A talk by Richard M. Stallman (RMS) **[CANCELLED]**
Richard Stallman has cancelled his trip to Canada.
Abstract coming soon!
A talk by Michael Biggs. This talk is RESCHEDULED due to unexpected circumstances
I am going to take an intuitive, CS-style approach to a discussion about the use of kernels in modern data analysis. This approach often lends us efficient ways to consider a dataset under various choices of inner product, which is roughly comparable to a measure of "similarity". Many new tools in AI arise from kernel methods, such as the infamous Support Vector Machines for classification, and kernel-PCA for nonlinear dimensionality reduction. I will attempt to highlight, and provide visualization for some of the math involved in these methods while keeping the material at an accessible, undergraduate level.
While reading Slashdot, Bill came across the recently digitized audio recording of his 1989 talk at the Computer Science Club. As Bill has always had a soft-spot for the Computer Science Club, he has decided to pay us a surprise visit.
Bill promises to give away free copies of Windows Vista Ultimate, because frankly, nobody here (except j2simpso) wants to pay for a frisbee. Be sure to bring your resumes kids, because Bill will be recruiting for some exciting new positions at Microsoft, including Mindless Drone, Junior Code Monkey, and Assistant Human Cannonball.
A demo/introduction to a new source code search engine. A talk by Holden Karau
Source code search engines are a relatively new phenomenon . The general idea of most source code search engines is helping programmers find pre-existing code. So if you were writing some code and you wanted to find a csv library, for example, you could search for csv. All The Code is a next generation source code search engine. Unlike earlier generations of source code search engines, it considers how code is used to help determine relevance of code.
The talk will primarily be a demo of All The Code, along with a brief discussion of some of the technology behind it.
Coming Soon!
The ReactOS operating system has been in development for over eight years and aims to provide users with a fully functional and Windows-compatible distribution under the GPL license. ReactOS comes with its own Windows 2003-based kernel and system utilities and applications, resulting in an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally.
More than just an alternative to Windows, ReactOS is a powerful platform for academia, allowing students to learn a variety of skills useful to software testing, development and management, as well as providing a rich and clean implementation of Windows NT, with a kernel compatible to published internals book on the subject.
This talk will introduce the ReactOS project, as well as the various software engineering challenges behind it. The building platform and development philosophies and utilities will be shown, and attendees will grasp the vast amount of effort and organization that needs to go into building an operating system or any other similarly large project. The speaker will gladly answer questions related to his background, experience and interests and information on joining the project, as well as any other related information.
Speaker Bio
Alex Ionescu is currently studying in Software Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and is a Microsoft Technical Student Ambassador. He is the lead kernel developer of the ReactOS Project and project leader of TinyKRNL. He regularly speaks at Linux and Open Source conferences around the world and will be a lecturer at the 8th International Free Software Forum in Brazil this April, as well as providing hands-on workshops and lectures on Windows NT internals and security to various companies.
A talk by James deBoer
This talk will introduce the Haskell programming language and and walk through building a recognizer for regular languages. The talk will include a quick overview of regular expressions, an introduction to Haskell and finally a line by line analysis of a regular language recognizer.
A common misconception amongst software developers is that top quality software encompasses certain platforms, is driven by a particular new piece of technology, or relies solely on a particular programming language. However as developers we tend to miss the less hyped issues and techniques involved in writing world class software. These techniques are universal to all programming languages, platforms and deployed technologies but are often times viewed as being so obvious that they are ignored by the typical developer. The topics covered in this lecture will include:
- Writing bug-free to extremely low bug count software in real-time
- The concept of single-source, universal platform software
- Programming language interoperability
... and other less hyped yet vitally important concepts to writing World Class Software
A talk for those interested in 3-dimensional graphics but unsure of where to start. Covers the basic math and theory behind projecting 3-dimensional polygons on screen, as well as simple cropping techniques to improve efficiency. Translation and rotation of polygons will also be discussed.
A discussion of software start-ups founded by UW students and what they did that helped them grow and what failed to help. In order to share the most insights and guard the confidences of the individuals involved, none of the companies will be identified.
How a Waterloo software company is changing the way people program computers. A talk by Stefanus Du Toit
For decades, mainstream parallel processing has been thought of as inevitable. Up until recent years, however, improvements in manufacturing processes and increases in clock speed have provided software with free Moore's Law-scale performance improvements on traditional single-core CPUs. As per-core CPU speed increases have slowed to a halt, processor vendors are embracing parallelism by multiplying the number of cores on CPUs, following what Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) vendors have been doing for years. The Multi- core revolution promises to provide unparalleled increases in performance, but it comes with a catch: traditional serial programming methods are not at all suited to programming these processors and methods such as multi-threading are cumbersome and rarely scale beyond a few cores. Learn how, with hundreds of cores in desktop computers on the horizon, a local software company is looking to revolutionize the way software is written to deliver on the promise multi-core holds.
Refreshments (and possible pizza!) will be provided.
IST monitors the campus network for vulnerabilities and scans systems for security problems. This informal presentation will look behind the scenes to show the strategies and technologies used and to show the problem magnitude. We will review the IST Security web site with an emphasis on these pages
http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/security/vulnerable/
http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/security/security-wg/reports/20061101.html