2019-09-13 –, Assembly Room
This talk will cover a range of topics around a tool I have built to enhance work sessions with my dog.
This talk will culminate in describing a Django Rest Framework I have built to keep track of the behaviours ("tricks") that my dog has learnt for the sport of discdog which involves acrobatic catches of frisbees. The tool also generates a particular sequence of these behaviours (a "routine") which ensures our training sessions always serve the purpose of being mentally stimulating.
I will start by describing some modern concepts of dog behaviour and present their parallels to higher education pedagogy (my day job is an educator).
Following this I will describe the sport of discdog and show some videos and photos of what it entails. (This is the cool part of the talk.)
I will then describe the tool that has been built and describe how it assists with our training.
This talk should be of interest to people who don't dislike dogs, like cool things and/or want to see how someone who is not a web developer used the Django Rest Framework to improve a part of their life.
Depending on how much time I have to work on the tool there's a chance that there will be some machine learning as well (because "machine learning", who knows maybe even some blockchain). That's a joke, there will not be blockchain.
I am a mathematician at Cardiff University and an organiser of PyCon UK as well as Cardiff's Python Meetup: PyDiff. I am one of the core developers of the Axelrod library which is a research tool for studying emergent behaviour. I have spoken at a number of academic and software conferences. My dog is my best friend.