It's 2k17 and I'm sure you're wondering the same things I am, why do I have to do anything? What happened to this ~~dys~~utopian future where computers were supposed to do everything for me?

This talk will demonstrate how to automate real life to get us one step closer to becoming the fat, lazy, inept humans in the movie Wall-E. We will start with an everyday problem at the Speak Easy, a local co-working space serving as a microcosm of any community or city, and show the process of building an IoT (Internet of Things) application from ideation to execution, using Python, microPython, and hopefully even Rust at every step along the way.

Time permitting we will do a pros/cons, compare/contrast between the different platforms, languages, paradigms, and dive into the deeper how all of these affect the product lifecycle from idea to production including security implications.

There is also a 99% chance of hearing how one speaker believes that IoT can impact your life and change the world in a very positive way.

MQTT is an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is commonly used as a machine-to-machine connectivity protocol for IoT devices, and usually runs over TCP/IP using sockets. But, recent efforts have implemented the protocol in JavaScript using web sockets, making it possible to use MQTT from within a web browser. This session will introduce the MQTT protocol, discuss various brokers, talk about messaging and Quality of Service, and provide examples of how to use Pub/Sub to enhance your web application and interact with IoT devices.

Amazon Echo, Amazon Tap and Echo Dot have brought voice interfaces to life for the home. We will discuss ways to integrate your existing software or database into an Alexa Skill, allowing for voice-activated, meaningful interaction with a user. Using this SAAS approach, with Web API hosted on Azure can make this process easy for rapid prototyping. We will build and deploy a skill that you can use immediately with your Alexa enabled device, and discuss the challenges of the publishing journey to get in Alexa's Skill Store.

The world of IoT and hardware has unlimited possibilities on what you can create and do. Why not add the Cognitive Services suite to your toolbox, enabling you to create more user friendly, powerful and complex hacks? Cognitive Services allows you to add computer vision, speech recognition, language understanding and so much more by simply calling an API. In this session let’s learn about the powerful RaspberryPi and how we can utilize facial and voice recognition to keep your valuables safe in this awesome 2-step lock prototype! If you love taking selfies and talking to hardware when no one is looking – this hack is for you!

Using an EPOC headset from Emotiv, I have captured 14 channels of EEG (brain waves) while subjects lied and answered truthfully to a series of questions. I fed this labelled dataset into Azure Machine Learning to build a classifier which predicts whether a subject is telling the truth or lying. In this session, I will share my results on this “lie detector” experiment. I will show my machine learning model, data cleaning process, and results, along with discussing the limitations of my approach and next steps/resources. Attendees will gain exposure to the Emotiv EPOC headset and Azure Machine Learning.