Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 21, 2015

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2015

Filed under: Conferences,XML,XML Schema,XPath,XProc,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 8:48 pm

Balisage: The Markup Conference 2015 – There is Nothing As Practical As A Good Theory

Key dates:
– 27 March 2015 — Peer review applications due
– 17 April 2015 — Paper submissions due
– 17 April 2015 — Applications for student support awards due
– 22 May 2015 — Speakers notified
– 17 July 2015 — Final papers due
– 10 August 2015 — Symposium on Cultural Heritage Markup
– 11–14 August 2015 — Balisage: The Markup Conference

Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, just outside Washington, DC (I know, no pool with giant head, etc. Do you think if we ask nicely they would put one in? And change the theme of the decorations about every 30 feet in the lobby?)

Balisage is the premier conference on the theory, practice, design, development, and application of markup. We solicit papers on any aspect of markup and its uses; topics include but are not limited to:

  • Cutting-edge applications of XML and related technologies
  • Integration of XML with other technologies (e.g., content management, XSLT, XQuery)
  • Web application development with XML
  • Performance issues in parsing, XML database retrieval, or XSLT processing
  • Development of angle-bracket-free user interfaces for non-technical users
  • Deployment of XML systems for enterprise data
  • Design and implementation of XML vocabularies
  • Case studies of the use of XML for publishing, interchange, or archiving
  • Alternatives to XML
  • Expressive power and application adequacy of XSD, Relax NG, DTDs, Schematron, and other schema languages
  • Detailed Call for Participation: http://balisage.net/Call4Participation.html
    About Balisage: http://balisage.net/
    Instructions for authors: http://balisage.net/authorinstructions.html

    For more information: info@balisage.net or +1 301 315 9631

    I wonder if the local authorities realize the danger in putting that many skilled markup people so close the source of so much content? (Washington) With attendees sparking off against each other, who knows?, could see an accountable and auditable legislative and rule making document flow arise. There may not be enough members of Congress in town to smother it.

    The revolution may not be televised but it will be powered by markup and its advocates. Come join the crowd with the tools to make open data transparent.

    January 20, 2015

    Spark Summit East Agenda (New York, March 18-19 2015)

    Filed under: Conferences,Spark — Patrick Durusau @ 3:05 pm

    Spark Summit East Agenda (New York, March 18-19 2015)

    Registration

    The plenary and track sessions are on day one. Databricks is offering three training courses on day two.

    The track sessions were divided into developer, applications and data science tracks. To assist you in finding your favorite speakers, I have collapsed that listing and sorted it by the first listed speaker’s last name. I certainly hope all of these presentations will be video recorded!

    Take good notes and blog about your favorite sessions! Ping me with a pointer to your post. Thanks!

    I first saw this in a tweet by Helena Edelson.

    January 3, 2015

    XML Prague Sponsoring for Students

    Filed under: Conferences,XML — Patrick Durusau @ 1:53 pm

    le-tec XML Tech posted a tweet today saying:

    We are sponsoring the full #xmlprague pass and accommodation for up to 5 students. xmlprague.cz Please apply to letexml@le-tex.de

    XML Prague 2015 is February 13-15 2015 so there isn’t a lot of time to spare!

    The schedule reads like a Who’s Who in XML, including Michael Kay speaking on parallel processing in XSLT. That alone would be worth the trip to Prague!

    If you are a student, apply for sponsoring. If you’re not a student, online registration closes February 9, 24:00 CET. Plus you need to get plane reservations, hotel, etc. Don’t delay!

    January 2, 2015

    Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) 2015 Program + Papers!

    Filed under: Computer Science,Conferences,Data Analysis,Data Management,Data Science — Patrick Durusau @ 3:23 pm

    Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) 2015

    From the homepage:

    The biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) is a systems-oriented conference, complementary in its mission to the mainstream database conferences like SIGMOD and VLDB, emphasizing the systems architecture perspective. CIDR gathers researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss the latest innovative and visionary ideas in the field.

    Papers are invited on novel approaches to data systems architecture and usage. Conference Venue CIDR mainly encourages papers about innovative and risky data management system architecture ideas, systems-building experience and insight, resourceful experimental studies, provocative position statements. CIDR especially values innovation, experience-based insight, and vision.

    As usual, the conference will be held at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on the Pacific Ocean just south of Monterey, CA. The program will include: keynotes, paper presentations, panels, a gong-show and plenty of time for interaction.

    The conference runs January 4 – 7, 2015 (starts next Monday). If you aren’t lucky enough to attend, the program has links to fifty-four (54) papers for your reading pleasure.

    The program was exported from a “no-sense-of-abstraction” OOXML application. Conversion to re-usable form will take a few minutes. I will produce an author-sorted version this weekend.

    In the meantime, enjoy the papers!

    December 31, 2014

    31C3: a new dawn

    Filed under: Conferences,Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 4:26 pm

    31C3: a new dawn (archives)

    Live-Stream

    Chaos Communication Congress conference in Hamburg.

    I took a break to watch Higher-Dimensional Geometry and Fractals. If you haven’t experienced a presentation was moving quickly, this one will give you that experience. The challenge would be to stop at each slide and fully understand it before moving to the next slide. Very cool!

    C++ sources for demo segments: https://github.com/ef-gy/topologic

    Blog series: https://ef.gy/linear-algebra

    Scott Draves, Erik Reckase, The Fractal Flame Algorithm: http://flam3.com/flame_draves.pdf

    The range of talks is really amazing.

    I first saw this in a post by Violet Blue, Invasive phone tracking: New SS7 research blows the lid off mobile security, where Violet covers three of the presentations at 31C3 on cellphone scanning technology. (Summary: You are even less secure than you imagine.)

    December 24, 2014

    Cassandra Summit Europe 2014 (December 3-4, 2014) Videos!

    Filed under: Cassandra,Conferences — Patrick Durusau @ 2:46 pm

    Cassandra Summit Europe 2014 (December 3-4, 2014) Videos!

    As usual, I sorted the presentations by the first author’s last name.

    Good thing too because I noticed that Ben Laplanche was attributed with two presentations that differed only in having “Apache” in one title and not in the other.

    On inspection I discovered an incorrectly labeled presentation by David Borsos and Tareq Abedrabbo, of OpenCredo. I corrected the listing but retained the current URL.

    I am curious why the original webpage offers filtering by company? That’s an unlikely category for a developer to use in searching for Cassandra related content.

    Consider annotating future presentations with the versions of software covered. It would make searching presentations much more robust.

    Enjoy!

    December 13, 2014

    Scala eXchange 2014 (videos)

    Filed under: Conferences,Functional Programming,Scala — Patrick Durusau @ 5:32 pm

    Scala eXchange 2014 Videos are online! Thanks to the super cool folks at Skills Matter for making them available!

    As usual, I have sorted the videos by author. I am not sure about using “scala” as a keyword at a Scala conference but suspect it was to permit searching in a database with videos from other conferences.

    If you watch these with ear buds while others are watching sporting events, remember to keep the sound down enough that you can hear curses or cheers from others in the room. Mimic their sentiments and no one will be any wiser, except you for having watched these videos. 😉

    PS: I could have used a web scraper to obtain the data but found manual extraction to be a good way to practice regexes in Emacs.

    December 5, 2014

    Big Data Spain 2014

    Filed under: BigData,Conferences — Patrick Durusau @ 7:35 pm

    Big Data Spain 2014

    Thirty-five videos, nineteen hours of content for a conference on November 17-18, 2014.

    Very impressive content!

    Since big data has started worrying about what data represents (think subject identity), I am tempted to start keeping closer track on videos for big data.

    I really hate searching on a big data topic and getting the usual morass of results that date over a three to four year span, if you are lucky.

    Is that a problem for you?

    October 23, 2014

    Balisage 2015!

    Filed under: Conferences — Patrick Durusau @ 7:49 am

    Early date and location news for Balisage 2015:

    We have a date and location for Balisage 2015:

    Pre-conference symposium: August 10, 2014
    Balisage Conference: August 11 – 14, 2014

    Same location as Balisage 2014:

    Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center,
    5701 Marinelli Road, Rockville, MD, 20852-2785

    (We have moved to the second week of August so we could have the same auditorium for the conference sessions and better space for posters, breaks, and such.)

    Mark your calendars. Start thinking about what you want to talk about at Balisage 2015. Plan your trip to the Washington DC area.

    Put plane tickets to Balisage on your holiday wish list!

    Start planning your paper and slides now. Imagine what a difference ten (10) months versus the wee morning hours before will make on your slides. (No names, Eliot.)

    Whatever your political leanings, the mid-term elections hold no fear. Balisage will occur in August of 2015 so all is right with the world.

    October 9, 2014

    2014 State of Clojure & ClojureScript Survey

    Filed under: Clojure,ClojureScript,Conferences,Functional Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 6:44 pm

    2014 State of Clojure & ClojureScript Survey by Alex Miller.

    From the post:

    For the past four years, Chas Emerick has run an annual State of Clojure survey (expanded last year to cover ClojureScript as well). Due to recent happy arrivals in the Emerick household, Chas has asked Cognitect to run the survey this year.

    The survey has been broken into two parts. A link to the second survey will appear after you submit the first, or you can use these links directly:

    The surveys will be open until October 17th. Shortly thereafter we will release all of the data and some analysis.

    If you’re not yet planning to attend the Clojure/conj in Washington DC, Nov 20-22, tickets are on sale now (regular registration rate ends Oct. 17th)!

    Summary:

    Two Important Dates:

    Oct. 17th – Deadline for State of Clojure/ClojureScript 2014 surveys and regular registration for Clojure/conj.

    Nov. 20-22Clojure/conj in Washington, DC.

    Avoid entering Oct. 17th in your calendar by completing the surveys and purchasing your ticket to Clojure/conj after reading this post.

    September 20, 2014

    WWW 2015 Call for Research Papers

    Filed under: Conferences,WWW — Patrick Durusau @ 8:18 pm

    WWW 2015 Call for Research Papers

    From the webpage:

    Important Dates:

    • Research track abstract registration:
      Monday, November 3, 2014 (23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
    • Research track full paper submission:
      Monday, November 10, 2014 (23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
    • Notifications of acceptance:
      Saturday, January 17, 2015
    • Final Submission Deadline for Camera-ready Version:
      Sunday, March 8, 2015
    • Conference dates:
      May 18 – 22, 2015

    Research papers should be submitted through EasyChair at:
    https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=www2015

    For more than two decades, the International World Wide Web (WWW) Conference has been the premier venue for researchers, academics, businesses, and standard bodies to come together and discuss latest updates on the state and evolutionary path of the Web. The main conference program of WWW 2015 will have 11 areas (or themes) for refereed paper presentations, and we invite you to submit your cutting-edge, exciting, new breakthrough work to the relevant area. In addition to the main conference, WWW 2015 will also have a series of co-located workshops, keynote speeches, tutorials, panels, a developer track, and poster and demo sessions.

    The list of areas for this year is as follows:

    • Behavioral Analysis and Personalization
    • Crowdsourcing Systems and Social Media
    • Content Analysis
    • Internet Economics and Monetization
    • Pervasive Web and Mobility
    • Security and Privacy
    • Semantic Web
    • Social Networks and Graph Analysis
    • Web Infrastructure: Datacenters, Content Delivery Networks, and Cloud Computing
    • Web Mining
    • Web Search Systems and Applications

    Great conference, great weather (weather for Florence in May) and it is in Florence, Italy. What other reasons do you need to attend? 😉

    ApacheCon EU 2014

    Filed under: Conferences,Open Source — Patrick Durusau @ 7:36 pm

    ApacheCon EU 2014

    ApacheCon Europe 2014 – November 17-21 in Budapest, Hungary.

    November is going to be here sooner than you think. You need to register now and start making travel arrangements.

    A quick scroll down the schedule page will give you an idea of the breath of the Apache Foundation activities.

    September 10, 2014

    What’s in a Name?

    Filed under: Conferences,Names,Subject Identity — Patrick Durusau @ 10:56 am

    What’s in a Name?

    From the webpage:

    What will be covered? The meeting will focus on the role of chemical nomenclature and terminology in open innovation and communication. A discussion of areas of nomenclature and terminology where there are fundamental issues, how computer software helps and hinders, the need for clarity and unambiguous definitions for application to software systems. How can you contribute? As well as the talks from expert speakers there will be plenty of opportunity for discussion and networking. A record will be made of the meeting, including the discussion, and will be made available initially to those attending the meeting. The detailed programme and names of speakers will be available closer to the date of the meeting.

    Date: 21 October 2014

    Event Subject(s): Industry & Technology

    Venue

    The Royal Society of Chemistry
    Library
    Burlington House
    Piccadilly
    London
    W1J 0BA
    United Kingdom

    Find this location using Google Map

    Contact for Event Information

    Name: Prof Jeremy Frey

    Address:
    Chemistry
    University of Southampton
    United Kingdom

    Email: j.g.frey@soton.ac.uk

    Now there’s an event worth the hassle of overseas travel during these paranoid times! Alas, I will have to wait for the conference record to be released to non-attendees. The event is a good example of the work going on at the Royal Society of Chemistry.

    I first saw this in a tweet by Open PHACTS.

    September 8, 2014

    Speakers, Clojure/conj 2014 Washington, D.C. Nov 20-22

    Filed under: Clojure,Conferences,Uncategorized — Patrick Durusau @ 6:39 pm

    Speakers, Clojure/conj 2014 Washington, D.C. Nov 20-22

    Hyperlinks for authors point to Twitter profile pages, title of paper follows:

    Jeanine Adkisson Variants are Not Unions

    Bozhidar Batsov The evolution of the Emacs tooling for Clojure

    Lucas Cavalcanti Exploring Four Hidden Superpowers of Datomic

    Colin Fleming Cursive: a different type of IDE

    Julian Gamble Applying the paradigms of core.async in ClojureScript

    Brian Goetz Keynote

    Paul deGrandis Unlocking Data-Driven Systems

    Nathan Herzing Helping voters with Pedestal, Datomic, Om and core.async

    Rich Hickey Transducers

    Ashton Kemerling Generative Integration Tests.

    Michał Marczyk Persistent Data Structures for Special Occasions

    Steve Miner Generating Generators

    Zach Oakes Making Games at Runtime with Clojure

    Anna Pawlicka Om nom nom nom

    David Pick Building a Data Pipeline with Clojure and Kafka

    Ghadi Shayban JVM Creature Comforts

    Chris Shea Helping voters with Pedestal, Datomic, Om and core.async

    Zach Tellman Always Be Composing

    Glenn Vanderburg Cl6: The Algorithms of TeX in Clojure

    Edward Wible Exploring Four Hidden Superpowers of Datomic

    Steven Yi Developing Music Systems on the JVM with Pink and Score

    Abstracts for the papers appear here.

    Obviously a great conference to attend but at a minimum, you have a great list of twitter accounts to follow on cutting edge Clojure news!

    I first saw this in a tweet by Alex Miller.

    August 28, 2014

    Onyx: Distributed Workflows….

    Filed under: Clojure,Conferences,Distributed Systems — Patrick Durusau @ 4:35 pm

    Onyx: Distributed Workflows for Dynamic Systems by Michael Drogalis.

    From the post:

    If you’ve ever jumped heads down into a codebase maintaining complex distributed activity and tried to simplify or change the processing workflow, not only will you scratch your head for 7 sleepless nights before you can get anywhere, but you’ll come to realize that workflows are often deeply complected with their mechanism of execution.

    In this talk, we’ll survey contemporary frameworks such as Storm and Cascading. We’ll identify the pain points that seem to crop up time and time again: workflow specification, stateful lifecycle management, and developer testing – to name a few.

    Onyx is a new distributed computation system written in Clojure that addresses these problems head-on. Hardware advancements in the last 10 years have enabled new designs that leverage fast networks and SSDs. Onyx takes advantage and adapts to this new environment. The concepts and tools discussed remove the incidental complexity that plagues modern frameworks.

    Attendees will come away with new perspective on leveraging immutability, persistent data structures, queues, and transactions to tackle increasingly complex problem spaces.

    This and much more at Strangeloop, St. Louis, Sept. 17-19th, 2014.

    July 27, 2014

    Digital Humanities and Computer Science

    Filed under: Computer Science,Conferences,Humanities — Patrick Durusau @ 3:19 pm

    Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science

    Deadlines:

    1 August 2014, abstracts of ~ 750 words and a minimal bio sent to martinmueller@northwestern.edu.

    31 August 2014, Deadline for Early Registration Discount.

    19 September 2014, Dealing for group rate reservations at the Orrington Hotel.

    23-24 October, 2014 Colloquium.

    From the call for papers:

    The ninth annual meeting of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) will be hosted by Northwestern University on October 23-24, 2014.

    The DHCS Colloquium has been a lively regional conference (with non-trivial bi-coastal and overseas sprinkling), rotating since 2006 among the University of Chicago (where it began), DePaul, IIT, Loyola, and Northwestern. At the first Colloquium Greg Crane asked his memorable question “What to do with a million books?” Here are some highlights that I remember across the years:

    • An NLP programmer at Los Alamos talking about the ways security clearances prevented CIA analysts and technical folks from talking to each other.
    • A demonstration that if you replaced all content words in Arabic texts and focused just on stop words you could determine with a high degree of certainty the geographical origin of a given piece of writing.
    • A visualization of phrases like “the king’s daughter” in a sizable corpus, telling you much about who owned what.
    • A social network analysis of Alexander the Great and his entourage.
    • An amazingly successful extraction of verbal parallels from very noisy data.
    • Did you know that Jane Austen was a game theorist before her time and that her characters were either skillful or clueless practitioners of this art?

    And so forth. Given my own interests, I tend to remember “Text as Data” stuff, but there was much else about archaeology, art, music, history, and social or political life. You can browse through some of the older programs at http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/dhcs/.

    ….

    One of the weather sites promises that October is between 42 F for the low and 62 F for the high (on average). Sounds like a nice time to visit Northwestern University!

    To say nothing of an exciting conference!

    I first saw this in a tweet by David Bamman.

    July 20, 2014

    SciPy Videos – Title Sort Order

    Filed under: Conferences,Python — Patrick Durusau @ 3:39 pm

    You have probably seen that the SciPy 2014 videos are up! Good News! SciPy 2014.

    You may have also noticed, the videos are in no discernable order. Not so good news.

    However, I have created a list of the SciPy Videos in Title Sort Order.

    Enjoy!

    July 2, 2014

    EuroClojure 2014 (notes)

    Filed under: Clojure,Conferences — Patrick Durusau @ 10:59 am

    EuroClojure 2014 (notes) by Philip Potter.

    A truly amazing set of notes, with links, for EuroClojure 2014.

    It’s not like being there but you will come away with new ideas, links to follow and the intention to attend EuroClojure 2015!

    Enjoy!

    June 30, 2014

    Balisage Travel Shortage!

    Filed under: Conferences — Patrick Durusau @ 4:44 pm

    I’m the last person in the world to start rumors about a shortage of airline seats to Washington, DC. Especially around the Balisage Markup Conference, August 4 — 8, 2014 (Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center).

    However unreliable my information may be, I don’t want Balisage registrants to miss out by waiting too late to order plane tickets.

    I can’t say (under certain non-disclosure agreements) if it was the posting of the Late Breaking News slots:

    • Streamable functions in XSLT 3.0
    • Teaching XQuery to (non-programmer) humanists
    • Making XML easy to work with (an easier API for XML than SAX or DOM)
    • Extending the relevance of XPath
    • Identity Constraints for XML
    • Teaching NIEM-based models to XML and NIEM novices
    • Enabling XML entity reference while protecting against data theft and denial-of-service attacks

    that prompted the rumors that lead to this post or not. Use your own judgement.

    Teaching XQuery to (non-programmer) humanists? Need a session on teaching programmers (non-humanists) to write documentation. Do you remember that Nietzsche quote about remembering to take your whip?

    Well, without disclosing any information that would impair national security or be an aid to the fifth columnists in DC, I have tried to warn you about getting to Balisage.

    It’s now up to you to take the appropriate action. (And register for Balisage at the same time.)

    June 22, 2014

    !!CON 2014 (Videos/Transcripts)

    Filed under: Conferences,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 4:40 pm

    !!CON 2014 (Videos/Transcripts)

    From the homepage:

    !!Con (pronounced bang bang con) 2014 was two days of ten-minute talks (with lots of breaks, of course!) about what excites us about programming — the amazing, the strange, and the heartwarming. From kernel exploits to teaching kids to program, !!Con was about bringing the NYC programming community together to celebrate the joy and excitement and the surprising moments in what we do. We defined “programming community” broadly — you didn’t need to be a professional programmer to be part of !!Con.

    Let me give you just a few of the titles of the presentations:

    • The Art of Obsession
    • The Sound of Segfaults!!
    • Nantucket! Hacking at verse
    • Now you’re thinking with PCMPISTRI!
    • How I used my knowledge of code (and music!) to help fight fires!
    • and more!

    I haven’t watched all the videos, yet, but they have me thinking that ten minutes may be the ideal presentation length.

    Long enough to present your core idea or what excites you yet not long enough to fill your slides with text. 😉 For details, the audience can read your paper.

    I first saw this in a tweet by Julia Evans.

    May 30, 2014

    Balisage – Late Breaking News

    Filed under: Conferences — Patrick Durusau @ 10:31 am

    Balisage 2014 Call for Late-breaking News

    Proposals due: June 13, 2014.

    You have been drooling over the Preliminary Program for several days and wishing you had submitted a paper to Balisage.

    Unlike some mistakes, you have a second chance to appear in the company of the markup stars listed in the program. Second chances in life are rare and I suggest you take advantage of this one.

    From the announcement:

    The peer-reviewed part of the Balisage 2014 program has been scheduled. A few slots on the Balisage program have been reserved for presentation of “Late-breaking” material.

    Proposals for late-breaking slots must be received by June 13, 2014. Selection of late-breaking proposals will be made by the Balisage conference committee, instead of being made in the course of the regular peer-review process.

    If you have a presentation that should be part of Balisage, and it isn’t already on the Preliminary Program, please send a proposal message as plain-text email to info@balisage.net.

    In order to be considered for inclusion in the final program, your proposal message must supply the following information:

    • The name(s) and affiliations of all author(s)/speaker(s)
    • The email address of the presenter
    • The title of the presentation
    • An abstract of 100-150 words, suitable for immediate distribution
    • Disclosure of when and where, if some part of this material has already been presented or published
    • An indication as to whether the presenter is comfortable giving a conference presentation and answering questions in English about the material to be presented
    • Your assurance that all authors are willing and able to sign the Balisage Non-exclusive Publication Agreement (http://www.balisage.net/BalisagePublicationAgreement.pdf) with respect to the proposed presentation

    In order to be in serious contention for inclusion in the final program, your proposal should probably be either a) really late-breaking (it happened in the last month or two) or b) a paper, an extended paper proposal, or a very long abstract with references. Late-breaking slots are few and the competition is fiercer than for peer-reviewed papers. The more we know about your proposal, the better we can appreciate the quality of your submission.

    Please feel encouraged to provide any other information that could aid the conference committee as it considers your proposal, such as a detailed outline, samples, code, and/or graphics. We expect to receive far more proposals than we can accept, so it’s important that you send enough information to make your proposal convincing and exciting. (This material may be attached to the email message, if appropriate.)

    The conference committee reserves the right to make editorial changes in your abstract and/or title for the conference program and publicity.

    Balisage will be held in North Bethesda, Maryland (a suburb of Washington, DC).

    So, no St. Catherine’s street. Sorry.

    On the other hand, the yellow pages currently list thirty-four (34) “escort” services in the Washington, D.C. area. I don’t know of any price/service comparison listing for those services.

    May 27, 2014

    Strangeloop 2014

    Filed under: Conferences — Patrick Durusau @ 4:48 pm

    Strangeloop 2014

    September 17-19, 2014 in St. Louis, Missouri.

    Including the keynotes, sixty-six (66) speakers. I don’t think I have ever seen a stronger speaker’s list.

    Enjoy!

    Registration opens May 28, 2014.

    May 12, 2014

    CRDTs in New York (May 15, 2014)

    Filed under: Conferences,CRDT — Patrick Durusau @ 7:10 pm

    Chas Emerick – A comp study of Convergent & Commutative Replicated Data Types (May 15, 2014)

    Thursday, May 15, 2014 7:00 PM

    Viggle Inc. 902 Broadway 11, New York, NY (map)

    From the meeting notice:

    A comprehensive study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types‘ by Shapiro et al.

    Commutative Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are a formalism for providing practical data and programming primitives for use in distributed systems applications without necessitating expensive (and sometimes impractical) consensus mechanisms. Their key characteristic is that they provide conflict-free “merging” of distributed concurrent updates given only the weak guarantees of eventual consistency.

    While this paper did not coin the term ‘CRDT’, it was the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of their definition, semantics, and possible construction separate from and beyond previous implementations of distributable datatypes that happened to provide CRDT-like semantics.

    A “papers we love” meetup later this week in New York.

    If you have or can make the time, RSVP and join the discussion!

    April 19, 2014

    New trends in sharing data science work

    Filed under: Conferences,GraphLab,Graphs,Open Data — Patrick Durusau @ 6:42 pm

    New trends in sharing data science work

    Danny Bickson writes:

    I got the following venturebeat article from my colleague Carlos Guestrin.

    It seems there is an interesting trend of allowing data scientists to share their work: Imagine if a company’s three highly valued data scientists can happily work together without duplicating each other’s efforts and can easily call up the ingredients and results of each other’s previous work.

    That day has come. As the data scientist arms race continues, data scientists might want to join forces. Crazy idea, right? Two San Francisco startups — Domino Data Lab and Sense — have emerged recently with software to let data scientists collaborate on multiple projects. In a way, it’s like code storehouse GitHub for the data science world. A Montreal startup named Plot.ly has been talking about the same themes, but it brings a more social twist. Another startup, Mode Analytics, is building software for data analysts to ask questions of data without duplicating previous efforts. And at least one more mature software vendor, Alpine Data Labs, has been adding features to help many colleagues in a company apply algorithms to code on one central hub.

    If you aren’t already registered for GraphLab Conference 2014, notice that Alpine Data Labs, Domino Data Labs, Mode Analytics, Plot.ly, and, Sense will all be at the GraphLab Conference.

    Go ahead, register for the GraphLab conference. At the very worst you will learn something. If you socialize a little bit, you will meet some of the brightest graph people on the planet.

    Plus, when the history of “sharing” in data science is written, you will have attended one of the early conferences on sharing code for data science. After years of hoarding data (where you now see open data) and beginning to see code sharing, data science is developing a different model.

    And you were there to cheer them on!

    April 18, 2014

    Non-Painful Presentations

    Filed under: Conferences,Presentation — Patrick Durusau @ 1:55 pm

    Looking to give fewer painful presentations?

    Want advice to forward on non-painful presenting?

    If you answered “yes,” to either of those questions, read: This Advice From IDEO’s Nicole Kahn Will Transform the Way You Give Presentations.

    Nicole Kahn has short and engaging advice that boils down to three (3) touchstones for making a non-painful and perhaps even compelling presentation.

    It’s easier to sell an idea, technology or product if the audience isn’t in pain after your presentation.

    April 12, 2014

    PyCon US 2014 – Videos (Tutorials)

    Filed under: Conferences,Programming,Python — Patrick Durusau @ 2:04 pm

    The tutorial videos from PyCon US 2014 are online! Talks to follow.

    Tutorials arranged by author for your finding convenience:

    • Blomo, Jim mrjob: Snakes on a Hadoop
      This tutorial will take participants through basic usage of mrjob by writing analytics jobs over Yelp data. mrjob lets you easily write, run, and test distributed batch jobs in Python, on top of Hadoop. Hadoop is a MapReduce platform for processing big data but requires a fair amount of Java boilerplate. mrjob is an open source Python library written by Yelp used to process TBs of data every day.
    • Clifford, Williams, G. 0 to 00111100 with web2py
      This tutorial teaches basic web development for people who have some experience with HTML. No experience with CSS or JavaScript is required. We will build a basic web application using AJAX, web forms, and a local SQL database.
    • Grisel, Olivier; Jake, Vanderplas Exploring Machine Learning with Scikit-learn
      This tutorial will offer an introduction to the core concepts of machine learning, and how they can be easily applied in Python using Scikit-learn. We will use the scikit-learn API to introduce and explore the basic categories of machine learning problems, related topics such as feature selection and model validation, and the application of these tools to real-world data sets.
    • Love, Kenneth Getting Started with Django, a crash course

      Getting Started With Django is a well-established series of videos teaching best practices and common approaches for building web apps to people new to Django. This tutorial combines the first few lessons into a single lesson. Attendees will follow along as I start and build an entire simple web app and, network permitting, deploy it to Heroku.
    • Ma, Eric How to formulate a (science) problem and analyze it using Python code
      Are you interested in doing analysis but don’t know where to start? This tutorial is for you. Python packages & tools (IPython, scikit-learn, NetworkX) are powerful for performing data analysis. However, little is said about formulating the questions and tying these tools together to provide a holistic view of the data. This tutorial will provide you with an introduction on how this can be done.
    • Müller, Mike Descriptors and Metaclasses – Understanding and Using Python's More Advanced Features
      Descriptors and metaclasses are advanced Python features. While it is possible to write Python programs without active of knowledge of them, knowing how they work provides a deeper understanding about the language. Using examples, you will learn how they work and when to use as well as when better not to use them. Use cases provide working code that can serve as a base for own solutions.
    • Vanderplas, Jake; Olivier Grisel Exploring Machine Learning with Scikit-learn
      This tutorial will offer an introduction to the core concepts of machine learning, and how they can be easily applied in Python using Scikit-learn. We will use the scikit-learn API to introduce and explore the basic categories of machine learning problems, related topics such as feature selection and model validation, and the application of these tools to real-world data sets.

    Tutorials or talks with multiple authors are listed under each author. (I don’t know which one you will remember.)

    I am going to spin up the page for the talks so when the videos appear, all I need do is to insert the video links.

    Enjoy!

    March 18, 2014

    Balisage Papers Due 18 April 2014

    Filed under: Conferences,XML,XML Schema,XPath,XQuery,XSLT — Patrick Durusau @ 2:21 pm

    Unlike the rolling dates for Obamacare, Balisage Papers are due 18 April 2014. (That’s this year for health care wonks.)

    From the website:

    Balisage is an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information.

    Are you interested in open information, reusable documents, and vendor and application independence? Then you need descriptive markup, and Balisage is the conference you should attend. Balisage brings together document architects, librarians, archivists, computer scientists, XML wizards, XSLT and XQuery programmers, implementers of XSLT and XQuery engines and other markup-related software, Topic-Map enthusiasts, semantic-Web evangelists, standards developers, academics, industrial researchers, government and NGO staff, industrial developers, practitioners, consultants, and the world’s greatest concentration of markup theorists. Some participants are busy designing replacements for XML while other still use SGML (and know why they do). Discussion is open, candid, and unashamedly technical. Content-free marketing spiels are unwelcome and ineffective.

    I can summarize that for you:

    There are conferences on the latest IT buzz.

    There are conferences on last year’s IT buzz.

    Then there are conferences on information as power, which decides who will sup and who will serve.

    Balisage is about information as power. How you use it, well, that’s up to you.

    March 14, 2014

    Papers: ACL 2014

    Filed under: Computational Linguistics,Conferences,Linguistics — Patrick Durusau @ 7:21 pm

    Papers: ACL 2014

    The list of accepted papers for Association of Computational Linguistics has been posted for the June 22-27 conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

    I am sure out of the one hundred and forty-six (146) you will find at least a few that will be of interest. 😉

    I first saw this in a tweet by Shane Bergsma.

    March 13, 2014

    2014 SIAM Conference Program on Discrete Mathematics

    Filed under: Conferences,Graphs — Patrick Durusau @ 2:52 pm

    2014 SIAM Conference Program on Discrete Mathematics

    If you are interested in the more formal side of graph work, there are a number of sessions at the upcoming 2014 SIAM conference of interest.

    This program listing gives authors and abstracts which should be enough for you to find their work prior to the conference.

    The conference runs from June 16-19, 2014 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

    March 8, 2014

    Black Hat Asia 2014: The Weaponized Web

    Filed under: Conferences,Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 7:56 pm

    Black Hat Asia 2014: The Weaponized Web

    From the post:

    The World Wide Web has grown exponentially since its birth 21 years ago, and it now serves as the interface for many of the apps we use every day. It’s hard to imagine a more enticing target for hacks and exploits. Today’s trio of Black Hat Briefings explore ways the Web can be weaponized … and how to defend against it.

    Even as HTML 5 proliferates as an enabler of rich interactive Web applications, cross-site scripting (XSS) remains one of the top three Web application vulnerabilities. DOM-based XSS is growing in popularity, but its client-side nature makes it difficult to monitor for malicious payloads. Ultimate Dom Based XSS Detection Scanner on Cloud delves into this thorny issue. Nera W. C. Liu and Albert Yu will show how they managed to introduce and propagate tainted attributes to a DOM input interface, and then devised a system to detect such breaches by harnessing the power of PhantomJS, a headless browser for automation.

    JavaScript’s ubiquity makes it the subject of aggressive security-community research, boosting its effective security level every day. Sounds good, but in JS Suicide: Using JavaScript Security Features to Kill JS Security, AhamedNafeez will demonstrate that these security features can be a double-edged sword, sometimes allowing an attacker to disable certain other JS protection mechanisms. In particular, the sandboxing features of ECMAScript 5 can break security in many JS applications. Real-world examples of other JS security lapses are also on the agenda.

    Ready-made exploit kits make it easier than ever for malicious parties to victimize unwary Internet users. Jose Miguel Esparza will take us down that rabbit hole in PDF Attack: A Journey From the Exploit Kit to the Shellcode, in which he’ll teach how to manually extract obfuscated URLs and binaries from these weaponized pages. You’ll also learn how to do modify a malicious PDF payload yourself to bypass AV software, a useful trick for pentesting.

    Looking to register? Please visit Black Hat Asia 2014’s registration page to get started.

    One of the things I like about Black Hat is their honesty. Computer enthusiasts include the usual high school/college nerds and white shirt/blue tie crowd but there are those who follow a different track. And some of those, don’t work for national governments.

    If you need more evidence for the argument that software (not just the WWW) is systematically broken (Back to Basics: Beyond Network Hygiene by Felix ‘FX’ Lindner and Sandro Gaycken), review the agenda for this Black Hat conference or for proceeding years.

    As long as software security remains a separate security product or patch to existing software issue, Black Hat isn’t going to go lacking for conference material.

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