Joint event with the BCS, Grey Thumb London and the JCF
The EvoGrid: an Evolution Grid in Cyberspace
Speaker: Bruce Damer, a visionary technologist from Northern California
Date/Time: Friday 11th July 2008 at 5.45.pm for 6.00 Ends around 8.30pm
Venue: BCS, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA

Bruce Damer will talk about the EvoGrid experiment. Artificial life programs have shown autonomous evolution. These programs are limited because they run in isolation. Bruce will explain how the Evogrid aims to overcome this limitation by engaging a community of developers to link their platforms into a single larger simulation.
Imagine simulated ants moving across the Internet into an L-system garden world and interacting with plants, or a digital soup with a number of small and larger symbio-organisms swimming between servers.
His talk will be followed by discussions where members can share their views and experience. The EvoGrid is part of Damer’s PhD research at the University of East London/SmartLab and other institutions.
Bruce Damer is a visionary technologist from Northern California whose work includes early graphical user interfaces for Xerox in the 1980s, pioneering work in the Avatar field in the 1990s, and innovations in the use of virtual worlds for space exploration working with NASA in the 2000s. He founded Biota.org in 1996 to provide a nexus for the community of artificial life developers, scientists, writers, and artists interested in the wider implications of evolution occurring within human technology.

Science and Engineering: a collusion of cultures
Speaker: Professor Sir Tony Hoare, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, Cambridge
Date/Time: Thursday 17th April 2008 at 6.00pm for 6.30. Ends around 8.00pm
Venue: BCS, 5 Southampton Street, London

• Summary: Pure Science and practical Engineering lie at two ends of a wide cultural spectrum, diametrically opposed across many dimensions. In every branch of Engineering Science, the intellectual integrity of the discipline, as well as its practical utility, requires that these cultures must not collide. Rather, they must collude in the old etymological sense of playing fairly together. A particular example treated in this talk is the collusion of the Science of Programming with the Engineering of Software.
• Tony Hoare has been working in computing since 1958. As a professor in Belfast and Oxford, his interests have included compilers, operating systems and unifying theories of programming languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Distinguished Fellow of the BCS.

• Summary: Incontrovertible is the enormous change in software engineering practice that has occurred over the past decades. The worldwide software industry now generates hundreds of billions of US dollars in revenue annually and continues to expand in scope and revenue volume.  Indeed, the software industry is increasingly acknowledged as a key driver of both social and economic growth.
  In view of this, it seems important to consider to what extent industrial and academic software engineering research has had impact on the practice of software engineering.  A group has formed to consider this question, taking a scholarly and methodical look into the origins of several critical elements of the practice, including high-level programming languages, configuration management tools, distributed middleware, testing, and architecture. Who cares about the answer to this question?  Obviously software engineering researchers, but also practitioners who are looking for help to do what they do better, and those in government and industry trying to decide how best to spend their precious little research budget.
  Bio: Prof. Alexander Wolf is a professor in the department of Computing at Imperial College, London. He also holds affiliated appointments at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Lugano. His research interests are directed toward the discovery of principles and development of technologies to support the engineering of large, complex software systems, networking, security, and data base management.

Business Intelligence. Do You Have IT?
Joint Institutional Event Organized by the BCS Consultancy Specialist Group
Date/Time: Thursday 1st November 2007, 6.00pm for 6.15. Ends 9.45pm
Venue: BCS London Office, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA
Business Intelligence (BI) is moving from the Analyst world into every day use and the benefits it brings. BI has been identified by a number of commentators including Bryan Glick, Editor of Computing as one of the current five key technologies.
Our expert speaker is Richard Neale, Acting Marketing Director, UK & Ireland, Business Objects; and his presentation will use numerous real life examples to show how both consultants and their clients can avoid the pitfalls and obtain the benefits of BI.

• Summary
  Business Intelligence is still a relatively young discipline and inevitably mistakes have been made. This presentation will look at how to avoid those common mistakes, failures, and misguided assumptions -- and offer a real-world survival guide. It will look at examples of how organisations have used business intelligence to save money, differentiate themselves in crowded markets, reduce waiting times for doctors and even track bears in Alaska. Finally we will have a look forward to some future trends in BI and see what’s likely to develop in the next few years.

• Speaker Bio Richard Neale became Product Marketing manager for Business Objects in the UK in April 1999. He brings over 15 years of IT industry experience to the role, and a unique perspective on enterprise systems thanks to his broad industry experience. Before his move into marketing, Richard has been both an end user of IT and an IT Manager.
  At Business Objects, Richard has been responsible for all major UK product launches including BusinessObjects XI, the latest release of Business Objects’ industry-leading business intelligence platform that enables organisations to track, understand and manage enterprise performance. He has also been responsible for the marketing of BusinessObjects’ Enterprise Information Management technologies.
  Richard began his career as a scientist. He worked for the Natural Environment Research Council, developing computer simulations and models of the effects of acid rain. It was here that he made a career change and moved into the IT department where he managed the local user support team.
  Richard has a BSc degree in Water Resources and Computer Science from the University of Aston. Richard enjoys football and hot air ballooning, although not at the same time.

Title: Biometrics - The ear and the gait
Joint Institutional event organised by the BCS Kingston & Croydon Branch
Speaker: Prof Mark Nixon of Southampton University
Date/Time: Tuesday 22nd May 2007. 7.00pm for 7.30. Ends 9.00pm

• The possible forthcoming introduction of a national identity card and the fact that security lapses still occur on credit cards, means that biometrics is a subject that will receive attention and funding.
  Professor Mark Nixon of Southampton University leads a team investigating the use of ears and gait as means of telling us apart. Mark is the Professor in Computer Vision within the ISIS research group at the Department of Electronics and Computer Science. He co-chaired the recent IEEE 7th International Conference on Face and Gesture held at Southampton, UK in 2006. Mark has also appeared on BBC1 Television in August 2005. http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~msn/ (please scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the interview)
  Prof mark Nixon’s presentation will be preceded by the short Branch AGM

Allowing an Online Community to trade without fraud and to communicate securely
Joint event hosted by the BCS Kingston & Croydon Banch
Speaker: Peter Lane : Managing Director : MyGR Cards Ltd (My Global Resource)
Date/Time: Tuesday 17th April. 7.00pm for 7.30pm. Ends 9.00pm
Venue: BT Delta Point, 35 Wellesley Road, West Croydon.

• Peter will show how they have delivered web based applications to deliver a secure trading solution based on debit cards that avoid fraud as far as is currently possible. He will also briefly preview some major advances presently under test. He will also identify the elements that keep the community active, interested and involved. He will also be showing Java-based technology on mobile phones that provides encrypted communication channels and secure payment systems linked to the web trading systems, available only to Community members.

Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling
Joint Institutional Event Organized by BCS Consultants & BCS Womens Group
Date/Time: Wednesday 28th March 2007 at 6.00pm for 6.15pm. Ends 9.30pm
Venue: BCS London Office, First Floor, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA

• Despite the increasing number of ladies who have scaled the heights in academic, business, professional and political institutions there is still a perception of a glass ceiling. We are very fortunate this evening to have two ladies who have overcome many obstacles in their journey to the top and are happy to share their very valuable experiences with us. After their presentations there will be a panel Q&A session and open discussion with the opportunity for those attending to share their experiences and further enlighten us. This will be followed by drinks and buffet with opportunities for networking. Our exemplars this evening include:
• Fran Kitteridge, who believes that IT is male dominated - both from the perspective of customer or user organisations and IT suppliers, will ask “Why is this”? She will also address a number of other issues including: What makes a career in IT different from other careers? What attracts women into IT in the first place, what roles do they fulfil and what are the prospects for career progression? As responsible employers what can we do to attract and retain more women into the industry?
  A graduate in Business Studies, Fran has worked for the past 25 years in various roles within IT from Project Management, Project Quality Office and Outsourcing Service Delivery Management. She is currently responsible for a team of 100+ Consultants and Project Managers within Unisys.
• From Balham to the Albert Hall & Beyond. Ibukun Adebayo found that breaking into management wasn’t easy, gaining acceptance as a black female manager in a male dominated industry was even harder. In original roles, she was treated with suspicion, surprise, bewilderment, and in some cases downright hostility but she always stayed the course. She will highlight the difficulties and obstacles she encountered on her path to success from her birth in Balham to the Albert Hall and beyond. She will show how these challenges were faced and how you too can successfully balance a business and family life.
  Ibukun Adebayo is married with 5 children. Her first Senior Management role came at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists where she was the Head of IT for nearly 3 years. She then became the Head of Information Systems at the Royal Albert Hall. In June 2004 she was appointed to her current role as Director of IT at Turning Point, a medium sized organisation with around 1,500 staff and 200 sites across the UK; and a year later commenced a privately funded MBA course.

The “on demand” supply of IT Services
Speaker: Jon Grubb of IBM
Date/Time: Tuesday 13th March 2007.
Venue: Room 102, Town House, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, Kingston.