November 10, 2009

TechMeetup Aberdeen #2 – 18 November

The time & location: Wed, 18th Nov, North Side Meston Building, Aberdeen Uni (map) 6:30 onwards. The Bobbin for more beer afterwards.

After the success of the first TechMeetup in Aberdeen we swiftly move onwards and upwards with two great talks lined up. The first talk is from Kate Ho and Neelima Alluri who will discuss developing for the Microsoft Surface. The second talk from Dave Westwater on producing natural language to summarise data. There will be pizza & beer too of course.

Kate Ho and Neelima Alluri – Developing for the Microsoft Surface

For those that arent familiar with the Surface, it is a touchscreen interface in the form of a table top, it allows multiple users to work on it at the same time due to its size and support for multiple orientations, it has multi touch for more intuitive commands for actions such as resizing and also has a basic object recognition based on a tag system (similar to barcodes) that need to be placed on objects.

The Surface is a step towards “natural user interfaces” which is aim to make user interfaces more intuitive to the user and less like you are performing a series of steps instructing a computer to do what you want.

Dave Westwater- BabyTalk: A Natural Language Generation System

NLG is concerned with the development of systems that automatically produce text in a natural language, like English or Chinese. The BabyTalk project developed one such system for summarising data in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Hope to see you all there.