Public Speaking

I have spoken at various technical conferences and developer meetups giving primarily technical talks ranging from introductory talks for non-technical audiences, all day training sessions through to advanced level talks for experienced developers and engineers. I am comfortable presenting to both small and large groups whether in a conference room, lecture theatre, hall or remotely via phone and video conferencing services.

On this page you can find details of my past and upcoming speaking, if you'd like to have me speak at an event your are organising please Contact Me.

Links are marked to denote the talk resources available:

Upcoming Speaking


Past Speaking

2018

TechExeter Conference 2018

Building a Killer Command Line App with Airline

This was a workshop talk about the Airline command line library I've been maintaining a fork of since 2014, this was a demo driven session about the capabilities of the library.

South West Data Meetup

Open Source & Large Scale Data Science

This was a 30 minute meetup talk discussing some of Cray's experiments and efforts around integrating open source data science technologies with Cray hardware platforms.


2017

ECMWF Workshop on Python for Earth Science

ECMWF is a major supercomuting centre specialising in weather forecasting and related research, as ECMWF were a major Cray customer we were invited to the workshop to give a talk on relevant product developments.

Python based Data Science on Cray platforms

This was a short 20 minute talk outlining the Urika product line which provided a number of convenient data science capabilities, especially for Python developers, on Cray supercomuting platforms.

CUG 2017

The Cray User Group (CUG) is a community of interest formed of Cray supercomuting users from across industry and academia, their annual conference is an opportunity for Cray users to share knowledge, best practise, new technology and research in supercomuting.

Quantifying Performance of CGE

This was an in-depth technical paper discussing many of the design and implementation decisions that went into Cray's highly scalable graph database - Cray Graph Engine (CGE). It included performance comparisons on both common benchmarks and customer derived workloads showing significant performance gains while also highlighting many areas where we still needed to make further improvements.


2016

Semantic Web London Meetup

A now defunct meetup group based in London for those with an interest in the Semantic Web.

Challenges and patterns for semantics at scale

A 30 minute talk discussing some of the challenges, and patterns for addressing those challenges, encountered when working with RDF graphs in the billion triple plus size range.

Teratec Forum - June 27-28th 2016

The Teratec forum is the premier High Performance Computing (HPC) event in France each year.

Applied Convergence of Supercomputing and Analytics

This was a technical/marketing talk describing the Cray Urika-GX product which we were launching in September of that year and was already in Beta at several customer sites.


2015

London Semantic Web Meetup - Feb 17th 2015

The London Semantic Web Meetup is a meetup group of Semantic Web enthusiasts in and around London that have held occasional meetings from 2011 onwards.

Apache Jena Elephas and Friends

This 45 minute talk was an updated version of my ApacheCon EU 2014 talk . I went into some extra technical detail on some of the thornier aspects of RDF on Hadoop and the talk reflected the latest state of the Elephas modules.


2014

ApacheCon Europe 2014 - Budapest, Hungary (November 17th - 21st 2014)

ApacheCon is the flagship conference for those involved in open source projects at the Apache Software Foundation.

Quadrupling your Elephants - RDF and the Hadoop ecosystem

This 45 minute talk covered several projects I have been involved in which are looking to provide tools that make it easier for people to work with RDF within the Hadoop ecosystem.

SemTechBiz 2014 - San Jose, California, USA (August 19th - 21st 2014)

SemTechBiz is the premier technical and business focused conference for Semantic Technologies that has been held every year since 2004.

Practical SPARQL Benchmarking Revisited

This 45 min talk revisited the tool originally introduced two years ago and the work that has been done since to transform it into a highly flexible automated SPARQL testing tool. You can learn more about the tool on the SPARQL Query Benchmarker page.

ApacheCon North America 2014 - Denver, Colorado, USA (April 7th-9th 2014)

ApacheCon is the flagship conference for those involved in open source projects at the Apache Software Foundation.

Introducing JDBC for SPARQL

This 45 minute talk covers the Jena JDBC components developed for the Apache Jena project and aims to show developers how they can start using SPARQL with their existing JDBC supporting tools.


2012

SemTechBiz West 2012 - San Francisco, California, USA (June 3rd-7th 2012)

SemTechBiz is the premier technical and business focused conference for Semantic Technologies that has been held every year since 2004.

Practical SPARQL Benchmarking

I gave a full conference session talk (45 minutes) introducing a SPARQL benchmarking tool developed in conjunction with my employer YarcData. You can learn more about the tool on the SPARQL Query Benchmarker page.


2011

San Francisco Semantic Web Meetup - December 6th 2011

The San Francisco Semantic Web Meetup is an active meetup group for Semantic Web enthusiasts in and around the San Fransisco Bay Area that meets every few months.

Everyday Tools for the Semantic Web developer

I gave a shorter 30 minute talk which was a shortened version of the talk I'd given a few months previously at the London Semantic Web meetup.

London Semantic Web Meetup - September 27th 2011

The London Semantic Web Meetup is a meetup group of Semantic Web enthusiasts in and around London that have held occasional meetings from 2011 onwards.

Everyday Tools for the Semantic Web developer

I gave a roughly 1 hour talk (full video available) on various popular open source tools that I considered essential for everyday work as a RDF/SPARQL/Semantic Web developer. The talk covered tools such as rapper, rdfEditor, Jena Fuseki and Store Manager.

SemTechBiz West 2011 - San Francisco, California, USA (June 5th-9th 2011)

SemTechBiz is the premier technical and business focused conference for Semantic Technologies that has been held every year since 2004.

dotNetRDF: A Semantic Web/RDF Library for .Net Developers

I give a 5 minute lightning talk covering my main open source project dotNetRDF in order to promote the library and increase adoption.


Training Sessions

The following are pre-prepared training sessions that can be given to small/large groups, note that the tutorials can be tailored to your specific audience provided sufficient notice is given.

Tutorial: SPARQL Optimization 101

This half day tutorial will provide a technical deep dive of the open source SPARQL optimizer included in the Apache Jena project and aims to give attendees a better understanding of how the SPARQL optimizer works and how to extend it. I'll cover some important tips for writing better SPARQL queries that help the optimizer do a better job and help you get more performance out of your queries.