Author Archive
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
Tech Meetup Aberdeen #3 – 20th January 2010
A Happy New Year to everyone!
The time & location: Wed, 20th Jan, North Side Meston Building, Aberdeen Uni (map) 6:30 onwards.
The show must go on as they say and we are starting the year with two great talks. The first talk is from Pete Henderson who will discuss the ups and downs of running a technical software company. The second talk from James Philp will show us how to end the never ending search for the right video codec. There will be pizza & beer too of course.
Care and feeding of Techies
Pisys are a software development company with offices in Aberdeen, Houston and (strangely) Swansea and Oldmeldrum. They specialise in a range of products for a number of diverse markets – from school performance management systems to multi million $ immersive training simulators.
In this talk founder Pete Henderson will talk about the many ups, occasional downs and the often surreal experience of running a technical software company.
Fully Configurable Video Coding: The future of digital video
Imagine never again having a video that won’t play because of an unknown or obscure codec.
Imagine never needing to replace a set-top box whenever a new broadcast technology is invented.
Fully Configurable Video Coding represents a major step forward in how video is transmitted to the consumer.
Using sophisticated techniques, the software required to decode a video sequence by the end user is sent along with the video sequence data itself. This results in both improved performance and a quick and easy way for developers to get their new video coding techniques to the end user without the headache of waiting for widespread market adoption of their ideas.
Hope to see you all there.
Sunday, December 6th, 2009
TechMeetup Aberdeen in December
There will be no TechMeetup Aberdeen in December but some people have suggested that we meetup for some drinks and tech chat. So if your interested we will be gathering at Archibald Simpsons on Wednesday 16th December, 18:30 onwards. Hope to see you there, or in January for the first Tech Meetup Aberdeen of the year.
Tuesday, November 10th, 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.
Thursday, October 8th, 2009
The Inaugural TechMeetup in Aberdeen
The time & location: Wed, 21th Oct, North Side Meston Building, Aberdeen Uni (map) 6:30 onwards. The Bobbin for more beer afterwards.
TechMeetup Aberdeen begins this month. Continuing on the great success of TechMeetup in Edinburgh and Glasgow TechMeetup will open in Aberdeen. Proudly supported by it’s benevolent sponser – Aberdeen University.
We start with two fantastic talks arranged: Gavin MacLean will talk about the hidden supercomputer in OpenCL and James Littlejohn will talk about how bloggers lives are intertwined. There will be pizza & beer too of course.
Gavin MacLean – Unleash your hidden supercomputer
Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have evolved from single-purpose chips into flexible processors that offer levels of performance once reserved for room-sized supercomputers. OpenCL is a new open standard that opens up these incredible performance opportunities. Forget dual core or quad core we’re talking 240 cores available today.
James Littlejohn – Lifestyle linking the world
mepath’s mission is to figure out how all life is connected. This has started by figuring out how individual bloggers lives are connected in the area of sport. We use ‘wisdom of the crowd’ data aggregation techniques on data derived from using semantics web definitions. The sites architecture from crawl to feedreader, Core engine to UI will also be discussed, including the use of the OpenStack.
We are really excited to be bringing TechMeetup to Aberdeen and look forward to having some great talks and meeting some amazing people. This is the start of something great in Aberdeen, see you all there.