Yo!
Today’s Geek Night is sure to be a fun one! I’ve been down to the farmers’ market in Cowley and grabbed us some delicious cheeses - the perfect fuel for ’golfing! If you’d like to come prepared, I’d highly recommend checking GolfScript out - though feel free to use any language(s) of your choice.
We’ve got a talk with Gold sponsor Palantir coming up next week. It’s on Machine learning and ethics in data science - a highly relevant topic in this age!
Metaswitch’s Insight Night event is still upcoming, feel free to check that out. HSBC also has an event running on the 30th October.
====ALMOST COMPLETELY OUT OF SPACES!!==== for our all-day Bletchley Park trip, kindly sponsored by Silver sponsor Ensoft! Bletchley Park, once the top-secret home of the World War Two Codebreakers is now a vibrant heritage attraction. Explore, experience and enjoy the once top-secret world of iconic Codebreaking Huts and Blocks set within an atmospheric Victorian estate. We’re also visiting the National Museum of Computing on that trip. Free for members, and £10 for non-members - so you’ve got a pretty good deal regardless! NOTICE: If you aren’t in the first 50 then you will be placed onto a waiting list, with members taking priority spots.
Push your interest onto this stack here.
Here’s the link to our Discord, just in case you’re not there already for some reason. Please let me know who you are when you join (like, your name and surname).
Come along!
The CompSoc Committee - Joe G, Edward H, Ben S
Geek Night 3: CodeGolf - 7:00 pm 27th October, Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science
CodeGolf, like normal golf, is all about getting the lowest score.
This is where the similarities end.
By “score”, we do of course mean bytes (characters)! For example, consider a typical “Hello, World!” PHP (yes the dreaded!) program:
<?php
print "Hello, World!";
?>Ugh, a whole 29 bytes! But we can do better:
Hello, World!There. A nice 13 bytes! (Yes, this works.)
By now you probably get the gist: in order to reduce code as much as possible, you may take advantage of any of the esoteric properties or features a language may have.
Try GolfScript (uses Ruby) if you’d like an easy introduction to programming with very few bytes.
Bring your laptops, we’ll provide the pizza - and some very nice cheese!!
Tech talk with Palantir: Ethics and Machine Learning - 7:00 pm 31st October, Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
Machine Learning (ML) is a ubiquitous tool enabling better decision making for Businesses and Governments but carries many hidden costs – technical, societal, ethical and legal. Palantir’s approach to ML is strongly influenced by the early days of the company regarding the merits of augmented intelligence in sensitive data environments and has tended to be cautious, even reserved - with amplifying Human agency as a primary objective. In this event Courtney Bowman (Lead of Palantir’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Team) invites you to join him in a discussion examining the pitfalls of naïve ML approaches, the practical and ethical virtues of augmented intelligence, and principles of good data science that we believe should be infused across machine learning work writ large.
Food and drinks provided.
Join us!
CS Essentials Session 3 - 7:00 pm 1st November, Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
This week’s CS Essentials session is the first of a two-part series on Bash.
CS Essentials is a brand new course that CompSoc organises for beginners. If you are into either exploring the Linux command line or learning how to create a beautiful document using LaTeX, this is just the course for you!
You do not need any prior experience, just come along and have some fun! All you need is a laptop to get through the exercises. What we will be teaching is:
If you need directions to the department, send us a message and we’ll be more than happy to help!
The course is open to all members of the University of Oxford.
P.S. If you have any experience in any of the topics and a little spare time, you can volunteer to help during the events.
Geek Night 4: Esoteric Languages - 7:00 pm 3rd November, Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science
Tired of things making sense? Want to try a language that breaks all the conventions and destroys the very foundations of what you think it means to write a program?
How about a language that’s Turing complete (can do anything computable) with only eight symbols? What about six? (I mean, it’s just JavaScript.) What about one?? Tired of writing your code line-to-line? How about it be flowing about in two dimensions?
What about the source file being a MIDI score? Or a recipe? Or a Shakespeare play? The possibilities do not end!
Use any skills you learned from the CodeGolf geek night to your advantage, you might find they prove useful!
Bring your laptops, we’ll provide the pizza.
Tech talk with EF: Title pending - 7:00 pm 7th November, Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science
We have a talk from Silver sponsor Entrepreneur First. A self-description from their site:
Entrepreneur First is where outliers come together.
Ambitious individuals leave places like Google, Goldman Sachs and Stanford to join EF. Why? Because starting a startup is the highest impact thing you can do with your life.
EF is the best place to find a co-founder, build a company and access the world’s best investors. We’ve helped build over 140 technology companies, collectively worth over $1bn.
EF is backed by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) and Greylock Partners, Mosaic Ventures, Founders Fund, Lakestar and some of the world’s best entrepreneurs.
Metaswitch - Oxford Insight Night Event
Thursday 1st November 2018 - 7:30pm-9pm Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP
YOU ARE EXCLUSIVELY INVITED TO OUR OXFORD INSIGHT NIGHT!
The event will give you a great introduction to careers in Software Engineering, and a taste of graduate and intern life at Metaswitch.
Come and meet a diverse selection of our current employees to hear about their inspirational career stories and any recommendations they have about working in the industry. Free food and drinks and a chance to win some great prizes on the day!
To attend, please sign up via our website.
Please feel free to encourage your friends to sign up to – the more the merrier.
Date: Tuesday 30th October
Time: 18:00 – 20:30
Venue: Examination Schools, Oxford
You are invited to join a discussion hosted by HSBC around the Dealing Room of Tomorrow. This will be a discussion led by senior Sales, Traders, Structurers and Quants from the Global Markets floor at HSBC.
If you are interested in exploring what a role in Sales, Trading, Structuring, Quantitative Analytics or Data Science could look like for you, then you should sign up to this event.
There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions and to find out about the challenges and opportunities for Global Markets and how this may affect your career. It will also give you an opportunity to find out which part of the business might suit your character and skills best.
In the last hour you will have the opportunity to network with a number of people at all levels across the Global Markets business.
To attend this event you need to apply by clicking the link. Places will be allocated on a first come first served basis, and are only open to University of Oxford students. Please arrive from 18:00 for registration and a 18:30 start.
We look forward to meeting you!
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.
Want to unsubscribe or manage your subscription preferences? Go to http://lists.ox.compsoc.net/mailman/listinfo/.