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(a)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/>