First of all, I sincerely hope all of you in our community are staying healthy during these trying times across the globe. COVID-19 is affecting us all in different ways, but we can still use this forum to keep up some community camaraderie. Please don’t be shy to post here in the #community:lounge, even if you just want someone to talk to while you’re in isolation.
Since we at Numenta are already set up to live-stream our research meetings, it makes it easier for us to create interactive online events with the community. I am working with the team to plan some events over the next month or two while people are mostly working from home, so we can continue to bring you live content and interaction. Some things I’ll be working on:
Specific presentations from Jeff, Subutai, myself, perhaps others (TBD)
We’re still thinking about the best way to do the presentations. We could take a whole work day and open up ZOOM meetings throughout the day, similar to an unconference, where attendees can join any of the presentations throughout the day. Or we could just do one per day over the course of a week. I want to make these as interactive as possible, so live attendance is important to me. I’m including some polls below so you can help me choose the timing for these events. They will all be available to view later, but if you attend live, you can ask questions in real-time.
The hackers’ hangout will be open to the public like always, but the other events may be RSVP only, and you’ll need a password to join. I’ll post more information as we plan the events.
Best weekday time for attending online events:
morning (9AM-12PM PDT / 4PM - 7PM UTC)
afternoon (12PM-5PM PDT / 7PM - 12AM UTC)
evening (5PM-9PM PDT / 12AM - 4AM)
0voters
How should we pace out these online presentations:
one topic / stream per day
all in one day, throughout the day (like an unconference)
0voters
Thank you for taking the time to read this message and take the polls. Please only take them if you want to attend the events live. Stay healthy!
It’s hard to say with all the turbulence going on. I am now working from home and I never expected that.
I do need to get the work done so I favor one tasty morsel a day. A constant stream of goodies would be too tempting and I fear it would keep me from being productive.
Massachusetts is not yet “sheltering in place” and I still travel to my day job to run machinery, but it’s already like a whole different world. A planned dinosaur tracksite related project to prep, cut and skid an over 40 foot long trackway to new geology building at Williams College seemed to go on hold right after first reports of the virus in China.
I’m at least able to carry on with coding work. The vesicle project became a weekend long marathon, in part from my still being new to Python. At this point I’m becoming proficient. Program also ended up needing to include how cells and molecules normally sometimes get squeezed out, while others migrating around in contact with surface fill voids. There were otherwise program induced logjams that do not exist in chemistry and biology.
I did not want to have to get into this much physics and geometry related detail. But without it there is no way to realistically account for forces at work during cortical sheet development. I was stuck with blurry fold lines and have (larger than pores) 6 sided holes complicating the problem. Now it’s just a matter of more accurately finding the center of voids and other program details.
Improvements in symmetry made it possible for me to notice a stretched overlap in the 392 point golf ball example, then on a hunch I tried 360 and found it meshed to perfectly spaced 5 sided pores, the magic number I was looking for. Increasing the number of points causes pores to form a hinged perforation line to fold along.
With finishing the code being such a priority your research meetings will again be what I will play in the background while coding, and occasionally repeat interesting parts a dozen or so times. Whatever is easiest for you to get online is fine by me.
Thanks for all the votes! I’m going to leave those polls open another couple of days just in case there are weekday voters who haven’t seen them yet. But so far the majority seems to want evening streams, and one per day. Seems reasonable to me.
