Innovation Week: Experiments, prototypes and new skills

"During the first week of October, Galois held “Innovation Week,” a time for everybody to explore new ideas, recharge our creativity, have fun and share what we’ve learned and done with each other.Throughout the week, Galwegians worked on a diverse set of side projects: running experiments, building prototypes, solving puzzles and acquiring new skills.Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of the projects that took place:

• Hacking our office front door to open with Tozny instead of a key card
• Hacking our Twilight Zone pinball machine to make it self-playable
• Writing a ray tracer in Haskell
• Writing an automated story generator
• Enhancing Haskell natural language processing modules
• Hacking software-defined radio for home automation
• Programming FPGAs to play C64-style music
• Driving an Arduino robot car remotely using EEG (brain wave) signals
• Creating data visualization demos
• Experimenting with linear logic proofs
• Building type systems to support dimensional analysis
• Lots of GHC hacking

Of course, innovation is not something we aim for just one week out of the year: Innovation Week is, more than anything, a celebration of how deeply the spirit of experimentation and exploration is woven into the Galois culture and how satisfying it can be to work together on projects in the context of playfulness and wonder."