Tag Archives: Events

PuneTech Event: Data Analytics in Location & Intent Aware Mobile Promotions

External Visitors, , ,

This Friday, we have a distinguished visitor from the Silicon Valley – Sanjay Mittal, a serial entrepreneur, investor, advisor to startups, with a highly successful track record in building and managing software technology companies. He will talk about his current interest – use of Data Analytics in Location and Intent aware Mobile Promotions.

The event is on Friday, 13 September, 5pm to 7pm, at MCCIA, ICC Trade Towers, SB Road.

Abstract of Talk

Search, Location and Mobile Ads can be put together to create targeted promotions for mobile users. Measuring and improving performance of these promotions is a different matter altogether. Join us to hear Sanjay Mittal (Chairman & CTO of Spotzot Inc) walk you through importance, methods and instruments of data collection, analysis and ad tuning, and how it can create a win-win situation for retailers, advertisers, publishers and consumers.

About the Speaker – Sanjay Mittal

Software Entrepreneur, Technologist, Private Investor, Advisor to Startups. Highly successful track record in building and managing software technology companies. Strong technology background in internet and artificial intelligence technologies.

Sanjay is currently a co-founder, Chairman of the Board, and CTO at mobile startup SpotZot. SpotZot has built a network of 30 million high-intent mobile shoppers who regularly make their purchases offline at brick and mortar retailers. Spotzot reaches these shoppers by providing a location based in-app shopping service to high traffic shopping, search and game applications. Spotzot allows retailers and brands to help consumers discover the hottest trends, best offers and coupons and find a store nearby.

Sanjay has been a co-founder and CEO of NASDAQ-listed company Selectica which makes software products to help the largest companies in the world improve the effectiveness of their sales and contracting processes.

In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, Sanjay has been a senior researcher at Xerox PARC, a director of TiE Silicon Valley, and many other achievements which can be seen on his linkedin profile

Sanjay has done his B.Tech. Electrical Engineering from IIT-Delhi in 1975, and an MS in CS from the University of Nebraska, USA.

Fees and Registration

The event is on Friday, 13 September, 5pm-7pm, at MCCIA Hall No. 5, 5th Floor, A-Wing, ICC Towers, SB Road. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Get notifications of future event announcements. Click here to subscribe (free) to the PuneTech Calendar of events.

RailsGirls Pune – The Gold and the Beautiful

Event Report, , , ,

(This event report of RailsGirls Pune – a one-day conference for women working on Ruby-on-Rails, first appeared on the Josh Software Blog, and is reproduced here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

I was skeptical! Just from my experience of organizing RubyConf India and some local meetups, I was sure the turnout would be low and the event would be ‘casually boring’. If only I knew how crazily wrong I was!

A few days before the event, seeing about 250 registrations was itself a revelation. Then the turnout of over a 100 girls was exhilarating to say the least. I mean, how often does one get a chance to address a crowd at a techie event with ‘Hello Ladies!’. I am indeed lucky.

RailsGirlsJosh Software was one of the sponsors along with ThoughtWorks and CodeIgnition. It was great to see a LOT of mentors turn up for the event — which in my opinion was one of the success factors of Rails Girls Pune – EVERYONE got attention and there was never a case where someone was sitting idle or looking around for help.

The demographics of the crowd was varied – quite a few girls had come down to Pune for this event, some even travelling most of the night to get here!. There were a lot of girls with a prior technical background but none in Ruby. And there were 5 people who were entirely new to programming and they too managed to code, gleefully if I may add! It’s not often you get to hear an artist talk about controllers and methods. 🙂

kid2

One good cultural change that stood out was the kids running around an event with their dad’s baby-sitting them while the mom’s coded!

Proceedings were kick-started off  by Gunjan from ThoughtWorks. She spoke about Women in Technology and Leadership and why such events are so important for everyone.

railsgirls1

After a brief introduction from other sponsors, all participants were divided among various tables and each table was assigned a mentor, though I saw at least 2 or 3 mentors at each table. Everyone was eager to help and answer questions.

RailsGirls3As the mentors were aware of the RailsGirls teaching process, it started of with getting familiar tryruby.org before moving on to other things like BentoBox and explaining basic concepts of Rails. Before long, everyone was busy working hard!

There were lot’s of discussions happening amidst kids running around, regular trips for getting more coffee or tea or some snacks. Before long, it was time for lunch and a breather.

chickendanceThoughtWorks organized an awesome lunch and after lunch, it required more than just Ruby to shake everyone up. What better than a ChikenDance for 5 minutes that started slow with a little bit of shyness among the audience but reached a crescendo with everyone joining in!

 

 

lighteningtalkThere were three Lightening Talks to get the crowd back into the coding groove. I spoke about why we love Ruby with the talk ”My Grandmother can read my code“.  Praveena  gave a talk on “Perks of being a Programmer” and Nishita gave a talk about “How the Internet works!”.

The afternoon was one busy session and everywhere you went, you heard only about Controllers, Scaffold, Bootstrap etc. – music to my ears!

Towards the end of the session, we had some participants showcase their work after uploading on Heroku. A few mentions of some really good work are  http://vast-mesa-2265.herokuapp.com/ideas and http://shrouded-cove-2185.herokuapp.com/

mentorsThe mentors did a wonderful job and got a lot of appreciation from all. Well, at the end of the day, a lot of people mad new friends. (Do not miss the “I <3 Matz” on the bottom right corner of the photo!)

Anup and Prathamesh wound up proceedings with introducing everyone to Pune Ruby User Group and after the prolonged networking that ensued, everyone called it a day and probably slept the night dreaming of instance variables!

A special thanks to Shilpa Nair and Hephzibah who did a wonderful job organizing RailsGirls. Hope to see more of these events soon. Do like the Rails Girls Facebook Page  and show your appreciation!

Event Report of @GhoseB’s 2-Day Clojure workshop – by @SwaroopCH

Event Reports, , , , ,

Last weekend BG aka @ghoseb conducted a 2-day free Clojure workshop – which was “sold out” and many people had to be disappointed.

Swaroop C H (who is famous for many things, one of which is A Byte of Python a free online book that has helped many people learn Python), was apparently in town, and attended the two sessions.

He has written a detailed and insightful event report. Here is his report of day 1 and report of day 2.

BG has promised to conduct another workshop for the people who couldn’t be accommodated in the first one due to space constraints.

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

Events, Featured, , , , , , ,

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

Events, , , ,

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

Events, ,

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.

Don’t miss tech events: Subscribe to the PuneTech Calendar

Featured, Miscellaneous, , ,

You are probably missing many, many interesting technology events that are happening in Pune. (In spite of the fact that you’re subscribed to PuneTech – because you are not subscribed to the PuneTech calendar)

Every week, there are at least 5-7 technology events in Pune. And they are all listed in the PuneTech Calendar. However, because the number is so high, we don’t post all of them to the PuneTech main page.

The fact that you got this article, means that you are subscribed to the PuneTech main page. However, we only selected events are posted to the PuneTech main page. All others are posted to the PuneTech Calendar, which has a different feed/subscription of its own.

For example, you were probably aware of C. Mohan’s talk on the Global Technology Outlook, and you probably know about the Turing 100 Lecture on Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. However, you are probably not aware of the following events all happening in the next 4 days:

  • A talk on Big Data with Hadoop
  • A Visual Studio Tech Tour by the Pune Microsoft Technologies User Group
  • An MCCIA Pune National conference on Cyber Security, where policy makers and decision makers from the Indian Army, Police, and other relevant Government organizations have been called for interactions with the security/tech community in Pune.
  • In-Product Email Marketing by K. Shashi, founder of Bandhan.com
  • IPMA (Indian Product Manager’s Association) Pune’s Event: 5 Things Every Product Manager should know about Agile
  • 2-day Scrum Gathering India Regional Event for Agile Enthusiasts (Paid)

And a few more.

All you need to do is click here and sign up get email alerts whenever an event is added to the PuneTech Calendar, or if you’re one of the 10 remaining people in the world still using RSS, here is the RSS feed, or you can directly import the calendar.

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

Events, Featured, , , , ,

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

Events, , , , , , ,

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.

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