On Friday afternoon I headed down to Bristol eOffice to the first Bristol Knowledge Unconference.
I’d never been to an “unconference” before, and found the format quite unusual, essentially a fifteen minute talk, followed by small group discussions at your tables before asking the speaker questions.
“The Fragmentation of Knowledge in the Brain” – Derek Smith
The other unusual feature of the conference was that until we turned up we had no idea what most of the talks were going to be about.
The talks were great, ranging from the BBC News website, to the Open Shakespeare project. The two I probably found the most interesting though were the talk by Derek Smith of the University of Wales Institute Cardiff on the way in which the brain stores semantic knowledge and relates that to syntax, and the “on-the-day” Steve Loughran of HP Labs who’s working on Hadoop (readers may remember the high resolution buhddabrot that I posted a few months ago, which I rendered on a hadoop cluster). It was great to be able to ask some questions about Hadoop, especially since I had to miss the Hadoop conference in London a few weeks ago.
Steve Loughran Shows how he’s using Hadoop over anonamous bluetooth logs to show the council how many people regularly use local footpaths.
