like several thousand years old. So, you know, there's nothing new here. But it's just recognizing that perhaps leadership isn't what we traditionally think of. So if I can paint the stereotype of the the 80s manager in the power suit ordering people around and belittling them and generally making them feel, you know, stupid and like he's the boss and he's in charge because it was a he in those days. I think that's the opposite of leadership. I think leadership is disappearing. It's everybody feeling like this works. We work creating that creating that climate as just as such an achievement. And I do think geeks are good at this because we tend to be introverts and introverts are much better at disappearing. So this is this is the phrase I put on my blog recently and I realized I quite like this one. So if you think of a if you're in a team where it's working, where you feel like you belong, where you feel safe, where you feel welcome, your engagement goes up, your enjoyment goes up, your energy goes up, the the power of your interactions goes up. People have done studies on this stuff, absenteeism goes down, productivity goes up. Just everything's better. And it's not just work because if you're enjoying what you do and you feel like you're in a good place, you're going to go home, you're going to be happier with your family, you're going to pass on to your community. This is this is almost kind of a humanitarian mission to, you know, this is how we live better as human beings work is a big part of our lives. And if it's not nice, we're just not going to have nice lives. But if it's really good, oh my goodness, when, you know, when this works, life is life is really, I mean, it's no less hard, right? Life is always going to be hard, but it can be enjoyable. So I cheekily came up with my own quote last night to add in here. And I would, you know, if I think, you know, this would be a conversation you might have in the world about gender, you know, if women don't hear themselves in the conversation about leadership or any role, but actually as as Geeks, if people are talking about leadership, and you don't recognize yourself in that picture, redefine that picture. Because I think Geeks can do this really well. And you know, and it's hard, right? You have to you have to learn the human side, the emotional intelligence, the connection. That's never going to go away. But actually, I think, you know, there are so many people who are really good leaders who don't call themselves that. And I would really encourage you to think of yourself that way. And that's me done. Thank you very much. Okay, do we have automated fact checking? Okay, then so bikes are dope. Okay, when you're ready. Hello morning. So my name is Ben, and I'm going to talk to you about bicycles for a little while. Apologies, I have not given this talk without notes before. So let's see how it goes. So like the first thing is that bicycles are great. This is actually a fact, not just my opinion. And I think one of the reasons why bicycles are spectacular things is because you can do so much with them. So they're really, they're good for lots of different things. Getting around, having fun, cargo, transporting other people besides the people pedaling, transporting other bicycles. You know, you can do nearly anything with a bicycle at a scale that is somewhere between walking and driving around with a car. And that makes it really nice. This talk, though, is about one specific sort of cycling, the kind of cycling that's done by people who are paid some money to go a bit faster than most of us can go on a bicycle. And in particular, we're interested in the kind of lengths that those cyclists might take to go just a bit faster than everyone around them. So let's like back up a second and look at what doping is, right? So I don't know if this is going to work. Sorry, contrast. So I'll just read it. So it says, administer drugs to a racehorse, greyhound, or athlete in order to inhibit or enhance sporting performance. So this is from WADA, which is the organization that does international regulation of doping in athletics and cycling and other professional sports, or professional and Olympic level sports. And there's a couple of things that I think are interesting about this definition. One of them is that there's this inhibit piece, which is not something we're going to talk about much more in this talk, but there is a sort of light history of people giving performance, decreasing drugs to their competition, which is probably not what people sort of think about when they think about doping, but it is something that does occur. So doping and cycling specifically is in general focused on things that you can do to your body with chemicals to make yourself go faster for longer. And this means that it is a different sort of drugs than the kind of drugs that you think of when you think of doping in your head, which is probably steroids and you probably have this kind of image, right? So people think about doping, especially before Lance Armstrong, and they think, let's take some steroids, let's get very large. And that's not the kind of nature of doping and cycling. So doping and cycling looks more like this. It tends to be super macabre and involve a lot of blood because the way that you go faster for longer in cycling is by having more red blood cells than your competition. So the goal generally for endurance cycling, which is not the cycling that happens on a track so much, but the cycling that happens on the road is to get the oxygen to your muscles efficiently and to clear the waste products your muscles produce because then your muscles can just pedal harder longer. And then you can go up hills for six hours for 21 days straight. So, okay, so let's talk about doping through history. So to kind of, so for my day job, I count things, which I guess means I'm a data scientist. And so I like to put things on charts, it's like a good way to work through stuff. So we have two different metrics here. One of them is toxicity, which in a lot of pharmaceuticals is measured in something called TD50. So that's the point where the median person in the population will die. And then we have something called effectiveness, which is ED50, which is how effective a drug is for the median population. So you're dealing with medians on both sides. So we're going to put some, put some chemicals on this chart. So we're going to start with something called stric9. So has anyone heard of stric9? It's a pretty, pretty, so typically it comes up as a poison, but it turns out it's quite useful in, in endurance athletics if you don't really care about your life. So here, here for effect is a picture of stric9 doing what it does. So, so stric9 causes your muscles to tense. And so if you have just the right dosage, it will keep your muscles from fatiguing. And if you have like a drop more than that, it'll kill you. So it was actually pretty popular and totally legal in the early history of cycling for maybe the first half century of cycling was still in reasonably wide use in the 60s. And so, you know, this is just, it's a good example of the kind of very narrow effect window, but did do something well if you hit the dosage. There's a really good story of the first person to die during the tour de France in 1898, I think it was, who had a cocktail of stric9 and cocaine about midway through. And that was how this particular cyclist was managing to pedal like 2,000 miles into this race. So post World War II, doping just got much better in a kind of effectiveness sense. And that gets us to amphetamines. So amphetamines, for those who don't know, are a drug that just basically is meant to keep your alertness going a bit more. It's also a bit of a party drug these days, but it was designed to keep soldiers fighting for longer during World War II and got quickly adopted in the endurance athletics community post World War II. So the best example I think of amphetamine usage in cycling is this man. So for those of you who are of a certain age and fans of cycling, you will recognize this is Eddie Merckx. Merckx perhaps the sort of most well-known cyclist of all time. Merckx definitely used amphetamines before the band came into effect of amphetamines during his career. I know he used them afterwards because he had a two-year band for amphetamines twice during his career. A thing that's fun is that people still talk about Eddie Merckx as like the greatest cyclist ever, but he definitely cheated using amphetamines. I will say it again, Eddie Merckx is a cheat. So this is Eddie Merckx getting the World Hour record, which he held for many, many years. He was an incredibly good cyclist. He took a lot of performance enhancers of the sort that amphetamines represent. So if we go forward a couple more decades, we get to the practice known as blood doping. So blood doping was done because all these chemicals, they were developing very good tests for. So they could either check the urine or a small blood sample and work out that you had amphetamines in your system, for example. So blood doping is the, I think, rather goth practice of getting more red blood cells in your system rather directly. So this involves a transfusion either from someone else to you or from yourself like six months ago back into you. So you have another extra leader of blood in your system, and that means the density of red blood cells is significantly higher. It's very effective. It's also really dangerous. So you're bypassing the body's own ability to regulate how dense your blood is, and this is a really good way to give yourself a heart attack. But if you don't do that, it's a great way to pedal harder, faster, longer. So here is a guy named Francisco Moser. He broke the hour record from Eddie Merckx. He did that in 1984. In 1999, he admitted that he did it through illegal at the time blood doping. Again, themes. His name is still on bicycle frames. He is a cheat. So this sort of doping when became illegal in the early 80s was clearly used by the Peloton for a decade after that until they figured out how they could test for it, which is effectively by monitoring the density of your blood over time. If you hear something called blood passports, that's what this is in reference to. So that gives us the modern world. So the modern world is all about EPO. So EPO is something called erythropotene. EPO, in short, is a chemical that's used in your body to trigger the production of red blood cells. So this bypasses the transfusion part, but has a similar effect. It's safer and about as effective as blood doping. It's safer because the body can shut down the red blood cell production if it's really dangerous. EPO made famous by Lance Armstrong. So this is Lance Armstrong and another cyclist, Basso, who was his competition when he was good. Both of them were on EPO. Lance Armstrong famously said that he was just better at doping than everyone else, and that's probably true. There's pretty good evidence that basically the whole of the 90s and aughts was just a bunch of people on EPO in the entire professional peloton. So, okay, fine. So this is the kind of spread of doping through the years. So what do we mean when we say better doping? When we say better doping, we really mean this idea of lower toxicity, higher range of effectiveness. I, as an athlete who doesn't have sort of cheating ethics, want to take something that makes me better than my competition and probably not kill me because that will make it hard for me to enjoy the spoils of winning. So let's talk about this. This is an electric motor that drops down into your seat tube and sits on top of the bottom bracket next to your cranks and drives the bike for you. Here's a slightly different design that it's rumored has been used in the professional world tour peloton, although there's never been any proof of that. It's a really quite fascinating design that I need to talk about very quickly. So it's a bunch of magnets in the rim of a bicycle and basically you have a pulsing electromagnet in the fork. Thanks very much. Do we have automated fact checking? No? Okay. And we might be able to manage one more after this. So if you have slides and you have five minutes, we'll try when this talk is done. Thank you. So just to show how much I disrespect EMF, I'm going to show you the slides that we presented in Bornhack last year. I haven't bothered to change them. This is sorry, last week. This is a presentation that my 10-year old son and I gave. He's not here today, so I'm going to do my best to give the presentation in his absence. We're trying to get interest in the AI and bot community in a game called Diplomacy. So AIs and bots can now largely beat humans at two-player games of perfect information. So for chess this has been solved 20 years ago. Go in the past couple of years or so. Poker progress is being made. These are games of incomplete information so they're a bit more difficult but the best bots are beating poker players. Dota 2 we've seen progress both last year in one-on-one mode with specific characters against top humans and then this year in five on five mode with a wider subset of characters. So for two-player games the bots beat us. Diplomacy is a board game. The easiest way to think about it is think of it as like risk. It's risk set in the early 20th century in Europe. There are seven players so that already makes it a bit more interesting than a two-player game. Also more interesting, well, different from risk, there's no randomness whatsoever. So conflict is determined by just counting the number of units that one force can bring to bear against another force and then here's where it becomes really interesting. My units are fully interoperable with anyone else's unit so an important part of the game is negotiating privately with other players in the game. If I'm playing England for example and if I'm able to get a French navy in support of a move that I'm trying to make against Germany, if the French fleet does support my move that would count as two units against the German one unit. So core to the game is negotiation. Negotiation is private. It's unstructured and it's uncontractable or verifiable. So this makes for great fun gameplay because in the gameplay it means that you spend a lot of the game communicating privately in private rooms or wandering off to a distant corner of the field and discussing what I might do if you did this for me. Now from a point of view of bots this becomes very difficult to model properly and to learn properly and I think this is what makes this an interesting target game. There is currently an annual diplomacy competition held at the automated negotiating agents competition every year. There have been two years in which the diplomacy has run. Last year it was won by a bot called Frigate out of one of the Tokyo universities. This year interestingly they were going to have a two-stage qualification procedure. So in the first stage a bot would have to statistically outperform a random bot and then all of the bots that qualified that first stage would run against each other and a winner would be declared among those second stage qualifying bots. This year actually what happened is that only one bot statistically outperformed the random bot and so they ran the second stage with the full range of submitted bots and the bot that had outperformed the random bot in the first stage didn't do terribly well. So no winner was declared this year. These bots, the state of the art of these bots, they're hard-coded, they're not doing any sort of learning, they're myopic, they're really dumb in a number of respects. So I think that insofar as the AI community is looking for new target applications and as games are an interesting class of target applications, I think the level of technology is very low here and I think that there's some interesting challenges in diplomacy as well. Currently the bots don't play against humans and so insofar as that's another benchmark of progress, you're beating top humans, we're nowhere near that at this point. So what we'd like to see, we'd like to see an AI that outperforms humans in online diplomacy games. If anyone's interested I'd love to talk to you about that. Thank you. Okay, do we have automated fact-checking? No. And does anybody else have five minutes? Hello, my name is Talis, my name is Talis Kimberly Fairbourn, this is very ad hoc on the fly. I'm going to talk to you about permaculture, magic you can eat. I'm new to it, I've only got five minutes so how bad can it get? Magic you can eat. Potatoes, let me talk potatoes, potatoes are wonderful. Ask Sam Gandhi, ask Mark Watkins, you know you've got a potato, you've got a meal. Now you don't need much of a garden, you can do it in a dustbin, you can do it in a little bit of scrubs somewhere, you can gorilla garden potatoes. This year I got very excited because my permaculture magazine, permaculture is one of those things where since I found it I thought my people, like you folk, you are also my people and there are other people who are my people. We can have many people and we can have potatoes back on the point house. Right, so little bit of ground, I had a little patch of garden about 70 centimetres by 140, patch of grass that wasn't doing anything between this and that, cardboard box, something arrived from the internet, slap it down on the grass, seed potatoes, don't just get the manky ones at the bottom of the drawer that you didn't eat that are sprouting tentacles, get seed potatoes, give yourself the chance, every chance of success. Stick down maybe four seed potatoes on the cardboard, okay, and then on top of that you pile stuff that would go in the compost, clippings, grass clippings. If you don't have those, you go wandering up and down your street and you find somebody mowing the lawn and you say, you got any plans for those grass clippings and they'll say, yeah, I stick them in the green bin but the council never gives us enough bins, you know, and you just say, I'd love some and then you trade them a bit of rhubarb or a bit of help with their computer or a bit of something because we all need those local community social capital connections where you need them more than ever. So anyway, back to the potatoes, cardboard, seed potatoes, load of clippings and stuff, not soil. A few weeks later, up come the little potato plants, that's great, okay, and then when the potato plants are about, I don't know, maybe about that tall, you pile on more clippings and stuff, these potatoes are not going to grow in soil but they will grow, they'll grow, they'll flower. When the flowers drop, you've got potatoes, you don't dig, you don't dig, you never dig the potatoes because your fork will go straight through the only potato that wasn't eaten by slugs, I tell you, and it'll be mud and slicey bits and you will cry. So anyway, no digging potatoes, you get down on your hands and knees, you part the compost with your hands and there's the potatoes, like eggs in a nest, clean, not slug eating, beautifully formed and bigger because they didn't have to fight the clay soil, okay, so you pull out the potatoes you want and you cover the rest over and they're there for the next time, you don't have to dig them all up, pull them all up at once, you just leave them there in their little potato larder so the light doesn't get to them because the light will turn them green and green potatoes are bad and should not be eaten. Okay, so that's magic you can eat, permaculture, no dig potatoes, it's great fun, it's easy, it's magic and it's edible, I commend you. Okay, thank you and that is all we have time for this morning, so one final round of applause for all the speakers.