A subject that I find myself reading about and discussing over the dinner table a lot recently is the promise of self-driving cars. I absolutely love the idea because of all of the problems it can solve in society. No more drunk driving, no more wasting time in traffic jams, no more parking issues and no need to own an expensive heap of metal that looses value even though you only use it a few hours a week.

With this in mind I went to Sanna Pampels talk called “Automated driving - are we taking the human factors researcher out of the loop?”. The talk was relly good with Sanna starting out by covering the different levels of automation. Going from a level 0 with no automation, over different levels of assisted and partially automated driving to level 5 which is full automation or autonomous cars.

Sanna said that british drivers spend 124 hrs in traffic jams each year, and dribing is not as safe as it could be, mainly because of human errors in traffic.

Today I chose to take up an old advice and picked a track that was completely out of my comfort zone for the first day of GOTO. When jumping off the deep end you might as well do it completely, so I decided to go for a number of talks on Deep Learning Analytics.

I had high hopes because the first talk was an introduction to the subject called “what is it and what can it do for you”. Sadly the talk didn’t really do it for me, because it started out really theoretical, and Diogo Almeida seemed almost too passionate, which meant that he started speaking really fast and jumped between usecases, both current and some for the possible future.

This year is, believe it or not, the 20th anniversary of the GOTO conference. So I think the expectations are high, with the event being hosted at the Bella Center.

Dan North, who is a regular speaker at GOTO, was tasked with doing the first half of the keynote, and as always he delivered. The topic was on the future of agile, so a topic that I have seen Dan speak about a number of times. He went over how we are still a young industry with the vast majority of us being the first in our families to work in IT.