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!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--
Thomas Denney
Secretary - Oxford University Computer Society
secretary(a)ox.compsoc.net <mailto:secretary@ox.compsoc.net>
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