Vinayak Hegde

ACM Compute 2010 concluded yesterday. It is the flagship conference of the ACM Bangalore chapter. This year was the 3rd edition of the conference and more than 500 people attended the conference. The highlight of this year’s conference was the launch of ACM India. ACM wants to increase it reach in India and ACM India Council consisting of 18 leading computer scientists from academia and industry are heading this initiative.

The ACM India launch was addressed by 3 Turing Award Winners – Barbara Liskov, C.A.R Hoare (Tony Hoare) and Raj Reddy. The ACM Turing award is “The Nobel Prize for Computing” and it is rare to see three Turing Award winners address the audience at any event. Barbara Liskov is the most recent awardee of the Turing award (the 2nd woman to win it) and she spoke on the power of abstraction. She spoke about the problems early programmers faced when writing large and complex programs. She explained how she tried to solve it using abstractions similar to (what is now called) Object-oriented programming. She talked at length on how her insights and experiences with these programming problem led to design of the CLU language. CLU was the first language to implement iterators and generators (as well as exception handling). It was a good lesson in computer history listening to her. I learned later that she was the first woman to get her PhD from a Computer Science Department. (Her doctoral advisor was the legendary John McCarthy). Her presentation and the mentioned references in it make for good reading.

Dr Raj Reddy is the only Indian who has won the Turing award for his contributions to field of Artificial Intelligence. Incidentally, his PhD advisor was also John McCarthy – AI Pioneer and Turing Award winner. Dr Raj Reddy spoke about the growth of computing over the years and the challenges of reaching the “bottom of the Pyramid”. He explained why there was need to move from the WIMP-paradigm in user interfaces to the SILK (Speech, Image, Language and Knowledge) to increase the reach of computing. His Turing award lecture (“To dream the possible dream”) makes for interesting read as well.

C.A.R Hoare (Tony Hoare) was the next speaker. He is a living legend in computer science. I was looking forward to hearing him speak as I had studied the Quicksort algorithm (which he invented) and Communicating Sequential Processes paper in college. He was remarkably witty and his enthusiasm for computer science shone through in his talk. In particular he spoke about the Verified Software initiative which he contended was similar in scope and impact (for Computer Science) to the Hubble Telescope and the Human genome project.

The following 2 days, we had the ACM Compute 2010 conference and there were several hands-on Tutorials on Cloud Computing, Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 apps, Widgets and Mobile Applications. The RIA tutorial was conducted by Mrinal Wadhwa (slides embedded below) and the Facebook connect tutorial by Prateek Dayal (of Muziboo).

(Disclosure:I am the secretary of the Bangalore Chapter and am on the program committee for ACM Compute 2010.)

With winter approaching fast we are also into conference season.

ACM Compute 2010 – 22nd & 23rd Jan, 2010.

ACM Bangalore chapter is organising ACM Compute 2010 which is into it’s third year now. This year the broad theme is Cloud computing and Information retrieval, management and analytics. The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers, practitioners, technology market movers, and thought leaders, with a view to advance the state of the art, and the state of the practice in applied research. This year we are planning to do something special – details soon The Call of papers (CFP) is out for sometime now and the last date for submissions is Oct 1 2009. You can also submit a proposal for a half-day or day long tutorial. Last year we had a bunch of good tutorials and also the symposium on Cloud Computing co-located with ACM Compute 2009 which was a great success.

Disclaimer: I am on the program committee of ACM Bangalore and am the secretary of the ACM Bangalore chapter.

Pycon India 2009 – 26th & 27th Sep 2009

Also this weekend (26th and 27th September 2009) India’s first Pycon India 2009 is being held in Bangalore. There is an interesting list of talks lined up. So do register if you are interested in attending.

Foss.in – December 1-5, 2009.

Foss.in shifts to a new venue this year NIMHANS convention centre. This year promises to be interesting as the venue is available for longer durations. Also there are going to be hacker evening/nights where tinkerers can meetup and talk about a whole range of stuff not restricted to just FOSS. My educated guess is something on the lines of CCC in Germany. Definitely something to look forward to. Plus I think there will be atleast one evening where we will have music . So join the mailing list if you are interested in presenting/attending as more details should emerge soon.

Joseph Koshy is a FreeBSD developer who has been contributing to FreeBSD for more than a decade. He recently gave a talk on “FreeBSD and PMCTools” as part of the ACM Bangalore Tech Talk Series. I was aware of Koshy’s work due to my interest in both system level performance monitoring (I have given a talk on this topic at Foss.in 2005) and FreeBSD. Having worked with porting BSD userland as part of my earlier work on SFU at Microsoft, I had read his name several times in FreeBSD Release notes and Changelogs. I was really surprised to hear from him that this was his first ever public lecture on FreeBSD/PMCtools tools.

Joseph started with an introduction to FreeBSD and the BSD philosophy (In short – don’t worry about ideology just code . He then explained how the architecture of PMC tools evolved and the challenges of writing such a tool. One of the challenges of performance counters is that the number and nature of performance counters changes with every generation of Intel/AMD chips so some of the assumptions go for a toss. So the code has to be writen with long term portability in mind while keeping the UI (command line in this case – A GUI interface is in the works but not a top priority. If you are interested in contributing to FOSS, this is a good opportunity – get in touch with Joseph). The PMCtools code is well written and is referenced in a “Communications of the ACM” (CACM) article as an example of beautiful and well-written code. His presentation at the ACM Tech Talk follows. It can be downloaded here

This is a belated post as I was really busy coming back from injury trying to catch up with work.

Cloudcamp Bangalore went off well in end March with good attendance. Out of the 400 people who registered, more than 300 people turned up. There were quite a few interesting discussions.

The format was a cross between a normal conference and an an unconference. Some of the sessions were planned beforehand (not scheduled on the spot as in an unconference). The “UnPanel” format was a big hit. In the UnPanel, we asked who amongst the audience felt they were the experts on a certain topic (such as security, networks, storage etc) and invited them onstage to form the panel. Then we asked the rest of the audience, what questions they expected to be answered during the conference. Then we wrote down these questions on the board and got the unpanelists to answer them. This got the audience involved and spawned some animated conversations which continued over lunch.

There were 4 parallel sessions after lunch on a variety of topics related to CloucComputing. Here are some presentations from those post-lunch sessions:

Snappyfingers

Snappyfingers is a FAQ search Engine. Snappy Fingers uses S3, SQS and EC2 services from Amazon to run it’s infrastructure. Chirayu Patel explains some of the lessons from building a search engine using Cloud services in the following presentation.

ACK Media

ACK Media is also using S3 and EC2 Cloud services to build a MMORPG. based on Indian epic Mahabharata. Arjun Gupte from ACK media explains why he used cloud computing to build the game and the architecture of the game in the following presentation.