Drones are one of the most exciting technologies to hit the mainstream in recent year, promising to revolutionise logistics and warfare – if they stop getting stuck in trees. This week's talk is about drones: drones for the consumer, their exciting future, their creative misuses and how we can protect ourselves.
Learn to Code continues and we'll have practising advanced list features and introducing the dictionary data type.
This is also the last week you can sign up for our 40th Anniversary Dinner!
Outside of CompSoc, Microsoft's student partners are hosting four(!) workshops covering cloud computing with Azure, computer vision and machine learning. The Oxford Foundry is launching a startup accelerator program and hosting a workshop on building a landing page in two hours.
Have a great week,
Edward and the rest of the committee
19:00 Saturday 4th Week – Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science
Bring your laptop for an evening of relaxing, chatting, games, coding and a selection of food and drink.
19:00 Wednesday 5th Week – Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
Abstract. Drones have been in consumer hands and newspaper headlines for several years now. While their much-touted potential to dramatically change modern existence is slowly beginning to emerge, it sometimes seems like their most notable success thus far has been in crashing into everything in sight.
This talk will take a brief look at the devices currently available for the everyday consumer. It will then explore some exciting legitimate uses as well as the manifold creative misuses people have devised. Finally it will discuss the potential countermeasures that have been proposed to detect UAVs, disable or commandeer them, and trace misuse back to operators.
There will be a selection of commodity drones to have a look at, from tiny FPV ones up to an octorotor that will lift a kilo of payload.
Bio. Richard Baker is a member of the Cyber Security CDT at Oxford.
19:00 Thursday 5th Week – Lecture Theatre A and Room 051, Department of Computer Science
In the fourth session, we're going to continue the exercise-based format we had last week. We'll continue our practice with lists and introduce a new data structure, dictionaries (aka maps).
The video for last week's session is now on YouTube, whilst the exercises and solutions are on GitHub. If you missed last week's session, we strongly encourage that you take the time to go through a few more of the exercises before next week's session.
19:00 Saturday 5th Week – Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science
Congratulations on surviving another fifth week! Bring your laptop for a well-deserved evening of relaxing, chatting, games, coding and a selection of food and drink.
19:00 Wednesday 6th Week – Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
Abstract. The Internet is perhaps the most complex machine ever invented, and it's made of software. This pushes the limits of human capacity for creating and testing code, but with recent advances, the machines are starting to rise up and take on these challenges. I'll talk about what's happening, why it's awesome, and what it means for your future career.
As usual, pizza and drinks will be provided.
Bio. Simon Chatterjee is a Director and CTO of Ensoft, whose experience includes helping to bring into existence the Guinness Book of Records' "World's Highest Capacity Internet Router".
Drinks reception from 19:00, Wednesday 8th Week – Foyer B, St Anne's College
CompSoc turns 40 next year and we're celebrating in style! A sumptuous three-course dinner at St Anne's (Domino's was booked up), joined by CompSoc members spanning the society's 40-year history. All for just £20. Reserve your place here (don't worry about the donation bit – that's just for old members who are in full-time employment). There are a limited number of places and reservations close on Friday, so act quickly!
Oxford Microsoft Student Partners are running two coding workshops next week on the exciting topics of cloud computing and computer vision.
All events are free with pizzas, drinks, Microsoft swag and more; you get $100 worth of Azure credit simply by turning up to one of our workshops! On Azure, you can make apps that recognise images and speech, set up bots that understand what you say, or build and train your own machine learning model.
To get more updates, join the Microsoft Student Partners Facebook group.
19:10–20:30, Tuesday 5th Week – Lecture Room 1, Christ Church
Do you want to have image processing for your IoT device, or manage bots to run scheduled tasks? Want to learn the fastest way to get your JavaScript code running online?
Azure Functions is a great solution for processing data, integrating systems, working with the internet-of-things (IoT), and building simple APIs and microservices.
19:10–20:30, Friday 5th Week – Lecture Room 1, Christ Church
Do you want to make your own AI powered app but don't know where to begin? We are running a workshop that teaches you exactly how to make your app "see the world"! We will walk you through how to start using Microsoft Computer Vision and Custom Vision APIs, and at the end of the day, let you train your own image recognition model!
19:10–20:30, Tuesday 6th Week – Lecture Room 1, Christ Church
Do you want to build your own Machine Learning model but don't know where to start? Well look no further! We are running a workshop to teach you exactly how to build and train your model using Azure Machine Learning.
Anyone from intermediate CS students to non-CS students new to machine learning are welcome! We'll provide a step-by-step hand out with examples. Free pizzas and drinks are always a thing here, and even better, we give out Free Azure Subscription worth $100, just for those of you who joined the workshop!
Save your interests to stay updated!
19:10–20:30, Monday 7th Week – Blue Boar Lecture Theatre, Christ Church
Oxford Microsoft Student Partners are delighted to welcome Ms Frances Tibble from Microsoft to give a talk on Microsoft Cognitive Services.
Frances recently graduated from Imperial College London, joining Microsoft as a Software Engineer. She now specialises in Machine Learning and AI, which means she gets to throw lots of buzzwords around. In this session we’ll be looking at a great source of those words: computer vision and language.
Part 1: Vision (30 mins)
This will be a presentation on how we can extract information from images using Microsoft’s computer vision APIs, followed by a hands-on lab where we’ll build our own machine learning model to classify images.
Part 2: Language (30 mins)
This will be a deep-dive presentation into language understanding using Microsoft’s LUIS, followed by a guided lab to build our own custom language model.
FAQ
What programming language will we be using?
This is a “no-code” lab, which means we’ll build our models without having to write any code.
What will I learn?
You’ll get started with Microsoft’s Cognitive Services so you can build projects of your own. Check out what students built using these services at Hack Cambridge and IC Hack.
What do I need?
Bring yourself and your laptop!
LEV8 – /ˈɛlɪveɪt/ – pron: el-ev-ate
verb
To raise or lift (something) to a higher position.
To raise to a more impressive level.
What is OXFO LEV8?
OXFO LEV8 at the Oxford Foundry is the University of Oxford’s newest accelerator, designed to support and nurture early-stage start-up teams affiliated to the University by helping to develop them into strong, scalable businesses.
Who can apply?
OXFO LEV8 welcomes applications from any start-up team that includes at least one Oxford University student, member of staff, or alumnus/alumna within 10 years of graduation.
Why apply?
Applications are now open – apply by midnight on 20 February!
Full information at https://www.oxfordfoundry.ox.ac.uk/about-oxfo-lev8.
18:00–20:30, Thursday 5th Week – The Oxford Foundry, 3–5 Hythe Bridge Street, OX1 2EW
The Oxford Foundry have arranged a free Coding Workshop for you in partnership with CodeSoc and Le Wagon – Change your Life: Learn to Code.
Anyone can learn to code. No previous coding experience required.
Create your Landing Page in 2 Hours.
Please bring your booking confirmation and a fully charged laptop! Requires no prior knowledge.
Reserve your space here (capacity limited to 50 students).
For university of oxford students only.
The Oxford University Computer Society (CompSoc) aims to organise meetings and events for our members to use and further their computing interests. See all of our upcoming events on our Facebook Page or visit our Website for more information about the society.
Edward HartSecretary - Oxford University Computer Society