Tag Archives: conferences

@RubyConfIndia 2013 Pune Event Report by @JonathanWallace

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(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.)

Ruby Conf is coming to Pune – Call for Speakers is now Open

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Ruby Conf, a big, 2-day technical conference of everybody interested
in the Ruby programming language is coming to Pune on 22/23 June, 2013.

The call for speakers is now open. If you have done any work in Ruby, or there is simply some technique, or library that you have used and find interesting, this is your chance to get your 15 minutes of fame amongst the Ruby community in India. This will be a big conference with international participation, so if you into Ruby, you should not miss this chance.

This will be the 4th RubyConf in India, and the second in Pune. Information about the previous ones can be found here. RubyConf India typically sees 500+ participants, and includes notable members of the local and international Ruby community.

Volunteering: If you’re interested in helping out with the conference, please join the PuneRuby mailing list.

For latest information on RubyConf, follow them on twitter.

And, submit a proposal now.

If you are a company that would like to sponsor, the call for sponsors is also open. Sponsorship can be in the form of a direct cash sponsorship, or you could do something else like after-parties, event pre-launch dinners etc.

Event Report: VLSI Design Conference Pune 2013

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(This is an event report of the VLSI Design Conference that was held in Pune in Jan 2013, by Shakthi Kannan. It originally appeared on his blog, and is reproduced here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

The 26th International Conference on VLSI Design 2013 and the 12th International Conference on Embedded Systems was held at the Hyatt Regency, Pune, India between January 5-10, 2013. The first two days were tutorial sessions, while the main conference began on Monday, January 7, 2013.

26th VLSID 2013

Day 1: Tutorial

On the first day, I attended the tutorial on “Concept to Product – Design, Verification & Test: A Tutorial” by Prof. Kewal Saluja, and Prof. Virendra Singh. Prof. Saluja started the tutorial with an introduction and history of VLSI. An overview of the VLSI realization process was given with an emphasis on synthesis. The theme of the conference was “green” technology, and hence the concepts of low power design were introduced. The challenges of multi-core and high performance design including cache coherence were elaborated. Prof. Singh explained the verification methodologies with an example of implementing a DVD player. Simulation and formal verification techniques were compared, with an overview on model checking. Prof. Saluja explained the basics of VLSI testing, differences between verification and testing, and the various testing techniques used. The challenges in VLSI testing were also discussed.

Day 2: Tutorial

On the second day, I attended the tutorial on “Formal Techniques for Hardware/Software Co-Verification” by Prof. Daniel Kroening, and Prof. Mandayam Srinivas. Prof. Kroening began the tutorial with the motivation for formal methods. Examples on SAT solvers, boundary model checking for hardware, and bounded program analysis for C programs were explained. Satisfiability modulo theories for bit-vectors, arrays and functions were illustrated with numerous examples. In the afternoon, Prof. Srinivas demoed formal verification for both Verilog and C. He shared the results of verification done for both a DSP and a microprocessor. The CProver tool has been released under a CMBC license. After discussion with Fedora Legal, and Prof. Kroening, it has been updated to a BSD license for inclusion in Fedora. The presentation slides used in the tutorial are available.

Day 3: Main conference

The first day of the main conference began with the keynote by Mr. Abhi Talwalker, CEO of LSI, on “Intelligent Silicon in the Data-centric Era”. He addressed the challenges in bridging the data deluge gap, latency issues in data centers, and energy efficient buildings. The second keynote of the day was given by Dr. Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow, on “Opportunities and Challenges for High Performance Microprocessor Designs and Design Automation”. Dr. Ruchir spoke about the various IBM multi-core processors, and the challenges facing multi-core designs – software parallelism, socket bandwidth, power, and technology complexity. He also said that more EDA innovation needs to come at the system level.

Dias

After the keynote, I attended the “C1. Embedded Architecture” track sessions. Liang Tang presented his paper on “Processor for Reconfigurable Baseband Modulation Mapping”. Dr. Swarnalatha Radhakrishnan then presented her paper on “A Study on Instruction-set Selection Using Multi-application Based Application Specific Instruction-Set Processors”. She explained about ASIPs (Application Specific Instruction Set Processor), and shared test results on choosing specific instruction sets based on the application domain. The final paper for the session was presented by Prof. Niraj K. Jha on “Localized Heating for Building Energy Efficiency”. He and his team at Princeton have used ultrasonic sensors to implement localized heating. A similar approach is planned for lighting as well.

Post-lunch, I attended the sessions for the track “B2. Test Cost Reduction and Safety”. The honourable chief minister of Maharashtra, Shri. Prithviraj Chavan, arrived in the afternoon to formally inaugurate the conference. He is an engineer who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and said that he was committed to put Pune on the semiconductor map. The afternoon keynote was given by Mr. Kishore Manghnani from Marvell, on “Semiconductors in Smart Energy Products”. He primarily discussed about LEDs, and their applications. This was followed by a panel discussion on “Low power design”. There was an emphasis to create system level, software architecture techniques to increase leverage in low power design. For the last track of the day, I attended the sessions on “C3. Design and Synthesis of Reversible Logic”. The Keccak sponge function family has been chosen to become the SHA-3 standard.

Day 4: Main conference

The second day of the main conference began with a recorded keynote by Dr. Paramesh Gopi, AppliedMicro, on “Cloud computing needs at less power and low cost” followed by a talk by Mr. Amal Bommireddy, AppliedMicro, on “Challenges of First pass Silicon”. Mr. Bommireddy discussed the factors affecting first pass success – RTL verification, IP verification, physical design, routing strategies, package design, and validation board design. The second keynote of the day was by Dr. Louis Scheffer from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on “Deciphering the brain, cousin to the chip”. It was a brilliant talk on applying chip debugging techniques to inspect and analyse how the brain works.

After the keynote, I visited the exhibition hall where companies had their products displayed in their respective stalls. AppliedMicro had a demo of their X-gene ARM64 platform running Ubuntu. They did mention to me that Fedora runs on their platform. Marvell had demonstrated their embedded and control solutions running on Fedora. ARM had their mbed.org and embeddedacademic.com kits on display for students. Post-lunch, was an excellent keynote by Dr. Vivek Singh, Intel Fellow, titled “Duniyaa Maange Moore!”. He started with what people need – access, connectivity, education, and healthcare, and went to discuss the next in line for Intel’s manufacturing process. The 14nm technology is scheduled to be operational by end of 2013, while 10nm is planned for 2015. They have also started work on 7nm manufacturing processes. This was followed by a panel discussion on “Expectations of Manufacturing Sector from Semiconductor and Embedded System Companies” where the need to bridge the knowledge gap between mechanical and VLSI/embedded engineers was emphasized.

Day 5: Main conference

The final day of the main conference began with the keynote by Dr. Vijaykrishnan Narayanan on “Embedded Vision Systems”, where he showed the current research in intelligent cameras, augmented reality, and interactive systems. I attended the sessions for the track “C7. Advances in Functional Verification”, and “C8. Logic Synthesis and Design”. Post-lunch, Dr. Ken Chang gave his keynote on “Advancing High Performance System-on-Package via Heterogeneous 3-D Integration”. He said that Intel’s 22nm Ivy Bridge which uses FinFETs took nearly 15 years to productize, but look promising for the future. Co(CoS) Chip on Chip on Substrate, and (CoW)oS Chip on Wafer on Substrate technologies were illustrated. Many hardware design houses use 15 FPGAs on a board for testing. The Xilinx Virtex-7HT FPGA has analog, memory, and ARM microprocessor integrated on a single chip giving a throughput of 2.8 Terabits/second. He also mentioned that Known Good Die (KGD) methodologies are still emerging in the market. For the last track of the conference, I attended the sessions on “C9. Advances in Circuit Simulation, Analysis and Design”.

Shakthi Kannan

Thanks to Red Hat for sponsoring me to attend the conference.

About the Author – Shakthi Kannan

Shakthi Kannan is a Senior Software Engineer with Red Hat in Pune, and is also a very active member of the open source community. For more details about him, see his Linkedin Profile, or his blog.

Event Report: 7th IndicThreads Software Development Conference

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(This is a live blog of the talks being given at the 7th IndicThreads Software Development Conference happening in Pune today and tomorrow. The slides of the individual talks will become available on the conference website tomorrow.)

Keynote Address: Suhas Kelkar: Technology Is Just The Start

The the keynote address was by Suhas Kelkar, CTO (APAC) for BMC Software, also in charge of driving BMC’s Incubator Team globally as well as the overall technical and business strategy.

The main point Suhas made was that technology is a great way to innovate, but technology is not enough. There are many other things beyond technology to look at to build great software products.

Any technology innovator must understand the technology adoption curve that Geoffrey Moore explained in Crossing the Chasm. First you innovate and create a new technology, and the first people to use it are the early adopters. And to keep the early adopters you need to keep adding technology features. But the set of early adopters is small. You cannot get mainstream success based on the early adopters. And most new technology innovations fail at this stage. Getting the mainstream to adopt the technology you need to win them over with non-technology things like better user experience, reliability, low cost, etc. And this is necessary, otherwise you’re technology innovation will be wasted. So you must learn to focus on these things (at the right stage in the life-cycle of the product)

Technology innovation is easy. Feature/function innovation is easy. User experience innovation is hard. Getting reliability without increasing cost is very hard. The best technologists need to work on these problems.

Karanbir Gujral: Grammar of Graphics: A New Approach to Visualization

The world has too much data, but not enough information. Not enough people working on converting raw data to easily consumable, actionable information. Hence, the area of data visualization is very important.

“Grammar of Graphics” is a new approach to visualization. It is not simply a library of different types of chart. Instead, it is a language which can be used to describe chart type, or even easily declare/create new chart types. Think of it as the SQL equivalent of graphics.

The language describes features of charts, not specific names/types. For example, instead of saying “bar chart”, you would describe it as a chart with basic 2D co-ordinates, categorical x numeric, displayed with intervals.

Where is this available?

  • Book: Grammar of Graphics by Leland Wilkinson
  • Open Source software packages:
  • ProtoVis and D3 for JavaScript users
  • Ggplot2 for R users
  • Bokeh for Python users
  • Commercial Software
  • IBM RAVE
  • Tableau

More specifically, the grammar allows specification of a chart using six different properties:

  • Element Type:
    • point, line, area, interval (bar), polygon, schema, text.
    • Any element type can be used with any underlying data
  • Co-ordinates:
    • Any number of dimensions (1D, 2D, etc)
    • Clustering and stacking
    • Polar
    • Transpositions
    • Map projections
      Guides:
    • Simple Axis
    • Nested Axis
    • Facet Axis
      Layouts
    • Standard sequential/stacking layout
    • Graph Layouts (Network, Treelike)
    • Treemaps
    • Custom Layouts
      Aesthetics/Style:
    • Map data to graphic attributes
    • Color (exterior/interior, gradient)
    • Size (width, height, both)
    • Symbol
      Faceting:
    • Splitting data into multiple charts
    • Chart-in-chart
    • Panels

Ideally, you would like each of these 6 different types of properties to be orthogonal to each other. You should be able to mix and match any type of element type with any type of co-ordinate system, with any aesthetics/style. Thus, specifying the values of these six different properties gives a specific type of chart.

Karanbir gave an example of how a simple bar chart is specified using a language like this. The specification was in JSON. I could not capture it in this live blog, but check out the slides for the actual specification. It is quite interesting.

Having to write out a largish specification in JSON just to get a bar chart doesn’t seem to be that useful, but the real power of this approach becomes apparent when you need to make changes or combine the different properties in new/unique ways. The power of orthogonality and composition become readily apparent, and you are able to do really big and cool changes with simple modifications to the specification. Karanbir’s demo of different visualizations for the same data using simple changes to the spec was very intersting. Again, see the slides for some examples.

Mohan Kumar Muddana: JVM the Polyglot Platform

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) was initially built for Java. But now it handles many different languages. More specifically, it was built to only handle classes, but now so many different types of language constructs from modern languages newer than Java are handled. Since Java6 (JSR223), JVM has supported scripting (Groovy, Jython, JRuby). Starting with Java7 (JSR292), the JVM has added the ‘invokedynamic’ construct, allowing support for dynamically typed languages, which makes it easier to implement all the features of interpreted languages on the JVM – and not just those that are compiled to bytecode.

Why would you want to run other languages on the JVM? Because you can get the speed and stability of the JVM and combine it with the productivity, or ease-of-use, or the different paradigm of the other languages.

Some interesting JVM based languages to check out:

  • Scala: Pure object oriented language with Traits, Case Classes and Pattern Matching, and Type Erasure.
  • Clojure: Pure functional language
  • Groovy

The slides of the talk contain lots of details and examples of why these languages are cool.

Sushanta Pradhan: Typesafe Stack Software Development on the JVM

The world is moving towards apps that need Scalability, Distributed, Parallel & Concurrent, Dynamic and Agile and Swift.

Concurrent access to data-structures is a big pain when trying to implement parallel programs.

Scala is a functional, concise programming language written on top of the JVM, and inter-operates with Java (i.e. you can very easily access all the Java standard library and any other Java code you might have from Scala code). It has immutable and mutable variables; it has tuples, multiple assignments in a single statements, sensible defaults, and operator overloading.

Scala has the following important features that help with implementation of parallel code:

  • Parallelism:
    • Parallel Data-Structures
    • Distributed Data-Structures
  • Concurrency:
    • Actor Model
    • Software Transactional Memory
    • Futures

Akka Middleware is a concurrent, scalable and fault tolerant framework based on the actor model. It is event driven and highly performant. It has a supervision model which establishes relationships between actors, and the supervisor can detect and correct errors of the subordinate model. This is a model of reliability based on the belief that you cannot completely avoid failures, so you should simply let your actor fail, and allow the supervisor to take corrective action.

Akka is written using Scala, but has Java APIs, so you can use Akka without really having to use or know Scala.

The Play framework, gives Ruby-on-Rails style agility in the Java world by adopting the convention-over-configuration techniques from Rails, has seamless integration with Akka, and hot deployment which makes it easier to have agile code updates. Play has an easy, out of the box setup for unit and functional testing, asynchronous HTTP request handling, WebSocket support, support for caching (e.g. memcaching).

Play has progressive stream processing. This is based on the iteratee model, which improves over the iterator model by allowing you to easily work with streaming data in which the collection size is not fixed beforehand. Similarly there are enumerator and enumeratees.

Play is written using Scala, and has integration with Akka, but it can be used without Akka, and it has Java APIs, so you can use Play without really having to use or know either Scala or Akka.

Scala, Akka and Play together are called the TypeSafe stack, and is a modern JVM based software stack for building scalable applications.

Mushtaq Ahmed/Shripad Agashe: Using Play! 2.0 to Build a Website

Important features of Play!

  • Powerful Templating: Play! has A heavy focus on type-safety across all the layers. This means that even the templating engine has type-safety built in; thus the templates are statically compiled and check for type safety.
  • Routes: Statically compiled reverse routes. Ease of refactoring routes due to compiler support. All references to routes are via reverse routes, no hard-coded routes.
  • Non-blocking: End-to-end non-blocking architecture. Thus a small number of threads can handle large numbers of concurrent requests. There are no callbacks.
  • Great Developer Workflow: Hot reloading, error display (compile time and runtime errors shown in browser), and in-memory database during development.

The rest of this talk contained a code walk-through of Play! features and an implementation of an insurance website using Play! 2.0.

Arun Tomar: Cloud Automation using Chef

Chef is an open source framework that allows the creation of automated scripts that help with hardware/software infrastructure management and deployment. Previously, app upgrades/deployments were manual processes that took hours if not days. Chef allows creation of scripts (written in Ruby) which fully automate these processes.

Chef is cross-platform, so it supports pretty much everything: Windows, Linux, Sun, Mac, BSD, AIX etc.

A Chef deployment consists of a Chef server, which holds all the configuration information for all your infrastructure (aka recipes), a Chef workstation (i.e. the machine from which you will run the Chef recipes), and the actual servers/machines that will be controlled/configured using Chef (aka Chef nodes). Chef client software needs to be installed on each node. The Chef workstation then takes the Chef script (or recipe) from the Chef server, breaks it up into pieces to be executed on each individual server/machine and sends those instructions to the Chef client on the nodes using ssh.

Each Chef recipe is used to configure some part of a server: e.g. Apache, MySQL, Hadoop, etc. These recipes describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state – packages that should be installed, services that should be running, or files that should be written. Chef makes sure each resource is properly configured, and gives you a safe, flexible, easily-repeatable mechanism for making sure your servers are always running exactly the way you want them to.

Core principles of Chef:

  • Idempotence: doing an operation should be idempotent. This ensures that when scripts fail halfway through, you can just re-run the whole script and everything will just work properly and the script will complete cleanly, without doing anything twice.
  • Order Matters: the steps in a recipe will get executed in the order they’re written
  • You are the Boss: Most infrastructure solutions force you to adapt to their “one-size-fits-all” approaches, even though every infrastructure challenge is different. This is crazy. Instead, Chef allows you to be in full charge of everything and you can configure everything exactly the way you want it – and you have the full power of the Ruby programming language to specify this to any level of detail required.

A big advantage of Chef is that Chef recipes are essentially a self-documenting record of your actual infrastructure. In addition, when you add new servers, Chef automatically discovers information your system. So, for example, when you need to do something on production, you simply ask Chef, which knows what is really happening, and you don’t need to rely on static documentation that might be out of date.

Another advantage of Chef is the extensive library of existing recipes for standard things that people would like to install/control using Chef. For example, consider this:

include_recipe "apache2"

This line is enough to install apache2 on any machine, irrespective of which OS the machine is running. This is possible because all the hardwork of actual commands and configurations for Apache2 for all the various supported platforms has already been done for you by someone else!

In addition, Chef contains templates (e.g. a template for apache2 ) which contain the various configuration parameters that can be configured by you easily. So if you don’t want to standard apache2 installation, you can “include” a template, over-ride a few parameters, and you’re done.

Here are some examples of what chef can do:

  • It can use rpm, or apt-get, or dpkg, or yum, or python-pip, or python-easy_install, or ruby gems, or whatever your package installer happens to be and install packages. It is smart enough to know whether a package is already installed and which version, and will not do unnecessary things.
  • It can update configuration files, start and stop services, and install plugins for software packages that can handle plugins.
  • It can automatically clone git repositories, make/build/install, handle dependencies, execute scripts.

Shubham Srivastava: NoSQL – Now and the Path Ahead

Why NoSQL?

  • Scalability and Performance
    • Horizontal scalability is better than vertical scalability
    • Hardware is getting cheaper and processing power in increasing
    • Less operational complexity compared to RDBMS solutions
    • Get automatic sharding as default
  • Cost
    • Scale without Hefty Cost
    • Commodity Hardware, and free/open source software (think versions, upgrades, maintenance)
  • Flexibility in Data Modeling.
    • Key-value stores (very powerful…)
    • Hierarchical or Graph Data
    • Storing values like maps, or maps of maps
    • Document databases – with arbitrarily complex objects

The next part of the talk was a detailed look at advantages and disadvantages of a specific type of NoSQL data base for answering specific queries.

CSI Conference: Big Data and Analytics – Dec 8

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Big Data has a Billion Dollar market and expected to create 4.4 Million IT jobs globally by 2015. This Big Data conference is a step-by-step guide on critical aspects that the IT professionals and students must know. The take-away from the conference will be 360 degree overview on technologies and applications in Big Data domain.

Program Contents

  • Keynote:
    • Perspective on Big Data by Anand Deshpande, Persistent
  • Tools and techniques:
    • Learn about Hadoop, Hive etc. by Kalpak Shah, Clogeny
    • Data Warehousing and Big Data by Akshay Bogawat, Infosys
  • Big Data and Analytics Implementation:
    • Retail Sector by Deepak Badhani, Sears
    • Media and Publishing by Sayali Kulkarni, PubMatic
    • Enterprise by Karan Gujral, IBM
  • Panel:
    • Big Data, Big Challenges by Roby John (Tap-to-Learn), Girish Mujumdar (VMWare), Karan Gujral (IBM), etc.

Fees and Registration

This event is open for anybody to attend. Fees: Rs. 800 for CSI members, and Rs. 1000 for others. Please register here

(Note: PuneTech has a policy of not promoting paid events, but in this case, the fees are reasonable, and CSI is a non-commercial organization, so we felt an exception was justified.)

vodQA Pune testing/QA event – 13th Oct

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vodQA Pune, to be held on October 13th in Pune, is an event for software testing and QA professionals.

In this edition of vodQA, the focus is on testing beyond the usual. The discussions will range from functional and cross-functional areas like Security, Usability, Scalability and Performance, to understanding testing practices within industries such as Manufacturing and Banking, among others.

The call for speakers. If you can give a talk (30 minutes), a workshop (60 minutes), or a quick lightening talk (5 minutes) in one of the above areas, you should apply. (Sorry, it appears that the call for speakers is now closed.)

For more details of vodQA, see the vodQA Pune 2012 page. (Note: although this page says that the last date for submitting a proposal has already passed, they are still accepting submissions.)

The event itself is free and open for anyone to attend. Register here. The event is on 13th October, from 9:30am to 4:30pm, at Thoughtwords, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada, Pune.

India’s Top IT Conference comes to Pune – NASSCOM Emergeout Conclave Pune – 12 Oct

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(NASSCOM’s EmergeOut Conclave is one of the top conferences in the country for software companies, and for the first time this year it is coming to Pune. Although PuneTech normally does not promote paid events, we make exceptions for exceptional events, and this is one of them, and also because there is a 35% discount for PuneTech readers. See below for details.)

What to expect at the EmergeOut Conference

  • Keynote address by Industry stalwarts and new age successful entrepreneurs – including the IT Secretary of Maharashtra, Ganesh Natarajan CEO of Zensar, Hitesh Oberoi, CEO of Naukri.com, Jaspreet Singh, CEO of Druva.com, and Mahesh Murthy, co-founder of SeedFund
  • Series of workshops and high powered panel discussions – including how to cross 50cr in revenues (Anand Deshpande), Whitespaces in Cloud Technologies, Mobile Technologies, How can a small company make it big (Mukul Kumar, Pubmatic, Harbinger), Big Data and Analytics, Marketing, Sales, Social Media,
  • Showcase – Your Story: a showcase of the top IT startups in India
  • The Winners of the App Fame Contest

What is the EmergeOut Conference

The Indian IT Industry has been the poster boy success story of the new age India in the last two decades and continues to do so. The Emerge Community is one of the important pillars and back bone of any industry and more so in case of the IT Industry. These companies are more agile, hungry for success and ever ready to face challenges, of course all this comes with a handicap of size, financial constraint and competition, which makes the space more exciting for an entrepreneur.

The power of small is in being together. This one day conference will facilitate one on one interaction, share best practices, help you explore new opportunities and learn from others failures and success. The sessions and topics of the day are custom made for you to learn, benefit and contribute. More and more Indian companies are aspiring to join the Billion dollar club and are well on track on getting there. “Breaking the Glass Ceiling” and exploring beyond, forms the core theme of Emerge Out Pune.

Emerge Out Pune is all about participation of companies from the product, mobility, services space and beyond and offers a unique opportunity for organisations to collaborate and partner with the key stake holders. We have tried our best to package the day in a way that there is something and more for everyone to take away, as we know for an Emerge company, it is always “Yeh Dil Mange More”

For more details see the EmergeOut Pune website, the list of speaker profiles and the agenda

Registration and Fees

Here are the instructions for availing of the 35% discount for PuneTech readers:

  • Visit the registration page and click ‘Register Now’
  • Select your ‘Membership Category-Non Member’ and quantity
  • Fill the Discount Code (PTNPTECHEC050) for discounted rate in the field ‘Got a Discount Code’ and click ‘Register’
  • Complete the Form and Submit
  • Please make sure you should register before by 4th October, else this code will expire.

Call for Speakers: IndicThreads Conference Pune

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The call for speakers for the IndicThreads’ software technology conference is open. The conference is in December, but the CFP closes this week (22 September), and you should submit a proposal

IndicThreads have been holding tech conferences in Pune for the last 7 years, and their conferences are the top pure technology conferences in Pune. An IndicThreads conference is one of the best places to hear about the latest trends in the software industry, and to meet techies from large and small companies of not only Pune, but the rest of the country too.

The conference itself is paid, but becoming a speaker is a good way to get into the conference for free.

This time around, the conference will cover a wide range of technologies from Java, Cloud Computing, Mobile App Development to emerging technologies like Big Data, Gamification, HTML5. (Traditionally, IndicThreads used to have a Java conference – but this year, they are broadening the theme.)

The CFP calls for submissions in these areas:

  • Software Architecture
  • Cloud Computing: IaaS, SaaS, PaaS
  • Design methodology
  • Mobile Software Platforms
  • Mobile Software Development
  • Software Testing
  • Optimization, Scaling, Caching and Performance Tuning
  • Java Language Specs & Standards
  • Enterprise Java (JavaEE)
  • JVM Languages
  • Software Security
  • Development Frameworks
  • Big Data
  • NoSQL Software Development
  • Agile
  • HTML5
  • New and emerging technologies
  • Case Studies and Real World Experiences

But feel free to submit other topics in software technology too. The audience consists mostly of software architects and project leads from various product and services companies across India. If you have done any interesting work in one of the areas above, you should submit a proposal. For now, all you need to do is submit a one paragraph abstract of what you’d like to talk about.

Why?

  • Because you get a free pass to the conference
  • Get recognized amongst the community as an expert in an area
  • It strengthens the tech community in Pune, which benefits all of us.

The submission deadline is 22 Sept, so submit your proposal now. For more details about the conference itself, see the conference webpage.

Call for Speakers: ClubHack Security Conference 2012

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ClubHack is one of India’s foremost conferences on Security and is now in its 6th year. As usual, it will be on the first weekend of December (1st to 3rd) in Pune.

However, rather than focusing on just plain security and awareness of security, ClubHack is now changing its focus. Here is the motivation:

ClubHack when started in 2007, dreamt that people in India will wake up and start thinking information security seriously. We even decided our motto as “Making Security a Common Sense”. After 5 long years, today we witness a lot of action around the country in this field, media as well as working professionals are actually looking towards security seriously.

Waking up to an extent that today we see 5-6 similar events in India on the same line. Hence we have now decided to confer the task of rest of the awakening to them and start a new journey.

ClubHack2012 onwards, we will concentrate our energies in empowering innovation & leadership development. Having loved our domain so much, we’d continue to do this in the domain of information security only. And that coins our new motto line “Empowering Innovation & Leadership in Information Security”

With this in mind, this year’s ClubHack is looking for speakers who can emphasize entrepreneurship in this space. So, here is a partial list of suggested topics:

  • Entrepreneurship in infosec product development
  • Research work in infosec
  • Innovation in attack vectors
  • Attacks on Cloud
  • Mobile computing
  • Malware & Botnets
  • Privacy with social networks
  • Telecom Security (3G/4G, SS7, GSM/CDMA, VoIP) and Phone Phreaking
  • Hardware, Embedded Systems and other Electronic Devices Hacking
  • War of handhelds & BYOD
  • Cyber warfare & your role
  • Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
  • Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) – COMINT, ELINT, etc
  • Critical Infrastructure Protection
  • Security aspects in SCADA and industrial environments and “obscure” networks
  • & the general other infosec domains like web, network, tools & exploits etc.

Those who would like to deliver a workshop at ClubHack2012, please write to cfp@clubhack.com to discuss the details.

Why become a speaker? In addition to helping the community, becoming well known and famous, meeting interesting people in this area, you also get:

  • Travel reimbursement or arrangement of economy return tickets for speakers
  • Accommodation for 2
  • Complementary passes for event & party for 2
  • Gift hampers & freebies

See the CFP link for more details of how to submit a proposal.

ACM Compute 2012 academic conference in Pune – 23/24 Jan

Events, Featured, , ,

ACM Pune, the local chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) one of the top associations of computer science academics and professionals, is holding Compute 2012, the first edition of its annual conference, on 23 and 24 January 2012. The theme for this conference is Intelligent and Scalable Computing Systems. Prof. R. K. Shyamsunder, TIFR, Mumbai and Dr. Lokendra Shastri, Infosys Ltd are general co-chairs for COMPUTE 2012.

Agenda

Keynote speakers:

  • Dr. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Deputy Director General of Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI)
  • Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT-Bombay

Other speakers include Dr Aditya Abhyankar, HoD, Department of Technology, Pune University, IITB, Dr Deepak Khemani, Professor IIT Mandi, Dr Abhay Jere, Persistent Systems Ltd, and Dr Girish Palshikar, Tata Research Design and Development Centre.

These are the papers that have been selected for presentation at Compute 2012:

  • Scalable Lock-Free FIFO Queues using Efficient Elimination Techniques
  • A Robust Neural Network Classifier to Model the Compressive Strength of High Performance Concrete Using Feature Selection
  • Mining Research Abstracts for Exploration of Research Communities
  • A Generic Topology Discovery Approach for Huge Social Networks
  • Multimodal Biometric System Based on Hand geometry, Palmprint and Signature
  • A Review of Path Planning and Mapping Technologies for Autonomous Mobile Robot Systems
  • A Knowledge-based Formalization of UBL Processes using Hybrid programs
  • GPU implementation of a novel hybrid lattice Boltzmann method for non-isothermal flows
  • Texture Edge Statistics for Efficient Retrieval of Biomedical Images Recognition and Classifier
  • Enabling High Performance Computing using Microsoft HPC Server
  • RobExT: A tool to customize microarray data for Cell Designer and Cytoscape
  • FIRA – A novel method for benchmarking the cache hierarchy.
  • Insertion and Querying Mechanism For A Distributed XML Database System
  • Parallel Algorithm to Evaluate Contextual Features for Term Weighting
  • Reconstructing the Software Environment of an Experiment with Kameleon

For selected posters, the program committee, and other details of the conference, see the conference website

Registration and Fees

The conference is open to anybody. Fees are Rs. 3500(2500) for professionals, Rs. 2500(2000) for academics, and Rs. 2000(1500) for students. (Numbers in parenthesis indicate rates for ACM Members). Register here.

The conference will be at YASHADA, on Baner Road, near University Circle.

Demo Space for Pune Startups

ACM Pune also invites technology startups in Pune to exhibit their products to the ACM audience for a fee of Rs. 5000 for one day. Selected startups will be provided with one table and a standee for the exhibition. This is a chance for a startup to reach out to a very select audience of computer science professionals from all over the country. For more details, watch for an announcement on the Pune Startups mailing list.

About ACM Pune

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society for the Computer Science/IT community, delivering resources that advance computing as a science and a profession for the past 70 years. The ACM India council was formed 2 years ago with a mandate of playing an active role in the science and profession of computing, with a special emphasis on India.

ACM Pune is the Pune chapter of ACM.