It’s true! Borja wrote up a summary of the GSoC lightening talk event, including pictures. If you don’t know what I look like, I am in both the GSoC student one and the ACM officer one. I really wish I got a haircut before this thing….

Borja linked to our website, which hopefully won’t get too much traffic. It is currently at 359 days of uptime, and I have shooting for a year of uptime before upgrading to the latest and greatest version of OpenBSD.

As one of the administrators for the ACM mailing list, I am used to dealing with a lot of spam at this point. Even with spam filtering, it used to be pretty terrible, until we made it more aggressive. Of course, none was going out to the list; it was really a difference between spam to review and spam that is auto-deleted. Mailman sucks, so my inbox gets filled with a lot of the bounces, which gmail spam filtering can handle nicely, but a select few can still get through. Spam is one of the most pointless things I can imagine, but at the very least, it usually includes a link, or some sort of ad. I got the same spam message a couple of times that didn’t quit follow that convention:

Subject: best
your life is crap

There were at two different from addresses and names, so it was pretty clear it was spam. The only purpose I could see to something like this spam is to reply back, desperate for answers. Maybe they were writing some huge long spam and hit send by accident a little too early, or there spam creation software sucks. What a strange piece of spam….

The ACM (just Borja really) organized a trip to Google Chicago, where all of the Google Summer of Code students who were accepted from UChicago (and in the US) gave lightening talks on our projects, which included me. The other GSoC students were Marcus Westin, Jordon Lewis, and Nick Edds. I put up my talk, as well as a more general page for my project on my CS site. Marcus and I both have projects with the Globus Alliance, so I was quite happy that he went before me, as I didn’t have to explain what Globus is. My project is fairly straight foreword to explain and I still don’t know the Globus Toolkit (GT) that well, so I couldn’t answer too many questions, and I ended up going under in time. Everyone seemed most interested in Nick’s project, since it is on the 2to3 tool in python, and a decent amount of the audience used Python, some with a great deal of dedication (it was at Google after all). I am pretty excited to see how Nick’s project turns out; we both went to the talk that his mentor, Collin Winter, gave at PyCon on the tool and the issues that Nick is working to fix.
The Chicago office’s engineering crew is dominated by subversion developers (in the small selection of software I like), but most of the presentations were about most unrelated projects. Ben Collins-Sussman discussed a VM for interactive fiction games like zork (I’ll still play my zork on the SDF TWENEX Machine; the version of zork installed is from 1981!). Karl Fogel, not a current Google developer, but subversion developer and good friend of the other googlers, gave a talk on script he wrote to help track patches from non-core developers based on logs. He put up some stats on the differences between subversion and GNU Emacs as projects; it further straightened my reasoning for using XEmacs. I went to a Russian choir concert the night before, as I had to go to a concert from a genre I don’t have any familiarity with, which he apparently was in; what a small world I live in. Brian Fitzpatrick gave a shortened version of the keynote he have at PyCon on balancing functional complexity with usability in software. Like all the other talks I have heard him give, it was an excellent talk; he has one of the best uses of slide shows I have seen, and I always end up thinking about the talks much later. There was also a talk from a developer for Blogger (he said he was now on feedburner); I would give his name, but I can’t remember it at the moment. I talked to him for a bit; I think my social awkwardness was in full swing at the time. I asked him about something I read on Valleywag about Google adding some preference search rankings with Blogger (I can’t find the post at the moment; I will link to it if I do); as I am sure is the case, he said that Google does no such evil. He also mentioned that Google crawls its own site with the same bot, which makes sense, but I hadn’t thought about it before. I wish I knew Blogger better, as I used it once for something else and had a couple thoughts about its workings.
It was a fairly awesome evening. I was very sleep deprived after one of my harder weeks here, so I was defintely in a strange state for the entirity of the thing. My thanks and appretiation go out to Borja and Google for this event. Apparently, my glorious face might end up on the GSoC blog or the Google open source blog.

Last night, the UofC ACM held its first major event, an interdisciplinary panel on artificial intelligence. Since Cord and I took over as co-chairs of the chapter, we have been fighting to get things happening in the CS department, which hasn’t been easy. The Facebook event had about 25 confirmed guests and 40 maybes, so we were a little nervous about turn out. The fliers and e-mails we sent seemed to pay off as we had about 60 attend. We were pretty happy.

For our first big event, we felt it went pretty well. The panel had David McAllester, John Goldsmith, Terry Regier, and Philip Ulinski. The majority of the panel were basically computer and linguistics people, so it definitely skewed, but we ended up discussing AI in a pretty broad way. Really, the panel was too broad. For the most part, the discussion was guided mostly by the audience, which made it pretty disorganized. I felt like I didn’t come away with a greater understanding of AI. Really, many of the AI-related questions I have pondered (which others asked) were answered, but I have yet to really process the answers. I have been thinking most about the singularity, which McAllester wanted to talk about, but we didn’t really stay on the subject much. Overall, it was a really enjoyable panel, and it was a pretty awesome thing to help organize. Borja said there was a food spread for another talk that was supposed to be at the same time that the CS department got hundreds of cookies for that only a few people went to. Future panels should be even more of a success.

See Also

• Page on the ACM Site for Event