>> That was definitely Leah Albaugh. What
else did she make? Leah actually
designed your T-shirts too, because
she's awesome! Yeah. Like, legit my
favorite person right now. Okay, so
first up is Jennifer Shin, with "High
Schoolers vs. Robots!!!!", and second up
is "Computer vision and archaeology! Can
computers assemble ceramic artifacts?"
Maybe. Kamelia Aryafar.

 >> Okay. Cool. Put this down. Because
I'm really short. Okay. All right. All
right. Hi. I'm Jennifer Shin. I work as
a full stack developer for Gilt Tech,
and to give you a bit of background
information, we're an online shopping
website and we provide members only
access to fashion, home decor, and
activities. To give you a bit of our
scale, we have 8 million users worldwide
and ship to 188 countries. One of the
unique challenges we face is because our
sales go live at noon, we have a huge
traffic spike then, so we have a lot of
concurrency and load balancing issues.
So that's really, really fun to deal
with. Or to handle. But one of the
things that I personally really like
about working for Gilt Tech is that
we're really involved in the community,
so we host not only a ton of meetups and
we have free classes, but we also do a
lot of volunteer work in the community.
So last year one of the events we did is
we teamed up with girls who code, and
hosted the girls from Base high school.
And apparently the girls had so much fun
working with us that the boys at their
high school got jealous. And had the
privilege of hosting 50 or 60 boys.
Which takes you to what I'm talking
about today. BASE stands for Bronx
Academy of Software Engineering,
designed to bring high-tech classes to
underserved neighborhoods. And this is
the first year in the Harlem chapter, so
the 9th graders joining us were the
first and only students to attend the
school so far. With the girls, we did
some cool stuff. They designed and
programmed their own web page, and since
they seemed to have generated all of
this hype with the kids around them,
we're like... Okay, we have to really
live up to the experience and make it
above and beyond this time. So my boss
in this stroke of genius was like --
let's program some robots. It was
really, really cool. That's exactly what
we did. The technology that we used was
Arduino. I don't know if anybody has
heard of it here. It's super, super
awesome. It's an Open Source prototyping
platform, consists of really easy to
assemble hardware and software. So it's
programmed in C. It's very, very simple.
And you can hook up an Arduino to a wide
variety of receivers. So you can see an
example on the right side, I guess, is
an example with LED lights. This is one
thing that we did with the kids. But
then another and the coolest part ever,
of course, was making the robots do
whatever we wanted them to do. So that
was really cool. Let's see. This is a
close-up snapshot of the Zumo robots,
the robots that we used to program with.
They're actually called Zumos because
they're built for sumo wrestling. That
shovel in the front is built to push
other robots aside, and whoever remains
on top wins or something like that.

But the cool part is that Zumo comes
with all of these Open Source libraries,
so you can do really cool stuff pretty
easily, so it can play music, you can
make it move around, and also, if the
robot is on a light surface, and you
tape down a dark track on it, you can
make the robot follow that dark path. So
to give you a little code snippet of
what it actually looks like, here's a
super short code snippet. You can see a
reference to motors over there, a delay,
and button. So motors and button --
those are actually references to classes
that come inherently in the Zumo
library. Like I said, you can download
that off of GitHub. And then with that,
you can see right off the bat, you do
some really easy stuff with it. So for
instance, you can make it go straight by
setting the left and right speeds to the
same speed, and then you can also make
one side slower to make it turn, you can
make it twirl, I can let you think about
that a little bit. To see how you make
it do that. And then there's also a
delay. So for however long you actually
want to make the robot do its thing for.

So then what did we do with the kids?
Let's see. So first we gave them some
code that had some really basic
functionality. And then it was their job
to tweak the speeds, make the robots go
in reverse, forward, do some cooler
stuff than what it was already doing.
And this was the part that I was kind of
scared about, because it's pretty
involving. We have high school freshmen.
They don't really know how to code. Some
of them do. Some don't. But they have to
try to figure out what the code was
doing, how it was doing it, and then try
to make it better.

But the kids really, really got into it.
So the thumbnail is really bad. I don't
know why the thumbnail is so bad. But
here's an example of what the kids did
with it.

 >> Oh, that was so cool!

 >> All right, cool. So you can't really
see very well. I'm sorry that I don't
have a better snippet of what we
actually did, but they did a whole bunch
of crazy stuff with it. They made the
robots go in reverse and see which one
would always win. It turns out that it's
always the one that's coming from a
higher surface, because it has the
momentum of gravity with it. Let's see.
They also put their cell phones on top
of the Zumo, so they got some really
cool video of the robot's perspective,
going through the track, which was
something we had never thought of. But I
think one of the coolest parts was when
the last exercise for the kids -- was
actually to make the robots dance. And
they actually got really into it.

They got the whole twirl thing right
away, so how to get that going. That was
really awesome. And then we said --
okay, now that you know how to do that,
do it whatever way you want. Make the
robots dance in your own style. So one
of the kids that was working with me in
the kind of way -- in that kind of
excitement that you only get from kids,
was like -- oh my God, let's make them
do the Dogie. And I have to say... This
was my reaction at first. So I learned
something that day as well. Not just the
kids.

Apparently... They taught us some steps,
and in case you don't know, it's...
Apparently, according to them, it's left
right left left, then right left right
right. And don't quote me on that,
because they could have just been
pulling my chain. I don't really know.
But that's... What's really awesome is
that's what we made the robots do. So we
uploaded the same program to all four
robots and got kind of an N Sync version
of a robotic dance team.

 >> Ready? All right.

 >> You guys ready?

 >> You want to count to three?

 >> One... Okay. It's going to be one,
two, three, go. Okay? So just do it on
go.

 >> One, two, three, go.

(applause)

 >> So the kids were pretty awesome. And
we just had so much fun. We had so much
fun and they had so much fun. But I
think the great thing about this clip is
that it shows that -- I mean, we were
teaching them to program in C, but it's
like -- they didn't learn it out of a
textbook and they weren't just reading
dry material. They actually were able to
take that and kind of make it their own
and really apply it into their own
world. Which was, like, really, really
cool. Now, of course, no knowledge
sharing session is ever complete with
mutual knowledge sharing, going back and
forth. So I learned about the Dogie
that day, and also learned about
something else that gives me nightmares
until today. I don't know if you've
heard about the commercials for little
baby's ice cream. But it's absolutely
horrendous. It's disgusting. And it's on
YouTube, if you're kind of into that...
Basically being disturbed for life. But
of course... It's really bad, I know.

Let's see. But of course, I wouldn't be
standing here today if it was only
little baby's ice cream and the Dogie
that I learned. Right? Near the end of
the day, our CEO came in to talk to the
kids, answer any questions they had, and
I was kind of thinking initially -- what
does the CEO of a company that has a
thousand employees going to talk and
connect with to high school boys? But it
was amazing. They asked her a ton of
questions about the future for tech in
New York City. They were really, really
engaged. They had a great back and
forth. And when I saw that connection, I
thought -- that was the same feeling, if
not more so for us engineers. They're
not typically people that I would be
spending Wednesday afternoon with, but
it was kind of an amazing feeling to be
helping kids that don't necessarily have
the same advantages that we might have
had. But also just have a connection
with people that you might never would
have otherwise. And that's when I
realized one really great thing about
technology. Technology -- you kind of
feel like that big generation gap
between us and our parents' generation
or grandparents' generation. But now
it's completely different. And I don't
want to sound canned or anything, but I
really felt like it enabled us to bridge
the gap between these two crazy
different worlds. Not only
educationally. We have something really
tangible and valuable to impart to the
student population. But also culturally.
They showed me what the Dogie was, and
that high school boys still like
watching disgusting things on the
internet, and it empowered us to go
beyond the daily 9 to 5 and make an
impact in unexpected but meaningful
ways. So it was pretty cool.

(applause)