Nerd Nite has a very simple concept – 3 speakers, each with their own uniquely nerdish tendencies convey their passion for a specialist subject in 20 minutes to a captive audience who wash down morsels of science, medicine, society and nerd culture with their favourite tipple.
This months speakers are as follows.
Music as Code: Code as Music – Dr Thor Magnusson
In this talk, Thor will discuss work in composition, performance and the development of audiovisual software – from small instrumental applications to software for live coding. He will introduce two live coding systems – ixi lang and the Threnoscope – both of which are examples of considerations of visual design in live coding performance systems. The presentation will include some musical improvisation.
STEAM-Punk in Education – Prof Avril Loveless
Avril’s talk will raise some questions about how to nurture ‘beautiful engineering’ in a digital age. She will argue that we need conceptual depth (knowing your stuff in a field); contextual scope (knowing why it matters to being human in our times); and pedagogical reach (knowing how to make it come alive for learners young and old). Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) play a role in ‘super-fusion’ of ways of knowing.
3D User Interfaces – Dr Diego Martinez Plasencia
In 1965, Ivan Sutherland proposed his vision of the ‘ultimate display’. Such a display would create virtual objects that were totally undistinguishable from their real counterparts (“handcuffs displayed […] would be confining, and a bullet […] would be fatal”). This vision was the seed for research in the fields of 3D displays, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). In this talk, Diego will summarize his research on developing formats for non intrusive VR. He will describe several systems created to support 3D interaction and collaboration and explain how displays can be created that do not preclude eye-contact and social interaction with other people, using substances such as fog.
Event details
Venue – Rialto Theatre
Date – September 16
Times/prices/info – 8pm, £4, £3 with NUS card + 65+
Tickets available via the following link
thelittleboxoffice.com
