A Dance With Intelligent Dragon Drones

GOTO Chicago 2017

Drones are increasingly used in various commercial and consumer scenarios – from agriculture drones (providing farmers with crop and irrigation patterns) to consumer drones (that follow you around as you engage in action sports), to drone racing. Drones are outfitted with a large number of sensors (cameras, accelerometers, gyros, etc.), and can continuously stream these signals in real time for analysis. This talk introduces the landscape of the various drone technologies that are currently available, and shows you how to acquire and analyze the real-time signals from the drones to design intelligent applications. We will demonstrate how to leverage machine learning models that perform real-time facial detection along with predictions of age, gender, emotion, and object recognition using the signals acquired from the drones. You will walk away understanding the basics of how to develop applications that utilize and visualize these real-time insights. This talk includes fun with drones, how to tackle the problem of world hunger, and some Game of Thrones silliness. It is targeted at data scientists, students, researchers, and IT professionals who have an interest in building intelligent applications using drones and machine learning. It will be a fun and exciting exploration as we demonstrate a drone with the power of recognizing faces, ages, genders, emotions, and objects. You will learn how to leverage these same machine learning models to imbue intelligence into drones or other applications.