Hello all,

For our first tech talk of the year an engineer from Google will be joining us to talk about how Google responds to major disasters. This weekend we also have our third Geek Night of the term, themed around code golfing. Next week we have a talk from Palantir and a G-Research coding event in Week 3.

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

Google Tech Talk https://www.facebook.com/events/349790655362525/

*Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science - 7:00pm Wednesday (2nd week)*

Nick Fortescue, Senior Software Engineer at Google, will talk about what it takes to get hardware and software done in a crisis situation when lives are on the line, as he talks about his time on the Google Ebola Crisis Response Team. In cooperation with Medecins Sans Frontières, the Google team produced tablets, servers and software for medical records in low connectivity, high risk locations.

Nick did Mathematics & Computation at Teddy Hall, then after working at a research lab, a startup, and banks and hedge funds ended up at Google. He's been working on Google Play, with a brief stint away helping with Google's Ebola crisis response. He lives in Oxford, and in his spare time he flies gyrocopters (doing anti-poaching patrols in Kenya this summer), dances, and helps lead Thesis, a group for graduate students at St. Ebbe's church Oxford.

Free food and drinks will be provided after the talk, along with a selection of Google swag.

Geek Night 2: Code Golf https://www.facebook.com/events/309692709411919/

*Undergraduate Social Area - 7:00pm Saturday (2nd week)*

The goal of code golfing is to write the shortest possible program to implement certain algorithms. This will be a great opportunity to check out some of the more esoteric tricks of your favourite programming language, although we're also going to be playing with GolfScript http://www.golfscript.com/golfscript/index.html, so you might want to set it up (requires Ruby) on your computer in advance.

Bring your own laptop and we'll provide the pizza :).

Palantir Tech Talk: Think Like a Palantir Engineer https://www.facebook.com/events/356324308042095/

*Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science - 7:00pm Wednesday (3rd week)*

Palantir is a company of individuals who are passionate about building world-class data integration and analysis software. If you want to work on the global problems you read about on the front page of the newspaper, we want you to come work with us.

Ever wonder what types of problems Palantir is fighting and how we work to solve them? Come hear about them first-hand and openly discuss your approach to solve them with us. We will be hosting an interactive workshop all around the hardest data problems the world is facing.

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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/ or visit our Website https://ox.compsoc.net for more information about the society.