On Friday 18th May we have Unruly Media coming in to deliver a talk entitled “Taming Scalability, and how Extreme Programming can help”. The talk will take place in S0.13 from 4pm.

“Abstract:
In this talk we will discuss three types of scaling challenges involved with adserving – Performance, Reliability, and Innovation.

We will cover some of the performance challenges we have encountered growing to tens of millions of impressions per day, and the approach we took to solve them, together with reliability challenges and how we avoid being woken up every night. We’ll pass on some lessons that we have learnt the hard way – so you won’t have to.

Teams often get less and less innovative when they have to cope with these kinds of scalability problems and increasingly complex business requirements. We will explain how Extreme Programming allows us to cope with these challenges and release new features into production to millions of users several times a day, while still having time to innovate.”

Free pizza will be provided :)

Hope to see you there,

Ruth King
Academic President

We are running a trip to Bletchley Park, the world renowned secret wartime code breaking site and birthplace of the modern computer.
There will be a tour around the site and a talk specially for us about cryptanalysis and the Enigma machine.

For more information and to sign up go to http://uwcs.co.uk/events/details/1438/

The AGM that was scheduled for the 8th February has finished, with the new exec being elected as follows:

Academic President – Ruth King (ruth)
Gaming President – Mike Clarke (MikeCobra)
Secretary – Alex Cooper (Goshawk)
Treasurer – Jonathan Davies (Moltenfire)
Tech. Officer – James Goode (james)
Socials Officer – Benedict Falconer (zed0)

Congratulations to all the new exec!

Alex Cooper, Secretary.

After the success of last term’s talk on Machine Learning, we have organised another guest talk courtesy of CoreFiling.

The topic of this talk is Real World Version Control, which will be of special interest to the students currently embarking on the CS Group Software Project.

The talk will take place in L5 (on the Science Concourse) on the 15th of February, from 5pm until 6pm.

“A talk about how version control is vital to software development and an introduction to some of the ways it can be used in a commercial context to deliver high quality software. Topics will include: a brief history, benefits of version control, pitfalls and common misconceptions, typical work-flows and tool support. The talk will last approximately 45 minutes and there will be an opportunity to ask questions.”

Hope to see you all there!

Alex Wilson

Academic President

CompSoc’s second guest talk of the term is taking place this Wednesday (23rd of Novemver), courtesy of CoreFiling Ltd.

The talk will be taking place in S0.18, from 1pm, about “Using Machine Learning To Solve Real-World Problems”

“How do you approach a classification problem involving thousands of categories rather than the 'usual’ five or six? What happens when your data-set is several gigabytes and growing? What open-source tools are available, are they any good, and can they be put to commercial use? How do you measure the system’s effectiveness when you’re not allowed to see the real data because of client confidentiality?”

David North, from Oxford-based software company CoreFiling, will aim to answer all these questions and more in a talk on machine learning from an industry perspective.”

Hope to see you all there!

Alex Wilson

UWCS Academic President

Hello, one and all.

It’s the start of a brand new year, which means new people, new places to visit, and all manner of interesting things for the society.

Events will be continuing as normal from next Monday (which is our “Fresher Pub”, so don’t be late and not get a seat!), but as mentioned at the Fair, there is NO GAMING THIS FRIDAY (the 7th October).

However, Gaming will resume next Friday, the 14th.

See you all around

Alex Wilson

UWCS Academic President

Hi all,

Remember that programming competition we ran during Term 2? Well, the results are now in and we are pleased to announce the winners!

1st Place: Konrad Dabrowski

The prize for first place will be a shiny new netbook.

2nd Place: Connor Dunn
3rd Place: Phil Hazelden

The prizes for second and third place will be Amazon Kindles.

Prizes will be distributed before the end of Term 3.

Alex Wilson, Academic President.

The AGM is now over and the results are in as follows:

Academic President – Alex Wilson (MrWilson)
Gaming President – Thomas Doherty (TeamDoherty)
Secretary – Michael Clarke (MikeCobra)
Treasurer – Matthew Cranham (cranman)
Tech. Officer – Benedict Falconer (zed0)
Socials Officer – Alex Martin (EvilGenius666)

We will announce the first exec meeting when a time and place has been decided, feel free to come along and meet us.

Michael Clarke (MikeCobra)
Secretary

The University of Warwick Computing society is pleased to announce its first all day programming competition, for the chance to win several fabulous prizes.

It will take place on Saturday the 12th of February, from 12pm to 6pm, consisting of multiple rounds of problem solving, a catered lunch/social period and a talk by a guest lecturer from Bloomberg, who are generously sponsoring this event.

The venue will be the Department of Computer Science’s Terminal Room 1, so there will be ample computers for those who wish to take part. Don’t worry if you don’t have a DCS login/password, we will provide an account for the day for all contestants who need one.

If you’d prefer not to use the departments computers and would like to use your own, there will be facilities in the same room for setting them and connecting to the internet.

The top prize will be a netbook, with Amazon Kindles for the next top 2 entries, and all participants will receive a USB stick for taking part.

Hello, all!

We have a few announcements to make for the next few weeks.

Next Guest Lecture

A big thank you to all who turned out to Paul Yarrow’s talk yesterday, and to follow this up we are pleased to announce that we have another IBM talk next week (24th November) at 6:15pm in S0.11, as usual.

The talk will be led by Gray Bachelor, a Solutions Architect, on the topic of “Systems Engineering: SMARTer products and services’’. Gray will explore the challenges, leading practices, advanced modelling and tools that support combined devices and IT back-end including cloud computing.

IBM Mainframe Competition

The IBM Mainframe Competition runs each year, and we highly recommend entering.
Registrations are open and the competition finishes at the end of December, so sign up now to have a chance at winning fabulous prizes!

“Mainframes make the world go round. Seriously, most of the biggest businesses in the world use a mainframe for their most mission-critical operations. If you’ve ever taken cash out of the wall, booked a flight or bought anything on the Internet, you’ve probably used a mainframe.

So, we are pleased to announce the IBM student mainframe challenge! You’ll join a fictional company and, over three increasingly challenging stages, develop mainframe knowledge that translates into real skills for your C.V. Learn how businesses use these powerful machines.
Prove your new-found abilities, and you’ll have the chance to win a t-shirt, an Amazon Kindle e-Book Reader, and the top 3 winners receive a Sony PlayStation 3 with Move motion controller or Xbox 360 with Kinect!

The winners will also have the opportunity to visit IBM’s Development Laboratory at Hursley (near Winchester) and see mainframes and other innovative technologies in action.

Students from all across the world are entering national Mainframe Challenges. The 2010 Mainframe Challenge is now open for registration.

Register now at: http://www-05.ibm.com/employment/uk/graduates/mainframe.html “