Hi everyone,

This week, we're thinking academically. At tonight's Geek Night, we'll be trying out the Coq proof assistant and on Wednesday David Chisnall, the Modern Compiler Design lecturer at Cambridge, will be talking about his open-source work with Objective-C and FreeBSD let him put his research ideas into practice.

If you enjoyed Richard Baker's talk on UAVs two weeks ago, you'll be pleased to find he us provided his slide

Hi everyone,

This week, we're thinking academically. At tonight's Geek Night, we'll be trying out the Coq proof assistant and on Wednesday David Chisnall, the Modern Compiler Design lecturer at Cambridge, will be talking about his open-source work with Objective-C and FreeBSD let him put his research ideas into practice.

If you enjoyed Richard Baker's talk on UAVs two weeks ago, you'll be pleased to find he us provided his slides, which are attached.

The remaining CompSoc events this term are the Week 7 LAN Night, the Annual General Meeting and the 40th Anniversary Dinner. If you're interested in helping run CompSoc, talk to one of the committee to find out more.

Other events include Microsoft Student Partner's last workshop of term, on machine learning, the deadline for the Microsoft Imagine Cup and the Materials Society hosting AI and robotics experts from Rolls-Royce.

Have a great week,

Edward and the rest of the committee

Events

Geek Night 6: Computer-assisted proofs

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 theorems like "A implies A" and that "Boolean OR is commutative".

Tech talk: Open source in research

19:00 Wednesday 7th Week – Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science

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.

As usual, pizza and drinks will be provided.

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.

Geek Night 7: LAN Night

19:00 Saturday 7th Week – Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science

CompSoc will be hosting a decent LAN night on Saturday 7th week, with a working LAN, working router and some games to play. Come and enjoy an experience better than the last one.

Annual General Meeting

19:00 Wednesday 8th Week – Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science

It's election time at CompSoc! The 2018–2019 CompSoc executive committee will be elected and, if there are enough keen people, non-executive positions may be created (the role of the new positions may or may not be going to meetings no one else wants to go to). There's no need to come up with a manifesto or have 3–5 years experience being a hack; just turn up on the night and say why you'd be good for the role.

We'll also be voting on approving the minutes of all meetings made in the last 15 years. The Proctors mandated a new constitution in 2014, which we've only just noticed requires us to formally minutes of meetings. CompSoc hasn't done that since 2003, so please email me with any minutes you'd like to see.

There will also be the usual committee reports and pizza, and the return of cheese and wine.

The official agenda is attached. If you want to submit any other motions, email me to add them to the agenda.

Sponsor notices

Microsoft Azure Functions & Computer Vision Workshops

Microsoft’s Vision and Language services: an interactive lab

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.

The event is free with pizzas, drinks, Microsoft swag and more; you get $100 worth of Azure credit simply by turning up to the workshop! 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.

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!

Microsoft Imagine Cup

Not long to go until Microsoft’s annual student developer competition submission deadline (18th of March)!

If you have a technical University project, hackathon idea, or even a side project you are working on, why not enter it into the Imagine Cup? It doesn’t need to be 100% polished and perfected, as long as you have a strong concept and have started on the technical development, your idea could see you go to the UK National finals and win a cash prize of £5000 and an Xbox One X (1st prize). 2nd prize is £3000 and 3rd is £2000. Teams can be up to 3 people and the only requirement is that the idea is built on Azure. If you would like to access an Azure grant code ($100 a month for 3 months), please email Oxford’s Microsoft Student Partner lead to get one Shu Ishida (shu.ishida@chch.ox.ac.uk).

Register here – https://aka.ms/imaginecupuk

Other notices

Cutting Edge Research: Inside the Rolls-Royce Future Technologies Group

17:00 Tuesday 7th Week – Wolfson Meeting Room, Materials Science Department

The Materials Society is hosting researchers from Rolls-Royce’s Future Technologies group, who are talking about the exciting work they do. The talk includes work Rolls-Royce is doing using AI to design new aerospace materials, and developing snake robots for inspection and repair.

Space is limited, so you must sign up.

Dr Al Lambourne is a materials specialist, looking at novel electrical and magnetic materials, functional coatings and composites.

Dr Bilal Nasser is an expert in robotics and computer vision, having worked for Rolls-Royce developing tele-operative and snake-like robots.

Dr Bryce Conduit is an expert in AI, and is building an AI platform to better optimise design and manufacture.

The event is free and food will be provided.


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 Hart
Secretary - Oxford University Computer Society