Hi everyone,
Will some programs become too complex to understand? Will computers have to program themselves? Ensoft's CTO will show us how computer-assisted programming is going to be make our lives easier and the future of the career programmer.
Congratulations to those who have been going every week to Learn to Code! We're nearly at the end and we'll be continuing with our exercise-based format. This week, we'll be building upon our knowledge of lists and dictionaries and looking at ways you can use your new programming skills.
Next Saturday, Geek Night will have a theme for the first time since Michaelmas (I'm sorry for my laziness): computer-assisted proofs. Then, we'll be hosting David Chisnall from Cambridge, who'll be talking about how he used open-source work in Objective-C and FreeBSD to put research ideas into practice and to transfer technologies.
Outside of CompSoc, Microsoft's student partners are hosting workshops covering machine learning and computer vision.
Have a great week,
Edward and the rest of the committee
19:00 Wednesday 6th Week – Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
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".
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.
19:00 Thursday 6th Week – Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
In the final session of the term, we will continue to look at fundamental data structures like lists and dictionaries before moving on to looking at how we can use lists as stacks and then at how to use stacks to model stack machines, which underpin how Python is executed on your computer. Finally, we’ll look at problems that the skills you’ve learned this term can be applied to, such as data processing for statistics, machine learning, and image processing.
Next term, we will run the previously advertised seventh week session with a machine learning expert covering the basics of machine learning in Python.
19:00 Saturday 6th Week – Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science
Bring your laptop for a well-deserved evening of relaxing, chatting, games, coding and a selection of food and drink. This week sees the return of geek night themes! This week we'll be using automated theorem provers to provide proofs of mind-boggling quick mathz like 2 + 2 = 4 and 4 − 1 = 3.
19:00 Wednesday 7th Week – Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
Bio. David Chisnall is the Bye Fellow in Computer Science at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and teaches Modern Compiler Design. He is a contributor to the Étoilé user environment, GNUstep development environment and LLVM project. His research interests include cross-language interoperability, architectures for modern programming languages and dynamic object-oriented programming languages.
Abstract. This talk will discuss open source both as a mechanism for involvement in research and as a means of technology transfer. I will discuss the transition from the Étoilé Objective-C runtime, which incorporated a number of novel research ideas, to the GNUstep runtime, which is now used in numerous Android applications and as the base of Microsoft’s WinObjC project. I will also discuss some of my experience on the FreeBSD Core Team, particularly in terms of engagement of research and industrial communities, and out current work using LLVM and FreeBSD for both prototyping and industrial engagement.
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 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!
Micro-Internship Programme
Keen to enhance your CV with work experience? The Micro-Internship Programme facilitates 2–5 day work experience placements in 9th and 10th week of every term. Applications are OPEN and the deadline is midday, Monday 19th February. Please see our handy sector list to browse micro-internship opportunities which may be of interest to your students.
Looking for guidance with your application?
Previous hosts have given helpful application feedback and advice. Stay up to date with our internship programmes by signing up to the Internship Office email alerts and visiting the Internship Office Facebook page. For any questions please email micro-internships@careers.ox.ac.uk.
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