Our speaker was Tim Lambertstock, Technology Strategy Manager at Voca.

Voca runs the BACS payment service handling 5 billion payments totalling €4.5 trillion per annum with some 80 million transactions on a peak day. Voca has recently completed the complete renewal of its technology and was now focussing on new business opportunities in Europe and on innovative solutions in the mobile and Internet arena. Tim took us through some advances in payment technology and covered:

• UK Payments Landscape
• Faster Payments
• Contactless Payments

UK Payments Landscape

There is a steady decline in the use of cheques which is now a small percentage of total payments. Electronic payments and credit/debit cards are by far the most popular method and showing continued growth according to figures produced by industry body APACS http://www.apacs.org.uk/ Internet and Telephone banking transactions currently account for about 7% of electronic payments and are set to grow as the number of users of Internet banks increases.

Faster Payments

Following pressure from the Office of Fair Trading, the payments industry announced in December 2005 that it would introduce a new way of making same-day payments in late 2007. This is mainly aimed at Internet and Telephone banking users and would also eliminate "float" from Standing Order payments. Tim gave the examples that if you: make an ATM withdrawal, the money is taken from your account immediately and you have the cash. If you buy from Amazon with a credit or debit card, the withdrawal and receipt of payment are almost synchronous. However, if you pay your Barclaycard through an on-line bank account, whilst the withdrawal is immediate, the money will not reach your credit card account for at least two working days, Voca and LINK (which operates the UK ATM network) are developing the IT systems to support Faster Payments. Payments will be made in near real-time but it could be a couple of hours before the payment is visible in your account depending on the systems used by the receiving bank. This should improve as banks upgrade their legacy systems over time.

Contactless Payments

The main disadvantages of the most popular methods of payment, from the retailer's point of view and to some extent of the consumer, are:

• Cash - it's costly (has to be counted and kept secure) and 'horrors' it's anonymous (the retailers like to know what we are up to i.e. what we buy).
• Credit / debit cards -it's costly to the merchant and slow at the till.

Tim suggested that Contactless payments are a viable alternative, particularly for smaller value purchases. Contactless payments rely on a technology known as Near Field Communications (NFC) which is a specific implementation of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). NFC chips could be embedded in credit and debit cards or in other devices such as mobile phones or watches or (as a member of the audience suggested) even your body! A user would simply need to touch the device on a suitable Point of Sale terminal and the sale would be completed without the need to sign, enter PINs or give change. A similar technology is used for Oyster cards which many people will be familiar with.

Tim believes that there is likely to be a major take-off of the technology in 2007 following the agreement of international standards and major investment by chip makers and others. The major providers are likely to be MasterCard with PayPass and Visa with Wave although a number of non-bank providers are poised to enter the market with stored-value propositions that may offer a number of other services beyond low-value payments. MasterCard is already claiming about 10 million customers for PayPass in the US and has seen a 45% increase in total transactions per account.

Tim said that Voca should shortly be announcing its involvement in a contactless payments public trial using mobile phones equipped with and ISO 14443 compliant NFC chip but, unfortunately, further information is not yet in the public domain.

This is a cheap way for retailers to take money. It is certainly cheaper than credit cards and possibly cheaper than cash to a small retailer. However, there are significant infrastructure costs and providers are struggling to develop viable business models for how the technology can be used.

Tim's relaxed and inclusive style elicited a great deal of audience participation and we all chipped in.

Tim finished off with a demo of the kit that may be used in the Voca trial and showed how easy it was to make payments.

Dr. Brian Day, secretary of BCS Oxfordshire branch, introduced the evening to branch members and guests at the Rutherford lab, and, using the video link, to the audience at Daresbury.

Our speaker at RAL was Dr Keith Norman of Tessella.

Keith described the climateprediction.net project, which had been built using the same framework as the SETI project to allow many PCs to work on problem. This is the world's largest experiment to attempt to forecast the climate of the 21st century. Keith described the background to the experiment (developed in part by Tessella, with Oxford and Cambridge Universities, CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the Met Office, and others), and showed how the software could help scientists to understand the global climate.

Keith's slides are here (1.3MB) and also linked from our downloads page.

Our speaker from Daresbury was Peter Lloyd, also of Tessella.

Peter described the issues surrounding Digital Preservation; with several examples of very public digital records which were nearly lost.

Peter discussed the challenges of ensuring that the digital information created and stored today will be accessible for as long as it may be needed.

Peter's slides are here (614KB) and also linked from our downloads page.

Our speaker was Stef Coetzee, Senior VP International, NetMotion Wireless.

Stef described the challenges of running applications from mobile wireless devices, where the signal strength and data rate can vary widely and sometimes drop completely as the user moves between wireless hotspots and mobile phone cells. He outlined an emerging category of products referred to as Mobile VPNs, specifically crafted to cater for the needs of secure wireless computing.

With bandwidth-challenged wireless networks, the protocol overhead becomes relatively large and can take an increasing proportion of the available bandwidth.

Stef described the communication stack demands of a Mobile VPN which could preserve application connectivity as the user moved from one type of network to another, and even hold the application connection when the physical connection was temporarily interrupted (when roaming from one network to another or travelling through a tunnel, for example).

This ideal application might also be sensitive to the nature of the network being used and introduce protocol optimisations and downsample marketing-type images when bandwidth was low.

He finished by describing several pilot projects, from various industry sectors, where such adaptive software has been used, and some surprising benefits in addition to the expected performance increases. See the slides for more information.

Stef's slides are here (2.2MB) and also linked from our downloads page.

Our speaker was Igor Aleksander (right), Emeritus Professor in the Intelligent Systems and Networks Group at Imperial College.

Igor gave us a great evening. His talk was stimulating, thought provoking and funny. He used lots of pictorial aids to express his ideas.

He started by discussing what we mean by consciousness and why we find it difficult to attribute consciousness to robots. An industrial robot, as used on an assembly line, doesn't really need to be conscious, but the Mars Exploration Rover vehicle does need enough consciousness to sense when its batteries were low and to avoid rocks which might flip it over. On the other hand, Honda's Asimo robots manage to play football without very much intelligence.

Igor posed the question "After so many eminent philosophers, from Socrates through Aquinas, Locke to Wittgenstein and the present day, had tried to understand the mind, would it be heresy for an engineer to have a go?"

His answer was "Certainly not!". Just as cracking DNA was a result of repeatedly modelling the possibilities of the structure, Igor proposed the method of "understanding through building". He defined five ways ("axioms") of feeling conscious:

1. PRESENCE: I feel in the middle of an out-there world.
2. IMAGINATION: I can imagine worlds I have and have not perceived.
3. ATTENTION: I focus on what is important to me.
4. VOLITION: I can decide what to do next
5. EMOTION: I evaluate options open to me.

These axioms were defined in a paper presented at AISB 05, which went on to suggest a 'kernel architecture' capable of supporting the five axioms.

To demonstrate that we can't always trust our observations, he showed us a short movie and asked us to concentrate on one particular aspect and report our results.
If you weren't there and would like to see the movie, you can find it as demo 15, together with further examples on the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab website.

Igor described the pattern recognition performed by neurons in the brain, how these techniques had been used in cancer screening, and demonstrated a "virtual machine" programme which had been built to study visual consciousness.

As time ran out, comparing human brains with insects and robots, Igor concluded that "Mechanisms for consciousness are similar, but MINDS are very different".

After a lively question time, and to the applause of the packed audience, many of us then went off for minced pies and mulled wine at the Lamb and Flag: a good ending to a delightful evening.
Thank you Igor.

Igor's latest book, aimed at the general reader as well as the specialist, is: The World in my Mind - My Mind in the World.

Igor's slides are here (2.4MB) and also linked from our downloads page.

Our speaker was Stuart Taylor (right), head of the UK centre of SophosLabsTMAbingdon, Oxfordshire. Stuart briefly discussed the history of Sophos starting in 1985 and the early years of anti-virus protection products.

He then went on to discuss the scale of the threat and the escalating number of viruses in existence. Stuart has seen these numbers rise from a few hundreds ten years ago to there being now over 200,000 recorded.

He spoke about how the profile of virus creators is changing. No longer are they misdirected amateurs doing it for a challenge; there is now money to be made and organised criminals are getting involved.

Other forms of malware or threats are appearing such as spam, scareware and ransomware which can be designed to extort money from you. The threats are that the malware has removed data from your PC and you must pay money to get it back.

He told us about tests carried out in his own labs where the survival time for an unprotected, unpatched PC attached to the internet to become infected averaged about 11 minutes.

Stuart concluded that:

• Today's threat is more organised.
• Your identity and personal details are at risk.
• The battle between the IT security companies and the criminals is going to continue with new techniques emerging on both sides frequently.
• Only agility will keep security companies ahead of the game.

Stewart quite reasonably prefers not to make his slides available on this, or any other website external to Sophos, because such material can easily go out of date.

Our speaker was Andrew Simpson from the Oxford University Computer Lab, who introduced the Software Engineering Programme, a joint project between the OUCL and Department for Continuing Education.

The Software Engineering Programme is a part-time , post-experience programme of education: it teaches software engineering to people already in full-time employment. Large-scale, multidisciplinary, projects are undertaken in collaboration with other universities (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Loughborough, UCL, KCL, Birmingham, Belfast, Auckland, Graz, Tulane) and commercial partners such as IBM, Microsoft, Siemens Molecular Imaging, T+Medical.

After touching briefly on earlier projects such as e-DiaMoND and climateprediction.net, Andrew described the DTI-funded GIMI (Generic Infrastructure for Medical Informatics) project; the motivation behind it and the safeguards required for legal and ethical reasons.

Andrew's slides are here (1.2MB) and also linked from our downloads page.

In a departure from our usual meeting location in the centre of Oxford, over 30 people travelled to Unipart's global Head Office on the outskirts of Cowley to learn about how they are using technology, including RFID, to improve logistics processes for their customers.

Unipart is one of Europe's leading independent providers of third party logistics and distribution services. It was formed after a management and employee buy-out from British Leyland in 1987 and has developed into a major international company with a turnover of £1.2bn. It employs over 10,000 staff and focuses on the Manufacturing, Rail, Automotive, Leisure & Marine and Logistics & Business Services sectors. Unipart has been a pioneer of the Lean operating system originally developed in Japan by Honda and Toyota. The company culture is one of continuous process improvement and although many organisations claim to follow this, it really did seem intrinsic to Unipart's ways of working. As part of this, it was interesting to note that "Our Contribution Counts" quality circles had saved Unipart over £5.5m so far. Unipart was now providing process consultancy services to a number of major customers outside of the Logistics area, including a major government department.

After an introduction to Unipart from Gareth Jenkins, Sales Director, in the Unipart Conference Centre, we made our way across the site to the Advanced Logistics Centre where Phil Wood, Head of Systems Practice, explained how Unipart used this facility to model the physical logistics processes for customers and worked with them on improvement. This facility could be configured to physically model each of the steps in the supply chain from manufacture to retail shop sales. Of particular interest to the audience was the use of RFID to improve picking accuracy, tracking distribution and controlling stock. RFID "tags" could be applied to containers, pallets, roll cages, boxes or individual items according to the customer requirements. Tags could be passive (only read by a reader) or active (emitting a radio signal) and could be used for different ranges for different applications. They also came in different form factors including paper labels and nails that could be hammered into wood.

It was clear from the visit that there are many applications for RFID but to really take advantage of the technology required a detailed understanding of how the supply chain processes could be improved and the careful selection of the right solution.

Ruby on Rails was top of Computerworld's March list of Five Technologies You Need to Know about in 2007.
Previous feedback had indicated that our members appreciate technical sessions: Jonathan Conway of New Bamboo Web Development certainly threw us in at the deep end with lots of code examples to demonstrate why Ruby on Rails is fast becoming a platform of choice for rapid Web2.0 application development. In the question session which followed, Jonathan explained some of the problems which remain to be solved before Rails-based solutions become fully scalable.

If you were hoping for a more introductory level talk on Ruby, have a look at this page of screencasts and presentations. Try building a weblog in 15 minutes.

This was a joint meeting with the BCS Open Source and Internet Specialist Groups.

Jonathan's slides are here (1.0MB) and also linked from our downloads page.