CompSoc have collaborated with Peter Zaborszky of Best Backups to create a 48 hour competition with fabulous prizes!

The idea will be to either work in a team of two or alone to create something technically interesting to do with backups! Sorry for being vague and mysterious but the specification won’t be released until the start of the competition.

The prizes available are:

- External hard drive, 2TB for 1 person team, 2×1TB for 2 person team

- Online backups – 2 years membership for 1 person team, 2×1 year for 2

- Amazon – 50 pound gift voucher for 1, 2×25 for 2.

We will be launching the competition at our gaming social this Friday, where people can come along to find a team mate or solve the problem alongside other participants. However you don’t have to come along to gaming to participate – feel free to start from home as the specification will be linked to from this event page once the competition has begun.

Please sign-up on the events page if you are interested!

The AGM was held as planned on 12/02/2013 and the new exec is as follows:

Academic President – Ruth King (ruth)
Gaming President – Matthew Piper (Murtag)
Secretary – Christopher Leonard (ChrisL)
Treasurer – Oliver Raabe (olibacon)
Technical Officer – Argha Sarkar (argha)
Social Secretary – Matthew Mo (Runite)

Congratulations to the new exec!

Christopher Leonard
Secretary

Greetings CompSoc,

The AGM has been arranged for the 12th February in MS0.4 starting at 6pm. If you wish to run for an exec position please send your manifesto to secretary@warwickcompsoc.co.uk. Your manifesto should cover who you are and why you want to be elected to a position in the society. Please note that you need to be a current member (not associate member) of CompSoc to be elected.

UPDATE: You can now vote at: http://uwcs.co.uk/elections/details/4/ if you wish to vote before the AGM. Please not you can only vote once.

The positions are as follows:

Academic President (Co-President)

The role involves keep the academic activities of the society running including academic talks and technical services. Both president positions have a responsibility to oversee the budget working with the secretary and treasurer on general society matters.

Gaming President (Co-President)

The role involves keep the gaming activities of the society running including weekly gaming events and the society’s LANs. Both president positions have a responsibility to oversee the budget working with the secretary and treasurer on general society matters.

Treasurer

The role involves managing and overseeing the society’s accounts. There is a responsibility to ensure the funds are used wisely and to sign off purchases for the society.

Secretary

The role involves taking minutes from exec meetings and communicating with the Student Union and the University on behalf of the society. Primarily in order to book rooms for society events. The secretary is also in charge of various administrative tasks. The secretary is also in charge of sending out newsletters to the society’s members.

Social Secretary

The role involves planning and communicating the social activities of the society, including weekly pub events and special socials for LANs.

Technical Officer

The role involves managing the society’s technical services. The technical officer acts as a communicator between the exec and the tech Team.

If you have any questions about any exec position or the application process, please e-mail me at secretary@warwickcompsoc.co.uk.

Regards,

Goshawk (Alexander Cooper)

On Thursday 22nd CoreFiling Ltd will be coming in to give a talk about continuous integration. The talk will take place in S0.13 at 5pm.

Abstract:
“A talk about how continuous integration is a key tool for the rapid development of high-quality, reliable software. Topics will include an introduction to the ideas of continuous integration, an overview of some of the systems which implement it, how CoreFiling built their own system in the absence of a suitable alternative, challenges and limitations of CI, and an exploration of some of the emerging ideas which build on it, such as continuous deployment. The talk will last approximately 45 minutes and there will be an opportunity to ask questions.”

Hope to see you there!

Ruth King,
Academic President

This summer the University of Warwick Computing society is pleased to announce a summer long programming competition to write an AI for the game Bomberman!

Entrants have the summer to write their AIs which will be scored during the final week before term starts. Make sure your AI is running during this week!

The top three AI writers will be awarded a fabulous prize – we have a Kindle, an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi up for grabs with the winner getting first choice. They’ll also be invited to IBM Warwick! The prizes will be awarded during a prize giving ceremony/networking session during the start of term 3. We’ll also be giving out really cool mini solar powered cars to people to entered the competition at this event!

More details can be found on the event page here: http://www.warwickcompsoc.co.uk/events/details/1441/
And the technical details and a few templates to get you started can be found here: https://github.com/UWCS/bomberman-progcomp

Happy programming and good luck!

Ruth King
Academic President

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