San Diego Java User's Group

6:30 -	Equipment setup and mixer - Food Provided by: Cognitive Medical Systems
7:00 -	Meeting begins, announcements
7:15 -	Speaker: Llewellyn Falco
7:30 -	Speaker: -Wolf Paulus- Bots, Amazon Echo, and language user interfaces in general
8:10 -	Short Break
8:15 -	Demo: Wolf Paulus - Build and deploy an Alexa skill
9:00 -	Drawings - final announcements Meeting Ends, tear down, mixer
9:30 -	Official Stop

Speaker: Wolf Paulus

Title: Bots, Amazon Echo, and language user interfaces in general

Abstract: The graphical user interface (GUI) revolutionized computing, however, is becoming overburdened and more difficult to use, particularly on smaller mobile devices. The language user interface (LUI) can overcome this hurdle to usability, both alone and as a supplement to the GUI. It allows using our natural language with the simple user manual: “Just say what you want.” The Language User Interface is the core technology behinds text based (chat-) bots and voice enabled applications.

Microphone arrays and far field technologies are now available at market-ready pricing, enabling a large proliferation of environment based voice interaction. Soon, even through noise, multiple speakers will become identifiable, when interacting with appliances and specialized devices (e.g. Amazon Echo).

Come and learn about best practices for voice and language UIs: Simple patterns like adaptive greeting, randomness, maintaining context, or predictive follow-up, can make an already good Voice and Language User Interface spectacular. If you haven’t noticed yet, Amazon’s Echo has had a tremendous impact on the outlook of voice assistance. Is the era of ubiquitous voice assistants right around the corner? Perhaps, but there’s no denying the rise in popularity of voice and chat driven assistants.

Speaker Bio: Wolf is an internationally experienced technologist and innovator, focusing on embedded, mobile, and opensource technologies. He helps to accelerate the discovery and adoption of emerging technologies, which currently involves wearable devices and voice user interfaces and consequently Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, and Natural Language Understanding. Before joining Intuit, he was responsible for developing strategies and architecting solutions, to deliver a compelling mobile print experience for HP, and as a Distinguished Engineer at Motorola Mobility, worked on the Google Android platform.

Wolf is the founder and principal developer of the opensource XUL Engine SwixML, which Sun Microsystems’ CTO called “The strongest straightforward design of declarative GUI implementations”. SwixML represents ideas that are re-used in Google’s Android SDK. (Graphical User Interfaces are described declaratively in XML and rendered into UI widgets hierarchies at runtime).

Wolf received a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Paderborn, a Specialized Certificate in Embedded Computer Software from the University of California, San Diego, an Android Developer Nanodegree from Udacity, and is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and Web Component Developer.

Speaker: Llewellyn Falco

Title: Clutter & Long Methods

Speaker Bio: Llewellyn Falco is an agile coach and legacy code expert. He is a international speaker and the creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests . He spends most of his time programing in Java and C#. He also volunteers creating courseware and teaching kids to program. Find his blog at llewellynfalco.blogspot.com.