Category Archives: Events

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on Life & Work of 2008 Turing Award Recipient Barbara Liskov

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In 2008, Barbara Liskov was given the Turning Award for contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.

Ajay Deshpande, Chief Architect at Persistent Systems will give a talk on the life and work of Barbara Liskov, on 31st August, from 2pm to 5pm at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent (SB Road).

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet) Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Latest schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 31 August.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here

Credenz’13 : 3-day tech fest at PICT College 30 Aug-1 Sept

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Credenz is the annual technical symposium organised by the PICT IEEE Student Branch. With 4000+ students from 50 different colleges attending, it is one of the top student tech fests, not only in the city, but in the country too.

Credenz this year will be from 30 August to 1st September.

From the Credenz website:

Inaugurated in 2004, with an aim to celebrate talent, it has prospered to become one of the finest technical events in the country. Credenz not only infuses a competitive spirit among participants, but it also provides an informative edge through various seminars and workshops conducted by eminent industry professionals. Participants get to experience a diversity of events like Clash, Bplan, Roboliga, WebWeaver, Pixelate, Mad Talks and seminars on recent technologies.

The IEEE Student branch at PICT has always believed in encouraging students to think beyond the academic domain and challenge their potential. The team changed the entire face of Credenz in the year 2009 when the entire event was hosted online due to the pandemic swine flu, which had made social gatherings impossible. Following the legacy, their juniors made Credenz’10 a great success. Now the PICT IEEE Student Branch presents to you Credenz’13 with an even wider platform to let students showcase their skills and talents.

More Info about Credenz 2013:

There is also an online software/app development contest that you can participate in right now

For full information, see the Credenz Website

11 Tech/Startup Events in Pune this weekend

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If you’re not subscribed to the PuneTech Calendar, you might not have realized that this weekend is packed with tech and/or startup events in Pune – 11, in fact.

Unless otherwise specified, these events are free and open to anybody who’s interested in attending. A few are paid events, and this is clearly mentioned below.

Here’s a quick overview. To get more details about any event – including venue, time and registration information, go to PuneTech Calendar and click on the event link.

Friday, 23 August, evening

  • 6:30pm: TiE Pune Event – A New Model of Leadership

Saturday, 24 August

  • Pune’s Microsoft Technologies User Group – PUG has a 2 day DevCon that kicks off on Saturday morning and continues on until Sunday evening.
  • A 2 day free Clojure workshop by Baishampayan Ghose of Helpshift at BMC Software. Unfortunately, this workshop had limited seats and got full almost immediately after being announced. They are hoping to have more such workshops in the future. Make sure you’re subscribed to the PuneTech Calendar so you don’t miss the announcement.
  • RailsGirlsPune – a One Day Ruby-on-Rails workshop for Women
  • A Paid Sales and Marketing Beginners Workshop for Entrepreneurs
  • Part 2 of a Workshop on Big Data with Hadoop
  • A Paid Hands-On workshop on the GIT distributed version control system
  • Part 3 of A Hands-On Session for Amazon AWS Developers
  • SAP HANA get-together

Sunday, 25 August

  • A meetup of everybody interested in the Corona SDK (a leading mobile development framework)
  • Internet-of-things Meetup: Hands-on with Beagle Bone Black + Python + OpenCV

To get more details about any event – including venue, time and registration information, go to PuneTech Calendar and click on the event link.

About the PuneTech Calendar

If you got this update in your email or RSS feed, but you did not see any of the above events, that means that you’re subscribed to the PuneTech main blog, but you are not subscribed to the PuneTech events calendar. Since there are many tech events happening in Pune, we don’t put all the event announcements on the main blog. Hence, if you’re interested in attending events, you should subscribe to
get event announcements by email. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events.

Free 2-Day Intensive Clojure Workshop – 24-25 Aug

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the Pune Clojure User Group is organizing an intensive 2-day workshop on Clojure – on 24-25 August. The workshop is designed for programmers who have been using imperative programming languages so far and will give them a solid foundation in Functional Programming, Clojure & the Lisp-way.

The course is completely free of charge thanks to gracious hosts, BMC Software. Seats are limited, so hurry!

Course Content

  • Data Structures
  • Functional Programming
  • Sequences & Collections
  • JVM Interop
  • Concurrency
  • OO & Polymorphism
  • Macros
  • A lot more!

Prerequisites

You don’t need any prior experience with Clojure, Lisp or Functional Programming but we do expect that all participants will have at least an intermediate level of experience with any programming language. We can’t teach you programming in two days but if you already know some programming we can definitely teach you a different (and extremely elegant) way of solving non-trivial problems.

You’ll have to bring your own laptop to the course. WiFi will be provided at the venue.

It’s also recommended that you setup your favourite editor for editing Clojure so that we can get started very quickly. Some resources are given in the resources section and others can be found online.

If you still have questions feel free to ask on the Pune Clojure mailing list.

About the Instructor – Baishampayan Ghose

Baishampayan “BG” Ghose has been a professional Lisp programmer for most of his career. He has been using Clojure since the early days and has contributed to Clojure and multiple libraries in the Clojure ecosystem. His areas of interest are functional programming, distributed systems & ethnobotany.

Currently he is Co-founder/CTO at Helpshift.

You can contact him on @ghoseb or b.ghose@freegeek.in

Fees and Registration

The event is on 24-25 August, from 9:30am to 5pm, at BMC Software, SB Road, Pune.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Seats are limited, so please register here fast.

About the PuneTech Calendar

Get event announcements by email. Subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar

Turing100 Lecture: Talk on Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie (creators of Unix)

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In 1983, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were given the Turing Award “for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.”

Prof. T.M. Vijayaraman will give a talk on the life and work of Thompson and Ritchie, and the history of Unix, on 27th July, from 2pm to 5pm at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent (SB Road).

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This is year 2 of the the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series. The series started in 2012 to celebrates the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series, and the success of the talk series in year 1 has resulted in the series being continued in 2013. Each lecture is be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and covers the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series has featured, or will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet) Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Latest schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

All the slides and videos of all the talks in the last year are available here.

The next talk in the series will be TM Vijayaraman talking about Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. In August, Ajay Deshpande will talk about Barbara Liskov, and in September Hemant Pande will talk about Fran Allen.

Fees and Registration

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 27 July.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here

Event: Global Technology Outlook 2013 by Dr. C. Mohan (IBM)

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On Wednesday, Pune is fortunate to have a very distinguished visitor – Dr. C. Mohan, an IBM Fellow, IBM Master Innovator, inventor of the presumed abort commit protocol in database, and a list of other achievements and awards that is so long that you’ll get bored reading the list.

Mohan is giving a talk on the “Global Technology Outlook” on Wednesday, 24 July, 6pm, at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent (SB Road). This talk should be of interest to not only technical people but also to a much broader set of people.

Abstract of the Talk

The Global Technology Outlook (GTO) is IBM Research’s vision of the future for information technology (IT) and its impact on industries that use IT. This annual exercise highlights emerging software, hardware, and services technology trends that are expected to significantly impact the IT sector in the next 3-7 years. In particular, the GTO identifies technologies that may be disruptive to an existing business, have the potential to create new opportunities, and can provide new business value to our customers. The 2013 GTO is built not only on its 31 predecessors, but the 100 years of IBM innovation. The 2013 GTO reports on six key findings which form 2 groups. The first group addresses The Rapidly Evolving Infrastructure while the second one addresses The Future of Big Data and Analytics. The six topics of GTO 2013 are: Mobile First, Scalable Services Ecosystems, Software Defined Environments, Multimedia and Visual Analytics, Contextual Enterprise and Personalized Education. In this talk, Mohan will share the GTO 2013 findings with the audience.

About the speaker – C. Mohan

Dr. C. Mohan has been an IBM researcher for 31 years in the information management area, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research community and standards, especially with his invention of the ARIES family of locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort commit protocol. This IBM, ACM and IEEE Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist. In addition to receiving the ACM SIGMOD Innovation Award, the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award and numerous IBM awards, he has been elected to the US and Indian National Academies of Engineering, and has been named an IBM Master Inventor. This distinguished alumnus of IIT Madras received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an inventor of 38 patents. He serves on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum and on the IBM Software Group Architecture Board’s Council. More information can be found at his home page

Fees and Registration

The talk is at 6pm, on Wednesday, 24 July, at the Dewang Mehta Auditorium, “Bhageerath”, Persistent Systems, SB Road.

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

National Conference on Cyber Security – focus: Defense & other Govt Agencies

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The Defense sub-committee of MCCIA Pune has organized a national conference on Cyber Security, with the intention of bringing together people/companies who are interested in working in the area of cyber security with the key policy and decision makers from defense, police, and other government bodies. Should be a great conference for CEOs/CTOs/Domain experts interested in working with the Indian Government in the area of cyber security.

The conference is a 1-day conference, on 26th July, at MCCIA, SB Road Pune. Register here

Overview

Cyber warfare is emerging as the new dimension in warfare and cyber security is attracting lot of attention globally. Impact of problems in this domain is felt across all sectors including defence, governmental institutions, industries and commercial organizations and many others. Interactions and learning from collective experience is one of the best ways to prepare for meeting these challenges. The main propose is to initiate interactions and dialogue between users and practitioners from Armed Forces as well as IT and ITES companies and experts on cyber security.

Needless to mention that this topic has gained prominence in the recent times and Government of India has appreciated the importance and the need to seek private sector participation in this vital area of National Security. You would therefore appreciate the importance attached to this event for creating the much desired awareness among the private sector to support this endeavour of the Government in general and the Defence Forces in particular. A small concurrent exhibition is also being organised for industry to display their capabilities.

Programme

  • Innaugural Session
  • Technical Session – I: Cyber Warfare And Cyber Security – Defence And Homeland Security Domains
  • Technical Session – II: – Systems And Processes As Defence Against Cyber Threats
  • Technical Session – III: Equipment And Solutions Canvass For Cyber Security
  • Technical Session – IV: Armed Forces And Civilian Cooperation Models
  • Valedictory Session

Program Facilitators:

Senior officers from services HQs, Army CERT, DIARA, HQ Southern Command, DRDO, DGQA, MCTE and other relevant establishments. Also senior officials from Police, IB, NTRO & CRPF for participation. There will also be a substantive participation from civil cyber security fraternity.

Who Should Attend

The conference will offer an excellent opportunity for those who are interested / working in the vital domain of cyber security to hear and interact with key decision makers and policy makers from Defence and government agencies about national policies and perspective plans. These plans will necessitate participation and cooperation between government, Defence and civilian experts whether for equipment and systems, training or enforcement

Fees and Registration

This event is open for anybody to attend, and costs Rs. 2000 (1500 for MCCIA members). Please register here

Event: Intro to Inquiry-oriented Education by Prof. K.P. Mohanan (IISER)

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InnoVidya and IUCAA a talk by Prof. K.P. Mohanan on “An Introduction to Inquiry-Oriented Education” on Saturday, July 20, 2013, at 11am, at Bhaskara 3 Hall, IUCAA. This is the next talk in the InnoVidya/IUCAA SPARK lecture series.

Abstract of the talk:

Scientific inquiry is a form of rational inquiry that seeks knowledge by formulating our ignorance as questions and arriving at answers on the basis of data/observations. Most forms of science education focus on helping students to understand a body of knowledge — the conclusions resulting from scientific inquiry — and to apply that knowledge to solve problems. As an alternative, I have been pursuing an inquiry-oriented form of science education that goes beyond understanding and application, to help students acquire the capacity to engage in scientific inquiry, to function not only as consumers of knowledge, but also as producers of knowledge.

The youtube video clip on What Ruca Likes and Dislikes will give a brief taste of what an inquiry-oriented classroom is like.

In this talk, I will briefly outline what my colleagues and I have been doing to bring scientific inquiry into classrooms, textbooks, and examinations. It should be of interest to both students and educators.

About the Speaker – Prof. K.P. Mohanan

K.P. Mohanan received his PhD from MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), under Noam Chomsky, and taught at the University of Texas in Austin, MIT, Stanford University and National University of Singapore. At NUS, he initiated the General Education Program for undergraduate students, and as part of this program, created a web course on Academic Knowledge and Inquiry (http://wiki.nus.edu.sg/display/aki).

In January 2011, he moved to IISER-Pune to set up and develop the Centre for Integrative Studies. At IISER, he has created a three-course package on rational inquiry, covering scientific, mathematical, and conceptual inquiries. He is currently engaged in developing courses and programs on different types of inquiry based learning for high school and college students.

About the InnoVidya IUCAA Spark Program

The SPARK program is a series of events jointly conducted by InnoVidya and IUCAA. These are special events that <spark> imagination & curiosity of our young, build bonds between participants of different disciplines, catalyze interactivity & promote peer links

About InnoVidya

InnoVidya is a group of educators and industry professionals who want to reach out to students, teachers, trainers and working professionals and catalyze significant improvements in their learning ecosystems. In addition to the InnoVidya website and the InnoVidya mailing list, we also hold public lectures on the 4th Saturday of every month. Lectures usually involve talks by senior educators, industry visionaries, or social and/or for-profit entrepreneurs working in the space of higher education.

We are currently based in Pune, but we expect that this initiative will expand all over India.

If you’re interested in the state of education in India, please subscribe to get updates by email

Event Details

The event is on Saturday, July 20, 2013, at 11am, at the Bhaskara 3 Hall, IUCAA, at University of Pune campus.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here. There is ample parking at the venue.

@RubyConfIndia 2013 Pune Event Report by @JonathanWallace

Event Report, ,

(This event report of the recently concluded RubyConf 2013, which was held in Pune a couple of weekends back, by @JonathanWallace first appeared at the @BigNerdRanch blog. It is reproduced here with permission, for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

In my professional career, I’ve never felt prouder than when I was accepted as a speaker at RubyConf India. I’ve spoken at numerous user groups, helped organize events, and even performed in front of huge crowds, but this was the first time I had been given the opportunity to speak at a conference.

My goal was to put together a quality presentation on debugging that would help the attendees in at least one small way. If each person, from advanced to beginner, were to walk away with at least one new insight or piece of information, then I would be happy.

I found myself achieving that much and more. I met so many friendly people at this conference, had a lot of good conversations and made a number of #rubyfriends—more than at any other conference I’ve attended. And while the accolades and interest in my talk were wonderful, discussing my work, good code and great co-workers at Big Nerd Ranch was the best part of all.
The Talks

There were many other excellent talks at the conference and I enjoyed all of the ones I attended, but I found myself most inspired by three talks in particular:

  1. Siddhant Chothet‘s talk on accessibility and Ruby illustrated how easily the Ruby community could improve accessibility for users and developers. This talk wowed us as Siddhant demonstrated the challenges and impressive capabilities of blind developers. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that though Siddhant did have slides, he did not read from them, as he is blind himself. Not only was this his first talk at a conference, Siddhant gave the whole presentation from memory! If you want to support his work, check out the brails project.

  2. Sau Sheong Chang created beautiful music for us using pure Ruby, turning tweets into music. He shared just enough of the basics of music theory and the physics of music to walk us through his newly released muse gem. I love music and have played the piano for many years, and I look forward to creating music with one of my favorite tools, Ruby. Step one? Add a hubot script that makes use of muse in some fashion.

  3. Our own Andy Lindeman gave the closing keynote. In this talk, he revealed how much we all benefit from open-source software, thanks to the many developers who have given freely of their time and effort. I highly recommend that everyone in the Ruby community see the talk. While Andy’s talk focused only on the code written in Ruby libraries, I find myself flabbergasted at how much benefit we derive from open source, free technologies when considering the full stack of operating system, database server, web server, web browsers and client-side technologies!

Next year

But a summary of a few talks alone doesn’t do this conference justice. It’s definitely a should not miss, and I’m already planning a talk for next year. I hope to see you there.

(For another event report, see this post by student Vikas Yaligar.)

Talk: Research in Programming by Asst. MD of Microsoft Research India, July 5

External Visitors, ,

CSI Pune presents a talk on “Research in Programming” by Sriram Rajamani, Assistant Managing Director of Microsoft Research India, on July 5, 6pm, at Persistent, SB Road.

Abstract of the Talk

Most people think about programming as a routine implementation activity,
primarily done in the industry, and primarily for economic gain. In this talk
it will be explained, why the topic of programming is an important subject of
research and scientific enquiry, with several interesting and hard questions,
such as: How do you write correct programs? How do you write programs that run
fast on modern multicore processors?  What does it take to program the cloud?
How do you debug a large program? Some research projects at Microsoft Research
India will be presented, that aim to address some issues in these questions.

About the speaker – Sriram Rajamani

Sriram holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. Currently, he is the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India. More information on him can be found at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/sriram/bio.aspx

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

For any additional info, contact shekhar_sahasrabudhe@persistent.co.in