Greetings, people of Compsoc!
Firstly, good to see a bunch of you at the OUCS tour today. Michael took a few photos --- they'll be on the net soon.
Okay, this is going to be a long enough email to warrant a table of contents. I apologise in advance. You're allowed to skim-read it. :-)
0. Electronic Arts talk on Thursday 1. Mailing lists: compsoc-jobs and compsoc-discuss 2. Scientific Society: Computer Vision and the Geometry of Nature 3. An aside about spam 4. Oxford Student Publications seeking technical staff 5. IBM Student Mainframe Contest 6. Outro
0. Electronic Arts talk on Thursday -----------------------------------
Computer Games Development
Date: Thursday 19th October Time: 20:00 Location: Keble College, Pusey Room (off Pusey Quad)
A senior engineer from Electronic Arts will present on what he does on a day to day basis as far as developing on next gen consoles (i.e. Nintendo Wii etc.) and also gaming career opportunities for CS grads. In addition, Harvey Wheaton (Senior Development Director) will show some of what EA are doing with the Harry Potter franchise and give some insight as to what a development director does.
Want a handy map of Keble? http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/tour/index.php Apparently, http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/support/getimage.php?id=49 was taken from the lodge, and the Pusey Room is up the staircase a third of the way from the left edge of the photo. There'll be someone at the lodge to meet people just before 20.00.
1. Mailing lists: compsoc-jobs and compsoc-discuss --------------------------------------------------
Later this week, we're going to be (re)creating two mailing lists: compsoc-jobs and compsoc-discuss.
We receive a lot of emails from companies asking us to advertise vacancies, graduate career events and so on. A separate mailing list, compsoc-jobs, will allow us to send them on to those of you who want them, while not irritating those who don't. Only the committee will be able to post to it: companies/advertisers will go through us. There are a couple of items towards the end of this mailing list that really belong on that list, but I'm including them here to clear the backlog.
compsoc-discuss will just be for general discussion among compsoc members and followers, so will be open to unmoderated posts by anyone subscribed to the list (which we'll ensure is (mostly) a subset of Compsoc members and those subscribed to compsoc-announce). Again, it'll be opt-in so that those of you who don't want to get that discussion, uh, won't.
We'll mass-invite everyone who is on compsoc-members or compsoc-announce to both when we create them. If you don't want to be on one or both lists, you can just ignore the relevant invitation and nothing more will appear in your inbox.
We're not sure how much use -discuss will see. That's up to you. Time will tell. :-)
2. Scientific Society: Computer Vision and the Geometry of Nature -----------------------------------------------------------------
I was asked by the Scientific Society to pass this on. It looks like it might interest some of you. I attended a lecture on something similar last year, and it was awesome.
Computer Vision and the Geometry of Nature
Dr. Andrew Fitzgibbon
Date: Wednesday 18th October 2006 Time: 8:15pm Location: Inorganic Chemistry Lecture theatre on South Parks Road Map: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~science/sci_map.gif Free to Scientific Society members; £2 for anyone else.
Computer vision is the search for mathematical models and algorithms which can explain and emulate the tremendous visual abilities that most of us rarely notice we possess: we can easily recognize thousands of objects, follow complicated movements, and almost subconsciously build a three dimensional view of the world through stereo vision.
When a camera captures a movie of some scene in the world, the rich visual complexity of the scene is not lost - we can still enjoy the images and recognize the film's contents - but the visual patterns are translated to complex numerical arrangements which current mathematics and statistics strives to represent and understand.
Although science is far from having a complete understanding of the processes of vision, the last decade has seen applications of artificial vision move out of the lab into the real world.
The talk will talk mainly be about the use of computer vision in obtaining a 3D representation of the world, and the application of these techniques to cinematic special effects in movies such as the "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" series.
The lecture will begin by looking at some aspects of the human visual system, trying to answer the question of whether it is even reasonable to expect to emulate human vision without first building an artificial intelligence: "Is vision AI-hard?".
Several classic experiments which suggest that not all tasks require AI. Applications where these tasks arise will be considered, for example robot navigation and special effects and show how a combination of engineering and geometry gives us reliable solutions in real scenes. After looking at how a man- made world simplifies the solutions to these problems.
Dr. Andrew Fitzgibbon has twice received the IEEE's Marr Prize, the highest in computer vision; and software based on his work won an Engineering Emmy Award in 2002 for significant contributions to the creation of complex visual effects.
He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at University College Cork and at Heriot-Watt University, and received his PhD from Edinburgh University in 1997. Until June 2005 he held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, and at New College, Oxford and presently is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge.
3. An aside about spam ----------------------
A few people mentioned that a spam titled "chuffautocratbluish" reached compsoc-members on Sunday. That's entirely my fault: sorry. I ticked the wrong box when confirming that my own mail to the list _wasn't_ spam.
4. Oxford Student Publications seeking technical staff ------------------------------------------------------
Oxford Student Publications Limited (OSPL), publishers of Cherwell and ISIS, are looking for new technical staff. With an annual turnover of nearly £90,000 OSPL is one of the most exciting student companies in Oxford. New staff can expect to gain invaluable communication and organisational skills and we welcome applications from students of all levels of technical expertise. Most new staff will be set a short-term 'project', whereby OSPL will present you with one of its ongoing problems, which we will give you responsibility to complete according to how you see fit. Previous technical staff have gone on to become Editors of both Cherwell, Cherwell24, Mays Anthologies, and being a member of the Board of Directors. Please contact Josh Sasto on chairman@ospl.org for more details.
5. IBM Student Mainframe Contest --------------------------------
IBM UK are running a competition involving students working with mainframes (which is cunningly called the UK Student Mainframe Contest) this autumn:
The main idea of the contest is to try and give current students, with no mainframe experience, some appreciation of the platform through a series of "hands-on" exercises. If the lure of using the technology with a chance to enhance your CV isn't a big enough incentive to take part, then there are also a series of prizes that you can win along the way:
Part 1 - a few hundred IBM Mainframe t-shirts Part 2 - 25 Sony PSPs Part 3 - 3 Lenovo Thinkpads and a trip to Hursley
It looks like it might be good fun. I spoke to some students who worked with System Z over the summer, and they said that they had completely different challenges and experiences to what they would gain by writing C++ to be run on x86 machines, or similar.
There's some more information on the contest wobsite[1]. It's already started, but entry has not closed. IBM also provided a presentation[1] and a poster[2]. (I had some problems viewing the poster. If you're a Linux user, try xpdf or gpdf rather than evince, which displays a blank page. On other platforms, you're on your own!)
[0] http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/uk/z/mainframecontest/ [1] http://www.ox.compsoc.net/ibm_mainframe/presentation.pdf [2] http://www.ox.compsoc.net/ibm_mainframe/poster.pdf
6. Outro --------
Okay, this was even longer than I anticipated. Sorry about that. Enough! Time to leave the house!
See you on Thursday,
wjt -- Will Thompson, Oxford University Computer Society President http://www.ox.compsoc.net/