Hi everyone,
This week, CompSoc is hosting a workshop with Semmle, where we'll be using their QL query language to find security vulnerabilities.
Tonight we will be hosting a semi-informal dinner with David Malan, a Harvard professor that runs their CS50 course - an introductory programming course that has over 1200 attendees each year. He's interested in chatting with current CS students about Oxford's CS course.
After that, it's our usual Geek Night and a tech talk with Metaswitch on how the Rust's type system and static analysis is making the internet safer for us all.
Learn to Code is fast approaching and if you have programming experience with Python and would like to share some of your time and enthusiasm, let us know or join the CompSoc helper Facebook group.
Other upcoming events in Oxford include a drinks event on Big Data at Somerville College and a Capture the Flag event with BAE Systems and OUEngSoc in Week 2.
Graduating? Want to start your future right? Bloomberg are taking applications for their 2018 software engineer graduate scheme.
See you soon,
Thomas and the rest of the committee
P.S. Don't forget to sign up for the 40th Anniversary Dinner!
18:30 Monday 1st Week - Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science (location provisional)
David Malan runs the CS50 course at Harvard, and Patrick Rebeschini (now at Oxford in the Stats department) previously ran the course at Yale. They are interested in meeting with Oxford CS students to discuss our course structure and to discuss the possibility of running a similar course at Oxford. If you're passionate about CS education or you're planning to volunteer with Learn to Code then this could be a great opportunity.
We're provisionally going to meet at 18:30 in the UGSA but the venue might change, so please RSVP here - we will e-mail later today if there is a change in venue. Food and drinks will be provided.
19:00 Wednesday 1st Week – Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science
On Wednesday of 1st week (17 January), engineers from Oxford University spin-off Semmle will visit CompSoc to give a workshop (with competition!) about code security analysis using the QL query language. Using QL, it is possible to write accurate and intricate queries that find security vulnerabilities and various other problems in code. We started as a research group at the Department of Computer Science, and have grown to an international company with offices in Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Copenhagen, and Valencia. The QL language and analyses are now used on a daily basis by security teams at both Google and Microsoft (among many others) to find security vulnerabilities in their code.
We recently made our analysis technology freely available for open source projects; find your own favourite projects on https://lgtm.com! As of today, lgtm has analysed over 10 million commits by more than 300,000 developers to over 55,000 open source projects. Our security researchers are constantly working with the community to find and disclose new vulnerabilities; have a look on https://lgtm.com/blog for some examples. Our queries are open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/lgtmhq.
The workshop will be given by recent Oxford Comp Sci graduates Sam Lanning and Aditya Sharad. We'll start with an introduction to lgtm.com and QL, and tell you about some of the technological challenges we faced when developing the query language and engine. After that, there'll be a workshop on how to write queries to find your own security vulnerabilities. Various prizes will be awarded, and of course there'll be drinks and pizzas.
See you all at on 17 January at 19:00 in the Social Area!
19:00 Saturday 2nd Week – Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
Bring your laptop for an evening of relaxing, chatting, games, coding and a selection of food and drink. This week's Geek Night theme is pizza which arrives on time.
By the way, locked out? If you're a member of the CS Department, you can enter after hours by swiping your Bod card and enter the secret code (genuine hint: this plus #).
19:00 Wednesday 2nd Week – Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
Rust is a relatively new programming language which is rapidly gaining traction in industry. It aims to replace C++, using a smart type system and static analysis to enforce safe use of pointers while retaining the efficiency required for systems programming. Buffer overflows and incorrect memory management are responsible for a large fraction of recent security vulnerabilities; Rust simply makes these impossible to compile. It’s a great example of how the concepts of Computer Science are making a practical difference to modern software engineering.
Bio: Keith Wansbrough is a Software Engineer at Metaswitch Networks Ltd.
19:00 Thursday from 2nd Week – Lecture Theatres A & B, Department of Computer Science
Learn to Code is back! If you've ever wanted to learn the basics of programming, refresh your Python knowledge, or get an idea of what computer scientists actually do all day then this is going to be a great course for you ☺️.
We aren't going to assume any prior programming experience, although to get the best out of the sessions we highly recommend that you bring a laptop so that you can follow along with some of the examples. It doesn't matter whether you use Windows, Mac, or Linux, and in the first session we'll explain how to get started on any of these platforms.
In this course we are going to be using the programming language Python, which is one of the easiest languages to pick up if you've never programmed before and it is widely used in the technology industry – YouTube, NASA, and Wikipedia are just three examples. If you need to learn R at some point during your degree you may find that an introduction to Python will help you pick up basic computational thinking ideas faster.
We do expect demand to be very high for this course, so please try to arrive before the advertised start time as we need to register everyone (for fire regulations). You'll need to enter via the back door on Parks Road; there are CompSoc signs up at the department.
15:30–19:00, Friday 1st Week – Flora Anderson Hall, Somerville College
‘Big Data’ as a term is hot property but what does it actually mean... to you? To business? To society?
Join Met Office and Alibaba Cloud as we cut through the ambiguity of Big Data and demonstrate the real-life value of analytics, algorithms and balloons(!) at Somerville College on Friday, 19th January.
Speakers include Alberto Arribas, Head of UK Informatics Lab at Met Office, Dr Wang Ning, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University and Data Scientists from Alibaba Cloud.
Includes drinks and canapés.
Agenda
09:30–16:30, Saturday 2nd Week – location TBC
OUEngSoc have kindly shared this event with us:
This is a team-based challenge for teams of 2 to 6 players, but individual entries are also fine and teams will be assigned later. The challenges will involve breaking into vulnerable websites, cracking ciphers, forensic searches, reverse engineering and much more. No previous experience of these kinds of challenge is necessary; they are designed for students who like taking things apart and seeing how they work.
Lunch will be provided and there will be prizes for the winners!
For more information or to sign up, email ctf@baesystems.com.
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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.