The web is becoming an eerily lifeless place. Its public spaces are filled with a mix of bad faith actors and automated predators like bots, advertisers, clickbait attention-grabbers, and angry twitter mobs. Like a dark forest, all the living creatures are quietly hiding out of sight. Generative AI systems are about to make this situation worse. We now have tools that can churn out tens of thousands of words, images, and videos in seconds.‍The volume of mundane, low-quality, and uninspired content published to the web is about to explode. How will we find original insights under this pile of cruft? How will we figure out which authors are flesh-and-blood humans we can form emotional and intellectual relationships with? And does it even matter if something was made by an AI instead of a human?

This talk presents UCAN Invocations and the Interplanetary VM (IPVM). Code in this model is capable of running anywhere (even offline), respects data privacy, and services interoperate seamlessly out of the box without pre-negotiation. Since computation doesn't happen in a vacuum, we will also describe how the workflow planner interacts with existing services, and how to lift them into this seamless paradigm.

How different is being a researcher, with a novel idea you want to introduce to the world, to being an entrepreneur, with a novel idea you want to introduce to the world? How have the great ideas in Computer Science spread throughout history, and how does that compare to how the most successful companies and products have been built and sold? If "marketing" is a dirty word amongst software engineers, who prefer to consider themselves pure problem solvers, what is the Academic view on the same issue? This talk will examine these questions from the perspective of a software marketing professional with a penchant for amateur Computer Science -- in other words, a perspective you might not be used to.

Verses is a collective re-imagining the future of the web with participatory software artifacts. Its governance is experimental. This talk is about its work, and how experimentation in organizational structures is essential for the pluriversal world we dream of — different structures allow for different forms of creation (e.g. commons-based peer production). Participants will have a chance to share experiments they’ve conducted or witnessed.

Over the past 20 years we have seen application security evolve from analysing application code through Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools, to detecting vulnerabilities in running applications via Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tools. As security has become more important, the DevOps model has evolved to the DevSecOps model where software development, operations and security are all integrated. In this talk I discuss how to provide an automated approach to integrate security into all aspects of application development and operations, aided by learning techniques.

This talk, punctuated by demonstrations/performances using multiple live coding languages, will explore how artistic live coding helps us to both attend to different histories of computation, and to tell different stories about what it could be.

In this talk I will cover recent developments in Idris 2. In particular, I will describe how the quantities in the type system give a new level of expressivity, and show how these can be used to implement state machines, communicating systems, and verify their properties, interactively.

Callum Hay gives a quick talk about his brewery Halo and our Causal Islands collab beer, Softmax.

Large language models like ChatGPT have hit the mainstream, but most applications of today follow the same format: a text box. That's because we're currently in the "MS DOS" stage of interfaces for machine learning – creating interfaces which conform to the shape of the system, not the shape of the human on the other end. This talk explores how AI might help us radically re-think our interaction with computers from the ground up, as the GUI did to command-line computing.

Programming education, seemingly obviously, focuses on the writing of programs. But when novices struggle with programming, a lot of their difficulty is not with the program per se. What else is there? What do we know about it? And how can we make their experience better? This talk summarizes computing education research that asks and answers these questions.

This presentation explores how Indigenous cultural knowledge can be used as a framework for computing science and computer programming. First, this conversation introduces decolonial computing and some of the problems with “culture-agnostic” or “culture-neutral” computing initiatives. It then proposes an Indigenization of computer science to disrupt established western design principles in computing by focusing on culturally-specific interfacing in digital technologies and computer programming. Specifically, this presentation uses examples from a Plains Cree (nehiyaw) worldview to Indigenize computing theory for software and hardware development that make technologies more culturally relevant, inclusive, accessible, and fair for everyone.

A father once misquoted a philosopher in telling his daughter that if she didn’t study history then she would be doomed to relive it; if we've learned anything about the tech industry, it's that we end up reliving it anyway. Join me, daughter of a mis-quoting father, as I go through the last 20 years of my computing career and envision the next 20 years through the framework of non-computing trend cycles and a universal agreement that everything I predict will come true.

Computing is an act of worldmaking. Let’s carve out what comes into shaping the creation myths that underscore technologies: In examining our role as technologist-worlders, we see what we draw from processes of ecological systems, pluriversality, and dwelling—withdrawing from thinking about computation in an isolated lens, instead better inhabiting the environments we construct. To create a construction myth, we explore narrative, and authorship in the context of computation.

I’ve spent the past few years researching the cultural baggage of computing and organizing alternative models of software labor. This talk builds on that experience to explore what a robust and sustainable future of our craft might look like and steps we can take in those directions today. We’ll look outside the industry and its established schools of thought to begin to appreciate exactly why such a future is so hard to build, what forces constrain and direct our action and imagination, and what we have to change about ourselves and our world in order to transcend.

We live in a competitive world. That competition forces change. It has always forced change. Change is normal. The question is not whether our organizations will change, that’s a given, but can we see this change before it hits us, do we know where we’re heading or are we simply floating aimlessly being carried by a river? It certainly feels that way sometimes.

Today, personal computing is organized around apps: prefabricated units of software developed by professionals for the masses. How might we reorient computing so that people can deeply tailor software to meet their unique needs?‍ This talk presents Potluck, a research prototype that enables people to start with regular text documents and gradually enrich them into interactive tools for managing recipes, workouts, household chores, and more. I'll show how Potluck represents one step towards a broader vision of personal, malleable software tools that users can reconfigure on the fly.

This talk will cover how peer to peer protocols, mesh networks, cooperative governance and the web can be combined together to form a new foundation for how technology can serve communities.

Shifting storage and compute toward the far edge reflects an extreme departure from traditional cloud-based architectures, bringing with that shift a new set of challenges for application developers. Rhizome is a decentralized database for InterPlanetary Linked Data that embraces these challenges to open up new ways of thinking about consistency, interoperability, and privacy. This talk introduces the ideas underpinning Rhizome, and demonstrates how they come together to empower developers to build and reason about new types of peer-to-peer and decentralized applications.