This page is for suggestions and comments about the branch programme for the 2007/8 academic year.
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If you know of possible speakers for any of the subjects below, please add their names
Oxford University Term Dates 2007–08
Michaelmas 2007
Sunday, 7 October
Saturday, 1 December
Hilary 2008
Sunday, 13 January
Saturday, 8 March
Trinity 2008
Sunday, 20 April
Saturday, 14 June
New ideas/offers of speakers/topics
IT at JET
Sverker Griph, who often comes to our meetings and to the Lamb & Flag as well, has offered to give us a talk. Sverjer writes:
«I have written an abstract for a proposed talk about IT at JET. It probably needs shortening a bit, but I prefer to do that in discussion with you. I also need to put the full presentation together and try it out.
The talk is made up of various presentations I have given both internally and at conferences, but there will also be some slides from close colleagues.» (SLL suggestion)
Potential Branch speaker.
Sent by HQ recently (SLL suggestion)
Richard Morreale has spoken at 3 Branch events, reports coming back sound very positive. I’ve not personally met him or heard him speak, but here are a couple of testimonials
“Our sincere thanks for a brilliant performance, which I know was appreciated by all the audience. I have had numerous compliments and positive comments about it since.
Your CD is in my car, and I'm well into the book already! Might be one of the best investments anyone could make”. Shane Barnes – Chair of Bedfordshire Branch:
“On behalf of the BCS Kent Branch Committee, I would like to thank you for presenting at our event yesterday. It was a very interesting, thought-provoking and entertaining presentation, and has certainly lead to some interesting discussion in the office in which I work today. We would certainly have no hesitation in recommending the talk to others”. Roger Burnett – Kent Branch:
ARE YOU PART OF THE PAST, PRESENT OR FUTURE OF COMPUTING?
Sent by HQ recently – Prof. Hoare has a long association with Oxford. (SLL suggestion)
There are still a few places available at the one-day conference organised by the BCS London Regional branches, which takes place on Saturday 23rd June at Kingston University Business School to celebrate the fiftieth Anniversary of the BCS. This is your opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the greats of computing – past, present and future.
Speakers include Professor Sir Charles Anthony Hoare, more widely known as
Tony Hoare – the inventor of the Quicksort algorithm, originator of the
Communicating Sequential Processes approach to parallel computing and father
of the Z language for formal system specification.
Professor Hoare came to international fame whilst at Queens University, Belfast and Oxford
University. He is currently undertaking research with Microsoft Laboratories
in Cambridge.
M42 Congestion
Derek Turner (London Congestion Charge) more or less offered another talk on M42 congestion and the high tech solutions that are in the pipelines. He gave a very polished talk in May (SLL suggestion)
Suggestions from the signup sheets at the Ruby on Rails meeting
Offer of a talk on End User programming
Offer of a talk on Social Networking Sites (file publishing e.g. Photos, videos, music on the net, YouTube, izimi, MySpace). “What is the Future?”
Suggestion that we invite Edwin Brady to talk on the Kaya programming language
A Dragon's Den type evening (TL suggestion)
Community sites (AW suggestion)
Could we invite suggestions for a redesign of the Oxfordshire Branch website?
The current method of generation from XML source using XSL stylesheets is technically interesting but there may be better options around now: Open Source Content Management Systems such as Mambo and Joomla have been mooted; the OSSG originally used Zope/Plone and switched to WordPress.
Could we run this as a joint event with Oxford Geek Nights? perhaps invite several mini-presentations and give a prize for the best? Unfortunately I can't make the July 25th Geek Night event. AdrianWalmsley /05.06.2007 16:38/
Future Media & Technology at the BBC
I recently attended a talk organised at work by Andrew Scotland of the BBC. He talked on Future Media and Technology. It was a good “general overview” type talk on the BBC's increasing dependence on new technology and how they are intending to exploit it.
I would have thought either this or another talk from someone at the BBC could be quite interesting.
He also gave a second more technical talk on the use of Agile methods – Project Management and Software Development – which I would have thought might also be an area which was worth considering as a topic in general, if we could get an appropriate speaker. BrianDay /28.05.2007 19:17/
From JT at the OII
Adrian will consider a slot in his Programme for 2007/8 on the theme of identity systems in forms of e-Government.
I have offered a talk on our current research on identity management.
If this goes ahead then this too would be an OII/BCS event.
Identity and Financial Fraud: Thursday 29 November
Tom Ilube, Garlik CEO confirmed speaker. CV and abstract to follow. Garlik is a new monthly monitoring service that finds, tracks and monitors your personal information online.
Technical advisers include Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall and Tim Berners-Lee.
Tom spoke to the BCS Financial Services SG in January 2007 (see http://www.finsig.bcs.org/events/2006-07/200701_A.htm ) AdrianWalmsley /02.05.2007 09:30/
Joint session with North Wales and Chester at RAL Wednesday 24 October
Brian Day wrote:
As I think I let everyone know earlier, the Chester and North Wales
branch are keen to have another joint event.
I have had some further communication from Paul Hulse (of C&NW branch),
and they are firming up on their ideas.
They are currently planning to do another event, this time at multiple
sites, and using access grid. The talk would probably be on access
grid itself, and they're thinking of at the moment linking up between
Daresbury, NEWI (Wrexham), Bangor University, and possibly Manchester
and Chester Universities, and also us, again at RAL.
Because of co-ordinating the event they have had to commit to a date:
24th October.
Branch outing
Following the trip round the military equipment at Shrivenham, hugely enjoyed by the students after the webcomp prizegiving on 20 June 2007, we discovered that they accept visits from parties. They said that a 3 hour visit would be fine, which matches pretty much the kind of branch outing we arrange every year. This would certailnly be a very good option, and in a way a good idea to maintain contact with Shrivenham in the year between web competitions (always assuming we run another). AdrianWalmsley /22.06.2007 09:34/
Offer from Alan Edgecombe of kisdata
From Alan Edgecombe
I am a past Chairman of the Western Cape Chapter of the Computer Society of South Africa and still a member of that society. Currently I am working for kisdata who are based here in Birmingham and who are dealers for a company called Riverbed who produce an appliance that accelerates applications over the WAN and allows customers to benefit from having LAN responses at their remote sites.
As with any talk of this nature, seeing is believing and we would like the opportunity to show the technology actually working. This could be done after the presentation which would be product neutral. For your information, the product in question is from Riverbed and it can be seen at http://www.riverbed.com.
Near Field Communication
Following on from the RFID meeting last year, could we get a talk on use of NFC to enable new applications for use by the public?
Such as the Finnish City of Oulu is piloting. See http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/2062/1/1/
Supply chain talk – from CM at Cranfield last year
I offered a presentation/discussion a couple of years ago and never heard any more.
I see that the new programme has been launched for this year.
In case of illness etc. it would be possible for me to stand in at short notice (say a few days)and to talk about either of these subjects.
If there would be any interest in either of these please let me know.
http://www.metaagility.com/OPEN/bcs_talk_proposal.html