Hi everyone,

Today we'll be hosting the G-Research Coding Challenge, where teams will be competing to perform sentiment analysis. Winning team members will win £50 Amazon vouchers! Make sure to register (link below). On Wednesday, in Bloomberg's tech talk, we'll be learning about parallelising the partition sort algorithm and how to get the most out of it.

Have a great week!

Thomas and the rest of the committee

Events

G-Research Coding Challenge 2018

18:00 Saturday, 3rd Week - Room 051, Department of Computer Science

G-Research is a leading quantitative research and technology company. We apply scientific techniques to find patterns in large, noisy and real-world data sets, using the latest statistical and "big data" analysis methodologies to predict global financial markets. Please join us for our annual coding challenge where you will compete in teams in a series of progressively more difficult sentiment analysis challenges.

This is a great chance to test your problem solving and coding skills and a chance to win a £50 Amazon vouchers per team member (plus prizes for runners up!).

• Where: Oxford Computer Science Department, Room 051
• Date: Saturday 28th October 2017
• When: 18:00-21:00

To take part all you need is at least one laptop per team and have a development environment set up for C#, Java or Python and you must be able to provide your own internet access. Afterwards we will provide food and drinks and a chance for you to talk to our employees informally about internships, graduate roles and life at G-Research!

To register your interest, please email graduates@gresearch.co.uk. You can register alone or as part of a team of up to 4 members, if you register individually you will be allocated a team at the event.

[This event replaces our usual Geek Night. Note that it begins one hour earlier than usual.]

Bloomberg tech talk: Parallel partition

19:00 Wednesday 4th Week - Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science

The partition algorithm is an important building block for other algorithms, especially for sorting. It seems like partition is inherently sequential but there are ways to parallelize the algorithm. This presentation shows a way to do so. It also discusses a few variations on the interface to the algorithm to show how these affect performance.

Geek Night 4

19:00 Saturday 4th Week - Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science

This week, we'll be trying to implement UNIX utilities in the language of your choice. Who knew grep could be so complex?

Bring your laptop for an evening of relaxing, chatting, games, coding and a selection of food and drink.

Palantir tech talk: Building Secure Search at Palantir

19:00 Wednesday 5th Week - Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science

How do you design a search engine when different users only have permission to view specific documents? In this workshop we will explore how object level authorization can be used to take care of privacy in these times of Big Data.

Pizza and drinks will be provided after the talk.

Who we are:

Today's critical institutions don't just protect public safety or provide vital goods and services - they also deal with astonishing amounts of data. At Palantir, our mission is to help the world's government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and nonprofits transform how they understand and use that data.We build software that lets organizations integrate and analyze their data so they can solve problems they couldn't before.

Sponsor notices

Entrepreneur First Early Application Deadline

The early application deadline to join EF's 10th cohort (beginning in April 2018) is on October 31st!

Entrepreneur First are Europe's leading startup builder, and always looking for innovative, talented individuals to support in building their first technology company - they are especially really keen to bring in those who haven't previously considered founding their own startup, but who have skills and enthusiasm and just need the right environment to flourish. They're also encouraging more women to apply, and try to narrow the gender gap between male and female founders.

The uniqueness of EF comes from the fact that they build companies pre-team, and pre-idea; they select individuals based on pure talent, then work with them to develop teams, ideas, technology, and help them raise funding. If this sounds like an opportunity which interests you then please please apply and you could be building your startup with us in April 2018!

It's a really exciting time to be at Entrepreneur First too, as they've recently closed a $12.4 million round of funding, with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and a handful of EF alumni from earlier cohorts also investing, including the founders of Magic Pony Technology, who built the company through EF and exited eighteen months later for $150 million.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask EF's student partner Sienna Rothery.

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.