dotnetsheff

• 🗺️ Hallam University Map: [https://www.shu.ac.uk/visit-us/how-to-find-us/city-campus-map](https://www.shu.ac.uk/visit-us/how-to-find-us/city-campus-map)
• 📌 Google Maps: [https://maps.app.goo.gl/kMU7RCsj3hdhWzXp9](https://maps.app.goo.gl/kMU7RCsj3hdhWzXp9)
• 🚗 Parking: The APCOA car park on Eyre Street is a five-minute walk from City Campus. You can park there for just £5. Just scan your blue chip at Owen Building Level 5, Charles Street, or Cantor to claim the discount.

Agenda:

• 🍕 Pizza/Drinks (18:15 - 18:30)
• 🗣 Introduction (18:30)
• 👉 Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions: Finding Your Meme Twin with Embeddings & Vector Databases (18:35ish)
• 🍻 Social @ Pub (after the talk)

👉 Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions: Finding Your Meme Twin with Embeddings & Vector Databases

Do you look like a famous meme character? Does someone you know? Knowing this information is vital—both for your career and your personal life. After all, am I the only one around here who wants to avoid Angry Walter? And who *wouldn't* want to work with Success Kid.

But can we even find out if we have a meme twin? There are lots of memes. And lots of people. How could we possibly search them all? Well, it's easier than you think if we turn those memes into embeddings and search them with a vector database!

But what's an embedding? And what's a vector database? Well, that's what I'll cover in this session. I'll begin by exploring embeddings, showing how unstructured data, such as text and images, can be translated into hyper-dimensional arrays—called vectors—using both common and custom AI models. Then I'll talk about vector databases, covering what they are and how you can use them to store and search those embeddings with embeddings of your own.

Of course, we'll do this all by example. I've turned all the big memes—from Ancient Aliens Guy to Zombie Boy—into embeddings and have loaded them into a vector database. I've built an application around these embeddings and that database. I'll show you the code and the queries of this application so that you can build something similar for yourself. And, most importantly, we'll take some photos during the session and use it all to find your meme twin!

So, are you ready to find your meme twin? Or are you ready to learn how to use this technology? I say, Why Not Both.

• 🗺️ Hallam University Map: [https://www.shu.ac.uk/visit-us/how-to-find-us/city-campus-map](https://www.shu.ac.uk/visit-us/how-to-find-us/city-campus-map)
• 📌 Google Maps: [https://maps.app.goo.gl/kMU7RCsj3hdhWzXp9](https://maps.app.goo.gl/kMU7RCsj3hdhWzXp9)
• 🚗 Parking: The APCOA car park on Eyre Street is a five-minute walk from City Campus. You can park there for just £5. Just scan your blue chip at Owen Building Level 5, Charles Street, or Cantor to claim the discount.

Agenda:

• 🍕 Pizza/Drinks (18:15 - 18:30)
• 🗣 Introduction (18:30)
• 👉 MIDI Controllers, Bird Data, and MAUI Magic with Tony Edwards (18:35ish)
• 🍻 Social @ Pub (after the talk)

👉 MIDI Controllers, Bird Data, and MAUI Magic
Can you use a MIDI controller to host TV game show games with the help of an event audience? Does bird song offer the perfect dataset for these games? Will a rainbow clown wig really offer protection against minor head injuries when the audience throws things at the host?

In this session, Tony hopes to answer these questions that no one has ever asked.

Using a 500 item data set of bird sightings and recordings curated in recent years, he'll guide the audience through the creation of a few games as part of a MacCatalyst App using .NET Maui. As well as exploring the high level benefits and drawbacks of choosing MAUI for cross platform development, the session will touch on the mental health benefits of stepping away from a screen and spending time in nature, using our non-tech hobbies to support technical upskilling, and offer a jump off point for anyone looking to explore the worlds of MIDI, MAUI, and ornithology.

No knowledge of any of the topics, nor a desire to use MAUI, is required to take something away from this talk.