Hello All,
With Term fast approaching, we have a couple of notices about the society about this term.
Mailing Lists
We are making some changes to the way mailinglists are going to be run this term, to make sure you're seeing the content you're interested in. We will be using 3 mailing lists; compsoc-members, compsoc-jobs, and compsoc-freshers.
Compsoc members will be where we announce events that will be running throughout term, including talks and our weekly newsletter. Compsoc Jobs will have any job advertisements from tech companies, and other groups. Compsoc freshers will be a mailing list for any freshers who sign up at freshers fair, and will have details specifically for new members of the society.
These changes will be happening from the start of term, so please make sure you're signed up to the correct lists to be sure you're getting the content you're looking for. Please note the fresher's list will be cleared out at the start of term, so if you want to continue to get updates about the society do sign up to the member's list. Details of how to sign up to mailing lists can be found on our website: http://ox.compsoc.net/members/mailing_lists/
Freshers Fair
Freshers fair will be happening on Wednesday to Friday of 0th week (that's the 7th, 8th and 9th of October), and we are looking for volunteers to help man the stall. There is a link to the different shifts (2 people are needed for each), so if you are able to spare some time, let us know which shift you're able to do, and we'll add you to the rota. The rota can be found at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YxZKb-Bnxev7nDaFuZMrkcBE_33pmHVH2YP…
[X]
Cameron Alsop
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net<mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>
Hello everyone,
Hope everyone had a relaxing break. This also marks the time of our new Committee coming into office, which includes myself, Matthew Burke as our new Secretary, and James Wallace as our Treasurer. We have the usual mix of events this week:
Netcraft's Best of Britain Programming Competition<https://www.facebook.com/events/557955384345625/>
Lecture Theatre A - 7:00pm Wednesday
Over the summer, Netcraft is running a programming competition with prizes up to £1000 per project. The competition will give the most talented student programmers a chance to spend their holidays exploring real issues in the field of internet security and infrastructure. James Nicholls, an alumnus of Oxford, will discuss some of the projects covered in previous editions of the competition, the resources we make available to students and examine a selection of suggested projects for the coming summer.
Geek Night 1<https://www.facebook.com/events/1433604486953244/>
Undergraduate Social Area - 7:00pm Saturday
[cid:part4.07070707.01010209@ox.compsoc.net]
Cameron Alsop
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net<mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>
Hi all!
Bloomberg Talk - Machine Learning
<https://www.facebook.com/events/829190463803389/>
Lecture Theatre A - Wednesday 7pm
Gary Kazantsev from the R&D Machine Learning group will speak about
Bloomberg´s current projects in the area of Machine Learning and Natural
Language Processing, such as sentiment analysis of financial news,
question answering, information extraction, etc. See attached flyer for
specifics.
Geek Night 8 -
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1583380675266956/>/Unofficial
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1583380675266956/>
/Undergraduate Social Area - Saturday 7pm
Since it is the end of term, Geek night won't /officially/ be running.
What this really means is that it will be running as usual, but you can
expect that much fewer people will be attending.
--
Regards,
Joe
--
Joe Fowler
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net <mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>
Hi everybody!
I am sorry for giving such short notice, but as hinted to in the
newsletter, we can confirm that the LAN party will be **TONIGHT** in the
undergraduate social area, and room 051, from 7pm onwards. Bring your
own computer/laptop, and make sure you bring all your peripherals
(charger, dongles, network cables etc) as we won't have many (if any)
going spare.
Regards,
Joe
--
Joe Fowler
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net <mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>
Hi All! Here is our event line-up for this week. Note that some of the
times/days are irregular!
The Role of Computer Scientists in Mass Surveillance
Tom Leinster - Tuesday, 4pm, Lecture Theatre A
We learned from Edward Snowden that our intelligence agencies are
intercepting and storing everyone's communications, of every possible
form, all the time. We also learned that they make extensive use of
malware, attacking, among others, IT professionals not suspected of any
connection to any kind of crime. I will summarize what we now know, and
describe some of the damage that the intelligence agencies have done -
both to our individual freedoms and to the functioning of democracy.
Computer scientists, however, are uniquely well-placed to change this
situation for the better. I will explain how.
Annual General Meeting
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1549165502000856/>
Wednesday, 7pm, Undergraduate Social Area
Our AGM will be happening*this Wednesday
<http://tlear.co.uk/isthecompsocagmthisweek.html>*, at which each of the
elected roles for the society will be re-elected. For clarification,
these roles are:
* *President* - Ultimately in charge, responsible for event
organisation and relations with sponsors.
* *Secretary* - Interchangeable responsibilities with the president,
and with re-registering the society with the Proctors each term.
* *Treasurer* - Responsible for keeping track of the accounts, and
producing summaries for each term.
Additional roles may be assigned at the discretion of the
President/Secretary. Ultimately, the positions do not require a vast
amount of time to be invested, but they *do* require good organisational
skills.
*Only society members can vote on motions. If you are a member, and you
are unable to attend, you may arrange to vote by proxy.
*
*LAN Party - Unconfirmed
Friday, 7pm, Undergraduate Social Area/Room 051
*
Geek Night 7
Saturday, 7pm, Undergraduate Social Area
Kind Regards,
--
Joe Fowler
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net <mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>
Palantir - Building trusted infrastructure in the cloud
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1404173943222015>
Lecture Theatre A - 7:00pm Wednesday
How do you gain the benefits of cloud computing without handing over
your data? Come and learn how Palantir hosts customers in the cloud
without them handing over control of their data, all while still
automating management of large clusters of machines
Speaker: Huw Pryce
Huw has been a Software Engineer at Palantir since 2012 after graduating
with a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Oxford. He
currently works on the Deployment Infrastructure team at Palantir where
you’ll find him worrying about how we scale out to more customers and
more data without increasing the burden on our Forward Deployed Engineers.
Geek Night 6 <https://www.facebook.com/events/779549255468925/>
Undergraduate Social Area - 7:00pm Saturday
Annual General Meeting Next Week
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1549165502000856/>
Undergraduate Social Area - 7:00pm Wednesday Week 7
Our AGM will be happening on*Wednesday of Week 7*, at which each of the
elected roles for the society will be re-elected. For clarification,
these roles are:
* *President* - Ultimately in charge, responsible for event
organisation and relations with sponsors.
* *Secretary* - Interchangeable responsibilities with the president,
and with re-registering the society with the Proctors each term.
* *Treasurer* - Responsible for keeping track of the accounts, and
producing summaries for each term.
Additional roles may be assigned at the discretion of the
President/Secretary. Ultimately, the positions do not require a vast
amount of time to be invested, but they *do* require good organisational
skills. If you are interested in running for any of these roles, you
have one more week to make up your mind!
Kind Regards,
Joe
--
Joe Fowler
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net <mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>
Here are our events for this week, as well as the announcement for the
*AGM* in week 7.
Ensoft - How to Break the Internet
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1555814134698779/>
Lecture Theatre A - 7:00pm Wednesday
The Internet itself is under constant attack from hairy hackers,
authoritarian agencies, fat fingers and boring bugs. Core routers stand
alone in the hurricane of harm, far beyond the capacity of any
protective firewall, and left to defend themselves. How can they do
this? And how safe is the Internet really?
This talk will reveal all.
The presenter is CTO of Ensoft Ltd, whose experience includes helping to
bring into existence the Guinness Book of Records' "World's Highest
Capacity Internet Router".
Geek Night 5 <https://www.facebook.com/events/405605016275380/>
Undergraduate Social Area - 7:00pm Saturday
No introduction necessary - casual gaming and snacks as usual.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Annual General Meeting
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1549165502000856/>
Undergraduate Social Area - 7:00pm Wednesday, Week 7
Our AGM will be happening in *week 7, Wednesday*, at which each of the
elected roles for the society will be re-elected. For clarification,
these roles are:
* *President* - Ultimately in charge, responsible for event
organisation and relations with sponsors.
* *Secretary* - Interchangeable responsibilities with the president,
and with re-registering the society with the Proctors each term.
* *Treasurer* - Responsible for keeping track of the accounts, and
producing summaries for each term.
Additional roles may be assigned at the discretion of the
President/Secretary. Ultimately, the positions do not require a vast
amount of time to be invested, but they *do* require good organisational
skills. If you are interested in running for any of these roles, you
have two weeks to make up your minds!
To reiterate: the AGM is NOT taking place THIS week, it's in WEEK 7,
which is the week after the week after this week, *NOT* this week, which
is not the week of the AGM.
Kind Regards,
Joe
Hi all,
Here are our events this week:
The Hut Group <https://www.facebook.com/events/1536406883278781/>
Real World Lessons from building a search engine for e-commerce
<https://www.facebook.com/events/1536406883278781/>
Wednesday 7pm - Lecture Theatre A
How do you help your customers find products that they want to buy? How
do you build a search engine that handles several thousand queries per
minute, in multiple languages, over a heavily diversified product set
that includes DVDs, dietary supplements, clothing, makeup and more? This
talk covers the real-world challenges we faced in building such a search
engine and how we solved them with insights from software engineering,
information retrieval and natural language processing.
We will also announce the launch details of highly anticipated 2014/2015
Computer Science Challenge, following on from our very successful
2013/2014 recommendation challenge http://www.thehutchallenge.com/ Open
to university students across the UK/Europe, the challenge carries a 1st
prize of £5000 and offers of highly paid graduate technology jobs and
internships.
*
**(Pizza /drinks provided!)*
Speaker details:
Dhruv Kumar joined THG in Jan 2014 and has worked on the in-house search
system since then. Before joining THG , he has worked for HP Autonomy as
a software developer and as a researcher assistant at the Computer
Vision Group of the University of Reading. Dhruv holds an MPhil in
Computer Science from Cambridge and a BEng from the University of Reading.
Shaun Hall joined THG ’s Growth & Innovation team in July 2013 and has
spent most of his time working on our search and browse algorithms.
Prior to this, he worked on an algorithmic trading platform at an
Investment Bank. Shaun graduated with a first class degree in Computer
Science from the University of Cambridge in 2011.
Geek Night 4
<https://www.facebook.com/events/343510472507055/>Video games +
stuff <https://www.facebook.com/events/343510472507055/>
Saturday 7pm - Undergraduate Social Area
No description is really necessary..
--
Joe Fowler
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net <mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>
Hi all,
Unfortunately, due to an unfortunate series of events, The Hut Group is
unable to host their talk tonight; they wish to postpone the event until
a later date, and say that they "will supply extra pizza and drinks to
compensate ;)"
Kind Regards,
Joe
--
Joe Fowler
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net <mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>
Hi all,
Here are our events for this week:
The Hut Group - Real World Lessons from building a search engine
for e-commerce
Wednesday 2015/02/02, 7pm - Lecture Theatre A, Department of
Computer Science
How do you help your customers find products that they want to buy?
How do you build a search engine that handles several thousand
queries per minute, in multiple languages, over a heavily
diversified product set that includes DVDs, dietary supplements,
clothing, makeup and more? This talk covers the real-world
challenges we faced in building such a search engine and how we
solved them with insights from software engineering, information
retrieval and natural language processing.
We will also announce the launch details of highly anticipated
2014/2015 Computer Science Challenge, following on from our very
successful 2013/2014 recommendation challenge
http://www.thehutchallenge.com. Open to university students across
the UK/Europe, the challenge carries a 1st prize of £5000 and offers
of highly paid graduate technology jobs and internships.
*(Pizza /drinks provided!)*
Speaker details:
Dhruv Kumar joined THG in Jan 2014 and has worked on the in-house
search system since then. Before joining THG , he has worked for HP
Autonomy as a software developer and as a researcher assistant at
the Computer Vision Group of the University of Reading. Dhruv holds
an MPhil in Computer Science from Cambridge and a BEng from the
University of Reading.
Shaun Hall joined THG ’s Growth & Innovation team in July 2013 and
has spent most of his time working on our search and browse
algorithms. Prior to this, he worked on an algorithmic trading
platform at an Investment Bank. Shaun graduated with a first class
degree in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge in 2011.
Geek Night 3
Saturday 2015/02/07, 7pm - Undergraduate Social Area, Department
of Computer Science
Regards,
Joe
--
Joe Fowler
President - Oxford University Computer Society
president(a)ox.compsoc.net <mailto:president@ox.compsoc.net>