In 1985, TOMY released a toy robot called Chatbot. Just a simple toy, it never got to fulfill its true destiny as a conversational, artificial intelligent, chatbot—until now. In this talk we bring this robot kicking and screaming into the 21st century. First, we replace its dusty, cold-war era circuits with internet-connected microprocessors, then we give it a brain running on a Node.js server that performs speech recognition, speech synthesis, and language understanding to make it a true chatbot. While you may not have your own Reagan-era robot to recreate this this temporal violation, you’ll learn how to build AI-powered Node.js apps for any century.

Takeaways:

• Node.js and hardware
• Using REST-based AI Services
• Building Chat Bots

Attendee Skill Level: Intro JavaScript or Node devs

Websites are seldom built with accessibility in mind. But increasingly, tech giants from Apple to Google are focusing on using artificial intelligence techniques to tackle obstacles faced by people with disabilities. This session will look at how AI is already impacting digital accessibility and what’s in the works at present. We will also take a look into how AI could automate and simplify digital accessibility in the future.

In this presentation we will cover:

1. Ways in which artificial intelligence is being used to improve the digital experience, and lives, of people living with disabilities, now and in the future.
2. The use of AI focuses on accessibility testing to reduce the level of effort with built-in standards, and keep everyone consistent.
3. The use of AI focuses on generating test code or pseudocode automatically by reading the user story acceptance criteria.
4. Codeless test automation, would create and run tests automatically on your web or mobile application without writing any code.

Takeaways:

At the conclusion of this session, participants will come away with:

• An understanding of how artificial intelligence is being used to assist those living with disabilities by companies.
• Insights on how artificial intelligence will impact accessibility testing now and in the future.
• A grasp of the challenges and triumphs with utilizing artificial intelligence in accessibility testing.

Attendee Skill Level: Introductory. This session is aimed at members of a web development team, both technical and non-technical, who want to become familiar with how AI is focusing on accessibility for people living with disabilities as well as its impact on accessibility testing.

What does it take to craft a great experience for new users of our product? Once we’re ready to move past MVP-stage, having learned what we needed to learn, there’s still more to think about than merely what capability to give our earliest adopters and how that translates into functionality for the team to build and scale.

Enter the concept of “New User Experience”. This session explores the idea of transforming new users into power users. It’d be nice if we could all hone our intuition skills and create absolutely 100% intuitive product 100% of the time, but that’s more fantasy than reality. So we must leverage techniques that help us make our new users feel awesome! This includes new users of products employing AR and especially AI which can have murky new user experiences at best.

Takeaways: You’ll learn:

• How to overcome the struggle to drive people to your product
• Considerations for short attention spans, limited scratch memory, temporary disabilities, and avoiding committing funnel homicide from cognitive burnout.
• The many types of onboarding, and which method is optimal for our users’ in learning how to use our products.
• Permission priming, permission pouncing and other concerns for user privacy when our products need access beyond various device limitations.
• What empty states are, and how you need to think about them in the context of your product and your users’ goals in order to make them useful as well as delightful.
• Sources of friction in the experience and in growing our user base.
• How to keep new users coming back, through consideration of habit formation tactics.

Attendee Skill Level: Some experience useful or else the topic may seem a bit advanced to beginners.

The technology available in web browsers continues to evolve at an impressive pace, and the creative possibilities are inspiring. This presentation will focus on real-time rendering of 3D environments within web browsers to create engaging interactive experiences. Michael and David will use a recent project created for Clearfield to help demonstrate possibilities, and share lessons learned. Attendees will leave with new ideas, an introduction to BabylonJS, concrete technical examples, technical tips, and valuable insights into what is next online.

Takeaways: An introduction to BabylonJS, and learn from our experience. We also expect to provide access to starter code to help attendees jump in after the event.

Attendee Skill Level: The presentation will provide concrete technical examples that will be of interest to developers intrigued by WebGL and who have JavaScript programming experience. While no prior knowledge of WebGL or BabylonJS will be required, a solid level of vanilla JavaScript will be helpful to understand the technical aspects. The presentation will be structured so those without a deep knowledge of JavaScript will be introduced to basic technical terminology and the possibilities of WebGL.

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role in various business sectors, and now it’s colliding with the social media marketing. If you don’t combine artificial intelligence in your social media marketing strategy, then you’re likely to fail to get any return from your campaign because the competitor will be using AI to gain competitive advantage. Let’s talk about ways we can use AI to gain brand awareness on social media through slack bots, facial recognition, customer service, and data usage. What machines are good at, humans are not and vice versa, which is why using AI in Social Media will give businesses a better understanding around a prospects thought pattern.

Takeaways: Key outcomes and takeaways include making sure the audience understands that if they get a head start on leveraging AI for marketing and business purposes they will be well ahead of the competition, teaching on different ways to incorporate AI into business and marketing strategies, as well as being able to discuss how AI can boost customer engagement, sales, and make for better business opportunities, as well as cutting down on overhead costs.

Attendee Skill Level: All levels are welcome especially entrepreneurs, people looking to raise brand awareness on social media or learn how to turn the use of AI into money.

The technologies for engaging with 3d content through virtual reality and augmented reality are advancing at a rapid pace. While some of this content is “born digital” in a 3d modeling program, we often wish to capture the objects, spaces, and buildings around us for a virtual experience. The range of technologies for performing this type of reality capture can be daunting or cost prohibitive. This presentation will provide a survey of reality capture technologies, their pros and cons, and advice on how to get started capturing your world for VR and AR. It will also explore the types of workflows involved with taking this content from raw data to models and formats usable for visualization and interaction.

Takeaways:

• Attendees to this talk will gain a clear understanding of the tools, technologies, and resources necessary to successfully begin capturing objects, buildings and spaces for use in AR and VR.
• They will learn about both free and for-cost software and hardware options for performing these types of 3d capture.
• They will also gain an understanding of the relative complexities involved with different approaches, and how to begin a project with a successful outcome in mind.

Attendee Skill Level: This session is intended for those just getting started in 3d capture, including technologies like photogrammetry, structured light capture, LIDAR, and laser triangulation.

Today, the UX of enterprise tools relies on customers telling us what they want to see. With the addition of artificial intelligence, we can make recommendations about trends and events to pay attention to, even if customers aren’t aware of them. We’re developing some new design patterns to make this possible, and the challenge is finding the right amount of personalization and clarity to achieve real value. I’ll examine some of these patterns and talk about what comes next.

Takeaways:

Attendees will gain a better understanding of current challenges in personalization; how to prioritize their UX needs; and how to apply the design patterns we’ve implemented at Datadog to their own projects.

Attendee Skill Level: Minimal