IEEE Oregon Hosted Speakers from Ubuntu Live and OSCON
IEEE Oregon Section Computer Society Chapter has arranged with the Ubuntu Live and OSCON Conferences to invite several speakers to make free local presentations July 23-36. Topics are:
 PACE (Professional Activities) Meeting:
There will be a No Host dinner after the meeting with the speaker. For further information or questions, contact John Prohodsky, john.prohodsky@ieee.org. Directions: To reach PSU Fourth Avenue, coming from the East or South take the 4th Avenue exit from I-405; coming from the North or West, take the 6th Avenue exit off I-405 and turn right onto Hall St. Paid parking is available under the Engineering Building (1930 SW 4th Ave) or in the surface lot at Hall and 4th. See www.pdx.edu/map.html for more details. The 3-laws of IT; Explaining the present and dictating the future. Speaker: Pauwl Lunow, Director, Qhuba Date: Monday, July 23, 2007 Time: 6:45-8pm Place: PSU Engineering Building, Room 102, 1930 SW 4th Avenue, Portland Cost: Free, open to public Abstract The 3-laws of IT have formed themselves into universal truths over the last 20 years. They have not only been the basic rules guiding the rise (and fall) of many IT phenomena and products, but also provide a solid framework to understand what the future will bring. Law 1: Consumerisation As is increasing clear, products and services are becoming more and more consumer oriented, consumer accepted, before reaching into the business arena. But how should you harness this movement, and how dangerous is it to our efforts of standardization in the last years? Law 2: Individualization People are becoming individuals in a way they never could before. With personal home pages, wider choices of what tools used to achieve the same goals, it's becoming increasingly more important in business terms to treat employees as individuals, not as large groups. This extends, of course, into IT use as well. Is there a link between a FaceBook, a MySpace and the corporate world? Law 3: Fragmentation Consumers have long been able to pick and choose what they buy from which shop, and accept having to go to one shop for food, another for shoes. Why then hasn't business IT cottoned on yet? Why are applications (e.g., SAP) still monolithic, and why are we relying on single service providers for our goods? Will Fragmentation threaten the likes of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft? The presentation explains what the 3-laws are, giving examples of how they reach outside of IT into all walks of life. It also gives advice on how to look for the tell-tale signs of the 3-laws manifesting themselves, and how to gear up your organization or products to cater for them. Particular attention is given to fragmentation, the threat it and open-source initiatives will bring to corporations like Microsoft, and how the big players are already gearing up to harness the laws themselves. Speaker Biography "Pauwl Lunow is a director at Qhuba, a Dutch-based IT company specialising in innovation processes and in improving the business results of IT through challenging basic IT principles. Previously he was Director of Innovation a Getronics, one of the largest Global IT service providers. He has also spent many years at Shell, in Asia, the Middle-East, US and Europe, implementing global standards for the Oil company. Pauwl now coaches CIO's and their teams on innovating internal IT, and helping companies align the benefits IT can bring with business processes. Originally South African, Pauwl lives with his wife and two daughters in the Burgundy region of France." High Performance Web Pages Speaker: Steve Souders, Chief Performance Yahoo!, Yahoo! Date: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 Time: 6:45-8pm Place: PSU Engineering Building, Room 102, 1930 SW 4th Avenue Portland Cost: Free, open to public Abstract Steve started Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team three years ago with the charter to quantify and improve the performance of all Yahoo! products worldwide. Typically, Steve talks about the best practices and tools the team has developed. In this talk he'll pop-up a level and talk about the process that was followed for establishing the team's leadership role in this area, and their success and challenges in evangelizing across hundreds of development teams at Yahoo!. Speaker Biography Steve Souders works at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he has developed a set of best practices for making web sites faster. He builds tools for performance analysis and evangelizes these best practices and tools across Yahoo!'s product teams. Prior to that he ran the development team for My Yahoo!. He's been at Yahoo! since 2000 working on many of the platforms and products within the company, including the scalability challenges of Yahoo!'s large number of users and page views. He's currently writing a book entitled High Performance Web Sites, to be published by O'Reilly in September '07. Lawyers as Hackers; Hackers as Lawyers: Free Software Law and How We Do It Speaker: Eben Moglen, Director, Software Freedom Law Center Date: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 Time: 6:45-8pm Place: PSU Unitus Building, Room 505, 2121 SW 4th Avenue, Portland Cost: Free, open to public Abstract The Software Freedom Law Center is the world's first and only non-profit legal services organization dedicated to providing free legal services to non-profits that make and distribute free and open source software. All out lawyers are hackers and all out hackers need lawyers. In this talk I use examples from our practice to show where the Free World is going and what its challenges are Speaker Biography Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. In addition to FSF, Professor Moglen has represented many of the world's leading free software developers. Professor Moglen earned his PhD in History and law degree at Yale University during what he sometimes calls his “long, dark period” in New Haven. After law school he clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the United States District Court in New York City and to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught at Columbia Law School – and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Virginia – since 1987. In 2003 he was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for efforts on behalf of freedom in the electronic society. The Spring Java Framework Speaker: Rod Johnson, CEO, Interface21 Date: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 Time: 6:45-8pm Place: PSU Engineering Building, Room 102, 1930 SW 4th Avenue, Portland Cost: Free, open to public Abstract The Spring Framework is the most popular application programming framework for Java/Java EE development, with widespread usage across many industries. Spring is an open source product, published under the Apache Software License, that enables POJO-based development, while making it easy for developers to access advanced enterprise services. In this presentation, Rod Johnson, the father of Spring and CEO of Interface21, will talk about advanced features of the Spring component model, and how it provides a basis for the rapidly evolving needs of modern applications. Spring provides a universal POJO programming model that is equally at home in a Java EE application server, lightweight web applications, grid compute farms, batch processing, and rich client applications, providing a unique ability to implement business logic in simple objects but leverage the power of enterprise technologies. Speaker Biography Rod Johnson is the author of the best-selling books "Expert One-on- One J2EE Design and Development," "J2EE without EJB" and "Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework," and is the founder of the Spring Framework. He is a member of the JCP and has served on the Servlet 2.4 and JDO 2.0 Expert Groups. Rod has been working with Java and JEE since their release, consulting in the media, insurance and financial industries. Open ID Speaker: David Recordon, Innovator, Verisign Date: Thursday, July 26, 2007 Time: 6:45-8pm Place: PSU Unitus Building, Room 507, 2121 SW 4th Avenue, Portland Cost: Free, open to public Abstract OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity. OpenID encompasses authentication, transactions, and user controlled sharing of personal information. OpenID has been rapidly gaining momentum growing from a grass-roots community at Six Apart to being supported by major vendors such as VeriSign, Symantec, Microsoft, AOL, Daum, and 37 Signals with nearly 120 million OpenID enabled accounts. With Open Source libraries in many languages (Ruby, PHP, Perl, C#, Java, Python, etc.) it is easy to integrate OpenID into an application. This has lead to widespread adoption throughout the Open Source community by software such as Ruby on Rails, Drupal, Plone, Confluence, and other popular community and enterprise collaboration tools. During this talk you'll learn more about what OpenID is, why in Tim O'Reilly's words it is, "taking the world by storm", and the effects it has on the technological, business, and standardization landscapes. Speaker Biography David Recordon works for VeriSign within their Advanced Products & Research group with a current focus on digital identity technologies. In 2005, Recordon worked with Brad Fitzpatrick developing OpenID, a decentralized single-sign-on protocol, and has taken on an instrumental role in shaping Yadis, which is designed to ease service discovery for personal digital identity technologies. Through his role at VeriSign, he has continued working with the community to evolve OpenID into a framework that provides services other than just authentication. While teaching himself PHP as a sophomore in high school, Recordon became involved in an open source message board project where he volunteered his time advising a team of over forty people worldwide. Pursuing this interest lead him to co-found a company which hosts message boards for tens of thousands of people. While still an open source hacker at heart, his role at VeriSign allows him to pursue his interests beyond just coding. Technical Management of Software Development Speaker: Alex Martelli, Uber Technical Lead, Google, Inc. Date: Thursday, July 26, 2007 Time: 6:45-8pm Place: PSU Engineering Building, Room 102, 1930 SW 4th Avenue, Portland Cost: Free, open to public Abstract Traditional management approaches don't work well for software development (and other fields composed of highly professional knowledge workers with their own cultures and mindsets). Open source successes show us that one approach that does work is to have a manager who is, technically, at least a peer of the employees, and also experienced, enthusiastic, and flexible enough to "use himself as an available technical resource" to fill in the gaps that always appear in the inevitable emergencies. In this approach, classic "command and control" is ditched in favor of trust-building, teamwork. and solid consensus. To put this great idea in practice, there are many details to be hammered out, and traps and pitfalls to be avoided. This talk briefly touches on these issues at a whirlwind pace, with practical tips on: planning and scheduling, time management, software development methodologies, building mutual trust, learning to delegate, when to back off, helping your developers grow, appropriate tools. The talk is oriented to an audience of experienced developers, and somewhat-experienced managers with highly technical backgrounds. Speaker biography Alex Martelli is Uber Technical Lead at Google, Inc. Martelli holds a laurea in Ingegneria Elettronica from Bologna University. He wrote Python in a Nutshell, and also co-edited the Python Cookbook. He's a member of the Python Software Foundation, and won the 2002 Activators' Choice Award. Martelli spent 8 years with IBM Research, earning three Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards; twelve as senior consultant (Win32, Fortran, C, C++, Java, etc), think3 inc; and three as a Python freelance consultant, mostly for AB Strakt. He has taught Programming, Numerical Computing, and OO Design at Ferrara University and other venues. PACE (Professional Activities) Meeting Women in Information Technology and Computer Science Speaker: Anna Ravenscroft, Stanford University Date: Thursday, July 26, 2007 Time: 6:45-8pm Place: PSU Unitus Building, Room 505, 2121 SW 4th Avenue, Portland Abstract Women are under-represented in IT. This talk will discuss various hypotheses on reasons why and what we should do about it. Reasons for under-representation include the "geek" stereotype, self-efficacy vs perceived difficulty, discrimination, lack of role models and mentors, and the definition of IT itself. The situation is complex, and no single explanation will account for the worldwide phenomenon, nor will any single solution "fix" the problem. A few instances of improvement will be described, and potential less-explored options will be presented. Speaker Biography Anna Martelli Ravenscroft has been a speaker at several Python Conferences, a technical reviewer on several Python books, is a co-editor of the Python Cookbook 2nd edition, and is the first female member of the Python Software Foundation. She is not a programmer, she just uses Python to get things done. Anna has an extensive background in use, coaching, and consulting on office applications. She is currently an undergraduate student at Stanford University, majoring in Symbolic Systems. Anna is the mother of two wonderful teenagers and is married to Alex Martelli. |
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