After the now traditional cheese and wine buffet on arrival, this year's Branch Chairman, Robert Ward (shown here) conducted the formal proceedings of the AGM.

Robert reviewed the highlights of the branch's programme for the 2003/4 season just completed, and summarised the BCS membership changes which would come into effect on 1 May 2004.

As all committee members were willing to stand again, the entire committee was re-elected en bloc. Tim Lambertstock, who had been the speaker at our January 2004 meeting, was also elected to the committee.

Robert also announced that the popular Schools Web Competition, which had last been run in 2002/3, was again in the plan for the 2004/5 programme.

Tony Cox, treasurer, presented an overview of the accounts, showing that once again he had managed the branch's finances excellently.

Extreme Blue is a leading summer vacation programme at IBM laboratories worldwide, open to students in their penultimate year of study. Students work in small teams with early-career professionals, on leading edge projects in areas such as Grid Computing and Linux.
This is now a worldwide programme running in IBM labs in 9 countries in locations ranging from California and Canada to Beijing and Bangalore, as well as several European sites.

Becca Loader, Extreme Blue UK programme manager, described how this summer studentship programme, which started in 1997, is coming to play a key role in the innovation process.

Figures show that only 7 out of 1000 ideas are successful in securing venture capital. Of those half might break even and only 10% hit it big.
The idea of Extreme Blue is to use small teams of bright students, from July to mid-September, to assess innovative ideas. The typical team is one business and 3 technical students, with mentors to help and to facilitate access to worldwide subject experts in IBM.
The students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own work and work patterns and to spend a lot of time brainstorming. They are encouraged to work hard and play hard - one team worked 36 hours on a stretch when they got stuck into a problem. Leisure activities have included trips to Alton Towers and Shakespeare in the Park.

One metric of the success of the programme is the number of patent disclosures: 80 in 2003 worldwide, with 11 from the UK

One project in Summer 2003 was to see whether there could be a part for IBM in the online games industry. They selected students with the appropriate experience. The team ported Quake2 to grid architecture and were able to show that there were no negative effects of scaling to multiple players. The project generated several business leads.
Sian Whiting, who had been on the 2002 UK programme and subsequently joined IBM, spoke about her team's experiences working with aspect-oriented development and aspectj from eclipse.

What's in it for
IBM - a fresh look at exciting business opportunities - and almost as important is the possibility to identify areas that are not currently worth investing in - plus a good way to recruit new talent.
The students gain paid summer employment as well as challenging work and unprecedented access to some of the best brains. About 50 to 60% go on to join IBM.

As is our practice, after the meeting the discussion continued over a drink at the Lamb and Flag.

After describing the mission of and legislation enabling the British Library, John Tuck, who is Head of British Collections, told us about the Domain.UK archiving experiment. This was a small six-month project on 2001 to select and archive 100 UK websites. The sites were archived with the permission of their owners on the understanding that this was a research project and theeir contents would not be made publicly available. The idea is to be able to preserve the contents of sites as a historic record.

The next, more formal, phase is the appointment of a Curator for Web Archiving.

A UK Web Archiving Consortium has been formed of six partners, which has selected the Australian PANDAS software.

They hope to start archiving sites in 2004 with controlled access to the archives.

Deborah Woodyard, Digital Preservation Co-ordinator, started by showing screenshots of websites from a year ago as an example of how an archive could be used to gain a historical perspective. She spoke about the many technical and legal challenges of taking a snapshot of a remote site. Software such as HTTrack facilitates the capture of static web pages, but challenges arise where a site is generated dynamically from an underlying database.

Although legislation requires copies of physically published books to be given to the BL, there is no immediate prospect of comparable legislation covering publication on the web. Challenges to be faced include software licensing - for example commercial database software needed to create an archive copy of a website - and the implications of making available archived material which later turns out to be incorrect or even defamatory.

References on the web include the Digital Preservation Coalition, the feasibility study undertaken for the JISC and Wellcome Trust and the 2nd ECDL workshop on Web archiving.

Slides from the talks are available on the download page.

Tim Lambertstock, Technology Strategy Manager at BACS (renamed Voca in October 2004), started by describing some facts and figures about BACS, such as the 60 million payments processed on peak days.

The first phase of the NewBACS programme went live on schedule and under budget in October 2002. Known as BACSTEL-IP, it is replacing the current BACSTEL service as well as paper-based reports.

The project has won several industry awards for innovation and successful use of technology.

Using PKI and smartcards, it provides a secure channel for the submission of payment instructions to BACS by customers and Members and enables them to receive reports electronically as well as maintaining their information on-line.

Tim described the challenges of moving from a mainframe, COBOL, X.400 based architecture to BACSTEL-IP which uses internet technology, J2EE, EJBs, XML, with clustering and failover.

We had not one, but two celebrities on stage for our Christmas presentation.
Steve Grand's first developmental robot orang-utan, Lucy Mark 1, was able to be with him as Steve explained his ideas on Artificial Life. Artificial Life is Steve's own preferred term for the kind of automated self learning machines which he is attempting to build.
In the photo Steve checks whether the audience is as clever as Lucy and can tell the difference between an apple and a banana.

Steve, watched by a giant movie of Lucy Mark 1, explains the challenges of building an android and how Lucy Mark 2 will be different.

The audience heard Steve explain his ideas on, amongst many other things, the structure of the brain, learning, perception and memory.
Steve mentioned that he started developing ideas on Artificial Life when he created the popular PC computer game "Creatures" in the 1992.
Many sections of the lecture were based on content that is in Steve's first book "Creation - Life and How to Make It".
The book addresses many issues in its investigation of the true roots of intelligence and life, including the proposal that intelligence is necessarily parallel in nature.
During his lecture Steve explained how in making a decision, for example in the human brain, the decision is not necessarily made at any one discrete point in the structure. Rather the decision is made by a majority weighting of a number of different controlling factors and interests reinforced with feedback loops in the structure to produce a decision 'on balance' based on these controlling factors, interests and feedback loops operating in parallel..

Steve explained that NESTA had funded much of his work on Lucy Mark 2. He is continuing to develop his theories on intelligence and skills as a Biomimetics engineer while building Lucy Mark 2 who is much more complex than Lucy Mark 1.
Both Lucy Mark 1 and Mark 2 have the ability to learn for themselves. Lucy 1 was being taught to look at and recognise objects. Steve described that the structure of their large number of 'virtual' neurones was mapped into software running on a number of microprocessors in their bodies. The neurones would each have a particular purpose in responding to certain types of stimulus or event. The learning process involved remapping the connections between these neurones based on the experiences encountered by the robot.
His long term aim is to work towards producing a robot that could attend primary school one day.
Glossary note: Biomimetics, in brief, is the abstraction of good design from nature. The art and science of designing and building biomimetic apparatus is called biomimetics.

Steve winds up his talk wishing the audience a Happy Christmas - and not plugging his new book (although the audience did have the opportunity to buy advance copies). If you missed the chance on the night, you can pre-order the book from Amazon UK by searching for ISBN 0297607332.

After the talk came the raffle and we were treated to the hilarious spectacle of Steve attempting to train Lucy to pick raffle numbers out of a hat for the draw. Lucy succeeded in picking out the first three or four numbers before appearing to lose interest, possibly because she realised she was not getting a prize herself!

Dr Jonathan Jones, from the Oxford Centre for Quantum Computation, introducing his talk by explaining classical computing.

Classical computers have been increasing steadily in speed according to Moore's Law for many years, but we finally see the time, perhaps by 2012, when further increases are physically impossible.

Turing and Church maintain all reasonable models of computing are equivalent to Turing Machines.

But Qubits can be in two different states at the same time.
When a quantum object can do two things it does both - in different universes.
What we call quantum computers are actually function evaluators.

Quantum computing offers the possibility of very greatly increased processing speeds for certain classes of problem.

The spooks in particular are worried. As we learned in our January 2003 lecture, quantum cryptography, if practical implementations are possible, looks provably uncrackable. And quantum computers, if we can build them, could be able to factor very large numbers in reasonable time, thus threatening the security of all public key cryptography.

In answer to a question, Jonathan said that he did not expect to see quantum computers replacing traditional PCs, but he could envisage a laptop with a quantum co-processor.

Roger Blake, seen here taking questions after his talk, has been Technical Consultant to the All England Lawn Tennis Club for the past twelve years. He described the challenges of and technology behind supporting the Wimbledon championships, including the information system which provides the commentators with instant statistics

Richard Pawson, founder of Naked Objects and co-author of the book of the same name, explained that the term "Naked Objects" reflected Antoine de Saint-Exupery's statement that "...perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
The term also mirrors the Naked Chef's dedication to reducing cookery to the basics of using a small number of high quality ingredients.

After Richard explained the concepts of Naked Objects, Dan Haywood risked a live demo, implementing an application suggested by a member of the audience. This showed how easy it was to create a simple application using drag and drop.

Richard Pawson's ideas have been put into practice in large organisations and, with Dan Haywood's help, he also conducted parallel implementations of a car service application using both traditional Java and Naked Objects.

More about the benefits of the Naked Objects approach