Dr. Greg Turner

I am a technology coach, strategist and maker. I bring curiosity, awareness and action to technology teams as they dance with culture and society. More

Reframing Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria

Every so often I come across a description of neurodiversity that is both enlightening and also a mild bummer in that it makes behaviours sound like a problem with the neurodiverse person rather than an effect of society’s difficulties with understanding and appreciating them. It takes a bit of work to pick out what is useful in these well-intentioned discourses and leave behind the pathologising - ie not to throw out the baby with the bathwater....

What Continuous Integration can teach us about caring for relationships

At Kraken Tech, two crucial factors determine our happiness and success at work: our working relationships, and Continuous Integration (CI) being green. For those who don’t know, Continuous Integration is basically a bunch of robots that check every change we make to our code to make sure it works and meets our standards. If it does, then the robots green-light a deployment; if it doesn’t, then the robots block deployment until we fix it....

An image from an exhibition at ACMI. Every surface is covered in projeced images. Silhouettes of people are visible around a central table.

ACMI’s Standards for exhibition technology

When I arrived at ACMI three years ago, I had a relatively naïve understanding of how much museums invest in the quality and robustness of their digital technology. Obviously, no-one wants their technology to fail, but museums — especially technology-rich ones like ACMI — face challenges of robustness, demand and scale that are unlike any other industry sector: How can we plan for no accessible cabling but easy maintainability? An artist has made a work with technology we’ve never encountered before....

An artist's impression of technology doing its thing in our new exhibition

An Internet-of-things strategy for ACMI

As Lead Engineer and project CTO, I have headed up the multi-year technology design and implementation for ACMI’s $40m Re/newal. One of the guiding principles of the renewed ACMI is “curation by humans, enabled by technology” (sigh, I guess my top secret curate-o-bot AI can wait for another day). We wanted to build a system that curators can use to choose and rapidly deploy playlists of content around ACMI’s galleries, whether the media comes from ACMI’s Collection, edit suite, special exhibition videos or elsewhere....

XOS media players playing through various kinds of demo content on various screens as part of our long-term testing — thanks to [sighmon](https://medium.com/u/b3aae533f7e6) for the photo

Our open-source media player for displaying fleets of video

This is just a quick post to say hello, we made an exhibition-scale internet-of-things media player, and we’ve open-sourced it so you can use it too. Why did we roll our own media player? As the world’s most-visited museum of the moving image, ACMI has a lot of, well, moving image to show. We also know that it’s really hard to present the moving image in a way that invites a deeper experience than you might get from simply watching the media there and then in a distracting environment....

Sticky tape and string: Learning faster from TripAdvisor reviews

Last week the British Museum wrote about how they were making sense of their TripAdvisor reviews, using natural language processing techniques and data visualisation — work they presented at MCNx. It was good-looking (if dense) stuff, which surfaced new insights into what visitors found important about their experience, and pointed towards some root causes. But I couldn’t help thinking that the approach suffered from throwing away the ratings data, and was very resource-intensive— the article concludes with plans for two PhD data science interns and a partnership with the Alan Turing Institute to continue the work....

A screenshot of a neural network generating movie titles

I trained an A.I. to imagine movie titles from ACMI’s collection

My first few weeks at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) have been a whirlwind of discovery, exploration, planning and excitement around its forthcoming renewal. One of my projects is to continue to flesh out explorations of machine learning and related AI techniques to ACMI’s collection of Australian moving image works. This is not that project. Or if it is, then it’s more of a fun steam-letting-off part of that project....