
Ask HN: What should I present on AI/robotics at GitHub Universe? - boltzmannbrain
The GitHub Universe conference brings together the SW community in sessions from team culture to open source software across industries and technologies: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;githubuniverse.com<p>I&#x27;m a Research Engineer &#x2F; SW Architect for a venture-backed startup focused on AI research towards robotics applications. What would you be interested in hearing me talk about? The call for proposals gives some more info: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.submittable.com&#x2F;submit&#x2F;110757&#x2F;github-universe-2018-call-for-proposals<p>A few (not mutually exclusive) topics I was thinking of:<p>a. Managing academic developers (i.e. matlab background, never heard of git nor unit tests)<p>b. Transitioning to a monolithic repo -- why and how<p>c. Github workflows for AI research<p>d. Hardware tests -- validating code works and CI<p>e. Our best practices for Python, C++, and ROS
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boltzmannbrain
Getting the discussion going with an example abstract...

Nowadays AI tools are incredibly prevalent and straightforward to integrate
into projects and products. Yet the research process behind the underlying
models and algorithms is a different animal. Built from theory and
experimentation, research code is meant to be thrown away, and is often
developed by programmers from academia. Building research into product-quality
code is no small feat. Adding robots to the mix brings on another set of
challenges -- integration with manufacturer's SW, hardware validation tests,
succumbing to the ROS ecosystem. I'll talk about challenges and lessons
coordinating teams of researchers and our workflows, with examples from our
transition to a monolithic repo and development of product-quality robotics
code.

