Hello all,

Fifth week is upon us. As we come to the terrifying realisation that we are /only/ half way through the term, hopefully the great events that we have coming up should ease the blues.

As well as Geek Nights each Saturday, we also have three more tech talks from Bloomberg, Metaswitch, and Microsoft on the Java Virtual Machine, testing, and an introduction to machine learning coming up (descriptions below). Next Saturday Jane Street, one of our sponsors, are also running a hackathon.

This week, to my amusement, I discovered that the society didn't have a Twitter account. As promoting society events is my job, I figured we might as well have one. If this is at all useful to you, please follow @oxcompsoc https://twitter.com/oxcompsoc and help get us more than a single-digit number of followers...

If you're interested in joining the society, please remember to bring five pounds to any of our upcoming events, and we can provide you with a membership form.

Have a great week,

Thomas and the rest of the committee

Events

Bloomberg Tech Talk: How the JVM executes Java https://www.facebook.com/events/208490852918521/

*Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science - 7:00pm Wednesday (5th week)*

James Gough from Bloomberg will be joining us to discuss details about the implementation of Java. Pizza and drinks will be provided after the talk.

When Java was released in 1995 it was slow, a reputation it has carried for many years... Today Java can give performance that is comparable to C++ and can emit instructions that are more optimal than code which is statically compiled. But how? This talk will take a tour of code and the journey through the JVM and the optimisations in between. Using practical examples, JVM flags and the Open Source JIT Watch we will explore what the JVM does in an adaptation of the classic Hello World program, you'll never look at Java in the same way again.

Geek Night 5 https://www.facebook.com/events/1823510761194036/

*Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science - 7:00pm Saturday (5th week)*

Join us for an evening of relaxing, chatting, games, coding, and the usual selection of food and drinks. We will also have an Adafruit IoT starter kit https://www.adafruit.com/product/3031 and a BBC micro:bit http://microbit.org if you are interested in learning some embedded programming.

Metaswitch: Putting the Science in Computer Science https://www.facebook.com/events/329354574096043/

*Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science - 7:00pm Wednesday (6th week)*

Edmund Pringle from Metaswitch will be joining us to discuss testing. The talk will be followed by free pizza and drinks.

I'm perennially amazed as to how bad otherwise bright people are at testing (including me!). And that's not surprising – we don't really talk about it or get taught it as part of our undergraduate degree and just about everything we've encountered called "testing" in our lives up to and including our degree isn't actually testing. This talk (in among the ranting, chocolate and invisible spoons) is intended to cover what testing is (and isn't), what's interesting about it and to offer a very basic skeleton that will hopefully let you learn more, enjoy more, and be a vastly better computer scientist.

Microsoft: Machine Learning Demystified https://www.facebook.com/events/240022973081334/

*Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science - 7:00pm Wednesday (7th week)*

Bianca Furtuna from Microsoft will be joining us for a talk on machine learning, which will be followed by free pizza and drinks.

Machine Learning can solve all your problems, it can tell you what to do better and how to improve your business processes, increase revenue, reduce waste etc.

Well, not really. Machine Learning is not magic. You don't just apply machine learning in your organisation and intelligent, innovative solutions come out of nowhere. Machine Learning has its limitations and its beauty, but it all comes down to data and questions. You need good data and the right questions and then you are good to go.

In this session, we are going to look at a typical machine learning process and how to apply it to some real world data. We are going to use Azure Machine Learning to transform data and ideas into models that are production ready in minutes, all of this while keeping the real world in mind.

Sponsor notices

Jane Street etc hackathon https://www.facebook.com/events/1633180670308427/

*10am - 10pm 19/11/16 (Saturday 6th)*

A day-long programming contest. Form teams and have your software compete against others and the markets.

A significant cash prize is on the line for the winning team. There'll be lots of (free) food and drinks available.

Absolutely no knowledge of finance, nor OCaml is required. You don't have to be a CS student or a full on programmer to participate but you'd need some knowledge of coding. You can use any language, but we'll provide some helper libraries in a few common ones. The contest is entirely technical in nature and you won't need any visual design skills.

Check out our events https://events.janestreet.com/home/etc/ website for more info and register on this link https://docs.google.com/a/janestreet.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScPVl1z3y6rpao69PNw0wcP7wBV9FhB2X3FakLKqawysKhMxA/viewform?c=0&w=1 if you're interested in participating! Please bear in mind spaces are limited.

We look forward to seeing you then!

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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 https://facebook.com/oxcompsoc, Twitter https://twitter.com/oxcompsoc, or visit our website https://ox.compsoc.net for more information about the society.