Termcard for Michaelmas Term 2003

Freshers' Drinks

Tuesday 14th October, 19:00
Lamb & Flag, on St. Giles'

Freshers' Drinks is a chance to meet existing Compsoc members and find out what the society's all about. We'll be there all evening (as usual!) and will hopefully be easy to spot, so drop by at any time.

OUCS Tour

Tuesday 21st October, 18:00
OUCS

See what makes Oxford's network tick in this behind-the-scenes guided tour. Meet inside the foyer of 13 Banbury Road, and don't forget to bring your University Card or unfortunately OUCS won't let you in.

AMD

Wednesday 22nd October, 20:30
Comlab

Simon Cole from AMD will be coming along to give us the lowdown on their latest CPU innovations.

xrefer

Tuesday 28th October, 20:30
Comlab

Tim Bruce will explain to us how he and Steve Coast have been using layout algorithms developed for mapping the Internet to make an applet for exploring xrefer's data set (encyclopaedias, dictionaries, etc), and the open source backends behind it.

Herald Infrastructure

Thursday 30th October, 20:30
Comlab

Ray Miller from OUCS will give us a talk on Herald and related services. The Herald system provides a mail store facility to almost 30,000 users across the University of Oxford, with access via POP, IMAP and the WING web/mail gateway. The service is provided using commodity Intel-based hardware and 100% Free Software. In this talk he will describe the hardware and software components that make up the Herald cluster, with particular emphasis on the areas currently under active development.

Ray works as a Unix Systems Programmer at Oxford University Computing Services, where he leads the Systems Development and Support Team. He is a strong advocate of Free Software, particularly the GNU/Linux operating system.

Introduction to HTML and CSS

Wednesday 5th November, 20:00
Comlab

David Ford will give an introduction to HTML and CSS. No previous experience will be assumed — by the end of this talk you'll know all you need to create your own web-pages from scratch!

Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management: The Good, The Bad, and The Future

Thursday 6th November, 20:00
Comlab

Our fearless president will be covering some of the technologies involved in DRM in some detail, their social impact/implications, the business implications, what it means to developers and what it means to consumers. As ever there will be time for questions in what we're sure will be quite a hot topic.

Postponed to Tuesday 11th November.

Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management: The Good, The Bad, and The Future

Tuesday 11th November, 20:00
Comlab

Our fearless president will be covering some of the technologies involved in DRM in some detail, their social impact/implications, the business implications, what it means to developers and what it means to consumers. As ever there will be time for questions in what we're sure will be quite a hot topic.

Introduction to Linux

Wednesday 12th November, 20:00
Comlab

Our very own sysadmin team will give a talk on the Linux operating system targetted at the beginner. It will also briefly cover the facilities offered by the Compsoc network which they run.

Red Gate

Thursday 13th November, 20:30
Trinity College

Red Gate will give a general overview of .NET development, a look at their tools and how they are useful, and an insight into starting and running a successful small IT company.

PHP

Tuesday 18th November, 19:30
Comlab

Lee Jordan from impact:applications will be giving us a talk on PHP, a popular web development language. He will explain how you can use PHP to create dynamically generated pages quickly, highlighting the security traps people all too often fall into. No PHP experience is assumed.

Cancelled

Hands-on — HTML, CSS and web programming

Thursday 20th November, 20:00
NAPL (Denys Wilkinson Building)

This follow-up to the previous talks on HTML, CSS and web programming will offer the chance to explore them yourself with someone on hand if you get stuck.

Laserquest

Tuesday 25th November, 20:00
Gloucester Green

Compsoc's members will be emerging from the darkness of their terminal rooms to, well, the darkness of Laserquest. This long-standing tradition is always fun and well-attended. If you'd like to come, e-mail committee@ox.compsoc.net before the end of fifth week.

Termly General Meeting

Thursday 27th November, 19:00
Magdalen

As usual, Compsoc's Termly General Meeting provides an opportunity for the members to speak to the committee directly and find out about the running of the society. After the meeting is (rapidly) concluded, we will be heading to a local curry house in what tends to be one of Compsoc's most popular events!

Christmas Party

Tuesday 2nd December, 20:00
11 Goodson Walk, Marston

Celebrate the end of term and the start of the Christmas season in style. Nibbles will be provided, but please bring your own drinks.

To reach Goodson Walk go East along South Parks Road past the Science area. When the road turns right take the cycle path to Marston (straight on). At the second cattle grid go straight on past the first road on the right. Turn right, then immediately left after about 20 metres (into Purcell Road), continue straight on, onto a footpath, right at the end of the footpath then left onto Goodson Walk (number 11 is near the end)

A group will be leaving Keble lodge at 7:45pm in case you don't feel like braving these directions!

Machine Learning Applications in Information Access

Thursday 4th December, 20:30
Comlab

Hugo Zaragoza from Microsoft Research Cambridge will be giving us a talk on an active research topic he is working on.

The field of Information Retrieval deals with the problem of searching and manipulating textual data to answer user information needs, such as finding documents on the Internet, classifying email, summarising documents, tracking topics, etc. The application of Machine Learning techniques to Information Retrieval has been very successful in recent years, and is today one of the most promising directions. In my talk I will introduce basic concepts from Information Retrieval and Machine Learning and discuss a number of examples of successful applications, some of which are being incorporated into Microsoft products.