This page shows a nearly final version of the branch's meeting programme for the 2007/8 academic year.

While the meeting programme is being developed, you can view a draft on the branch wiki.

Come back to this page from time to time to confirm dates and times, and to check for amendments to the programme and more details on some of the sessions as they become available.

Programme Summary

27 September 2007	How Green is IT?
Wednesday 24 October 2007	Access Grid technology
7 November 2007	BCS Evening at Science Oxford
29 November 2007	Identity Fraud - From Criminals to Consumers
24 January 2008	IT at JET - A Challenging Fusion Research Environment
21 February 2008	How Big Business learned to love Virtual Worlds
13 March 2008	What's Hot
24 April 2008	Annual Branch Visit: Technology in Action - Shrivenham
22 May 2008	Education in the Internet Age and Branch AGM
Attendance	Unless stated otherwise, all our meetings and events are held on Thursday evenings and are open to the public without charge. Except for special events or rare meetings which are expected to be heavily oversubscribed, there is no need to book: just turn up on the night. When booking is required, it will be made clear on this page and on the monthly emails which we send to people on our mailing list.

We hope that you will enjoy the range of topics to be covered. If there are other subjects you'd like to hear about, it's never too soon to start thinking about next year. Just drop us a note using the contact form.

Following our usual practice, we will send email reminders to each branch member of record between one and two weeks before each meeting.
Any unavoidable changes to the programme will be advertised on this page and notified to members by email.

We reviewed the wording of our meeting reminders in the light of the EU Directive on Electronic Communications (which came into force in the UK on 11 December 2003) and now include a clear explanation of why individuals are receiving the message and how to unsubscribe.

Programme details are posted to branch members in late August. If, after allowing for postal delays, you didn't receive yours, please let us know using the contact form.

Programme Detail

How Green is IT?

Date	27 September 2007
Time	19:30 (Cheese and Wine buffet from 19:00)
Location	Computing Lab, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QG ..Directions and Map
Calendar Entry	Download this iCal file: depending on your browser settings, your calendar may launch automatically, otherwise double click to add the meeting to your Outlook diary. Procedure may differ for other Calendar tools.
Meeting Summary	On the reports page
Speakers	Zahl Limbuwala and/or Liam Newcombe. Zahl is the chair and Liam is the secretary of the newly formed BCS Data Centre Specialist Group.

Abstract:The DCSG is raising the awareness of just how "Green" we are in the IT industry and it may not be a surprise to many that we are not particularly efficient in our use of energy. Come and find out the real facts and figures and what we as an industry are doing about it.

The DCSG has been taking a very proactive role in highlighting the energy costs of IT and advocating ways of reducing consumption. See the summary of the EPA report to Congress and a presentation on Fresh Air Cooling in the DCSG's document repository.

OneClick are sponsoring this event with wine, cheese, a demo and will be offering a special discount on their products.

OneClick Technologies is a UK-based start-up company borne out of the realisation that vast quantities of electricity - and hence carbon dioxide emissions from power stations, which are blamed for climate change - are being wasted through electrical leakage from a multitude of sources. The two biggest culprits have been identified as computers and audiovisual (AV) systems. OneClick will offer a range of intelligent products that reduce electrical waste, helping to conserve the Earth's resources while, as a welcome side benefit, saving money on fuel bills for both households and businesses.

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Access Grid technology

Date	Wednesday 24 October 2007
Time	19:00 (Tea and Coffee from 18:15) Note earlier start than usual
Location	Pickavance Lecture Theatre, Building R22, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, OX11 OQX ..Directions and Map As it's a large site, you should allow some time to find the lecture theatre. Security: There is no charge for this meeting but we need to know the names of people who will be coming. Please use the contact us form to tell us that you will be coming. You will need to bring some form of identification. If you are attending the event at the Daresbury lab, please go to the Chester & North Wales branch website and follow the instructions there. Once on site, the Pickavance Lecture Theatre is in Road 13, just off Road 6 which you can see in this detailed view from Google maps. The JSOC website has a site map showing the roads, but the neighbouring buildings and car parks are now different, presumably affected by the huge Diamond project construction just behind Building R22. If you have the time, Google Earth has a great view of the lecture theatre and the Diamond Project which you can find if you search for Chilton, Oxfordshire and zoom in.
Calendar Entry	Download this iCal file (updated October 2006): depending on your browser settings, your calendar may launch automatically, otherwise double click to add the meeting to your Outlook diary. Procedure may differ for other Calendar tools.
Speakers	TBA

Abstract: Access Grid is an advanced collaboration environment that has been described as "videoconferencing on steroids". It can support a huge number of sites interacting simultaneously with an emphasis on effective distributed collaboration between groups. It was invented in 1997 in order to provide a human interface to the Grid and continues to be an accessible route to Grid technologies.

There are over a hundred Access Grid nodes across UK academia and thousands of users worldwide. This talk will look at the technology in more detail, describe some interesting use cases in science, social science and the arts, update the audience on current developments and look to the future of Access Grid considering similar technologies such as Skype and ConferenceXP.

This is a Joint Session with Chester & North Wales branch, linking Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Daresbury Laboratory, NEWI (Wrexham) and Bangor University.

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BCS evening at Science Oxford

We have exclusive use of the exhibition space and "Hands on" exhibition at Science Oxford. This event is an opportunity to provide feedback on what you, our members, would like from the BCS as well as a chance for you to find out what we already do for our membership, with a focus on the Young Professionals Group (YPG). We are especially eager to meet current YPG members or potential young professionals: our aim is to find out what you wish from the BCS now and in the future. This is your chance to network with our branch members and meet your Committee. There'll be raffles and mini quizzes during the evening with various prizes. Refreshments will be provided.

Watch this page for more details.

Identity Fraud - From Criminals to Consumers

Date	Thursday 29 November 2007
Time	19:30 (Tea and Coffee from 19:00)
Location	Computing Lab, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QG ..Directions and Map
Calendar Entry	Download this iCal file: depending on your browser settings, your calendar may launch automatically, otherwise double click to add the meeting to your Outlook diary. Procedure may differ for other Calendar tools.
Speaker	Tom Ilube is CEO of Garlik (www.garlik.com), an online consumer company pioneering a range of services to help give people real power over their personal information in the digital world, using semantic web technologies. Garlik's first product, Data Patrol, is aimed at reducing the risk of identity theft, one of the UK's fastest growing crimes. Until recently Tom Ilube was Chief Information Officer of the world's largest pure online bank, Egg plc and a member of the Executive Committee. In 2005 Tom left Egg to found Garlik, in partnership with Mike Harris, the Founding CEO of Egg and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University. Garlik's advisory board includes Professor Wendy Hall and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

This presentation will explore the rapidly emerging wave of identity theft hitting Britain, with over 130,000 incidents a year, and the impact on individual consumers. Looking at this emerging challenge from the consumer perspective, Tom will base his talk on research conducted with consumers, to understand their attitude towards their own personal information and with interviews conducted by leading criminologists, 1871 Ltd, with over 100 fraudsters to try to gain an insight into what they are actually doing and why they are doing it.

Garlik is one of the first consumer companies to use semantic web technologies on a large scale and Tom will explain why Garlik adopted semantic web technologies and how they are being used in practice.

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IT at JET - A Challenging Fusion Research Environment

Date	Thursday 24 January 2007
Time	19:30 (Tea and Coffee from 19:00)
Location	Computing Lab, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QG ..Directions and Map
Calendar Entry	Download this iCal file: depending on your browser settings, your calendar may launch automatically, otherwise double click to add the meeting to your Outlook diary. Procedure may differ for other Calendar tools.
Speaker	Sverker Griph, Senior Software Engineer at MetaAgility Knowledge Engineering. Sverker began with computing in 1971 as a medical research student in Uppsala, Sweden. Initially he worked on scientific applications and realtime interfacing of instrumentation. In the early 80s Sverker worked among other things on resource contention and scheduling problems in realtime operating systems. In 1983 he identified the 'priority inversion' realtime scheduling problem and implemented a recursive solution to it. In 1985 he was recruited to JET as a realtime operating system specialist. In 1990, when JET began to migrate its control and data acquisition systems to UNIX, Sverker worked as a software project leader. During the 90s he also implemented embedded realtime systems and micro-processor emulators in software for the Swedish industry using data driven frameworks of his own design. During the last decade he has been section leader at JET in control and data acquisition. During this period the data driven design concept has been developed at JET into a generic implementation methodology for high performance applications. It uses a data driven framework, which dynamically loads software components and supports third party linking compatible with high performance realtime. Also under Sverker's leadership, JET has since 2005 begun to use the RDF language (from W3C) as a generic configuration language for data driven designs. Sverker is also a strong proponent for the use of RDF as generic language for formal representation of knowledge in general.

The fusion research environment at JET provides many IT challenges. A mission critical real-time IT system - with high complexity and flexibility - needs to be sustained over decades, while subject to a high rate of change. These challenges are for example addressed by

• selective adoption of and longterm ownership of IT standards,
• extensive use of data driven design,
• a pervasive use of IT engineering databases and
• an in-house high performance software component architecture.

More details at http://www.metaagility.com/OPEN/bcs_talk_proposal.html

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How Big Business learned to love Virtual Worlds

Date	Thursday 21 February 2007
Time	19:30 (Tea and Coffee from 19:00)
Location	Computing Lab, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QG ..Directions and Map
Calendar Entry	Download this iCal file: depending on your browser settings, your calendar may launch automatically, otherwise double click to add the meeting to your Outlook diary. Procedure may differ for other Calendar tools.
Speaker	Roo Reynolds is a Metaverse Evangelist based at IBM's Hursley Park laboratory in the UK and is part of a team which facilitates the use of Virtual Worlds within IBM. All of this work is made all the more enjoyable thanks to a large world-wide community who are learning to collaborate and get things done in totally new ways. He enjoys exploring and building in the metaverse that is Second Life, uploading his photos to Flickr, keeping his bookmarks on del.icio.us, updating his playlist on Last FM tracking his location on Plazes and what he is doing on Twitter, as well as indulging in any number of other bleeding-edge alpha geek social software type activities. Roo is married to an artist, who tries her hardest to keep him balanced. As well as writing on rooreynolds.com he also contributes to eightbar.co.uk, an external IBM group blog.

Abstract: IBM has long been recognised as an interested player in virtual worlds. Roo Reynolds will share how a handful of brave IBMers first began a foray into Second Life and other virtual worlds, and how this grass-roots interest became widespread adoption within the company. What can a corporation expect from getting involved in a virtual world? What about an employee? Expect a lively tour of what's interesting in this space, together with some real-world examples of what's virtually possible.

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What's Hot

Date	Thursday 13 March 2007
Time	19:00 for 19:30.
Location	Computing Lab, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QG ..Directions and Map
Calendar Entry	Download this iCal file: depending on your browser settings, your calendar may launch automatically, otherwise double click to add the meeting to your Outlook diary. Procedure may differ for other Calendar tools.
Competitors/Panellists	Watch this space

Introduction: We will look at a number of emerging technologies and innovative applications of IT. Inspired by the BBC TV programme "Dragons' Den", a guest panel of senior industry experts and entrepreneurs will question each presenter and, at the end of the evening, the audience will be invited to vote for its favourite. Prizes will be awarded to the winners!

Watch this website for more details.

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Annual Branch Visit: Technology in Action - Shrivenham

Date	Thursday 24 April 2007
Time	All afternoon (start time to be confirmed)
Location	Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham Campus ..Directions and Map
Calendar Entry	Download this iCal file: depending on your browser settings, your calendar may launch automatically, otherwise double click to add the meeting to your Outlook diary. Procedure may differ for other Calendar tools.
Arrangements	Shrivenham is a secure site and numbers will be limited so we shall need members to book online. Watch this website or the monthly email newsletter for details of how to book and the time and place of the rendezvous point(s).

This year's branch trip is an afternoon visit to the Defence Capability Centre at the Defence Academy in Shrivenham.

Details are still to be finalised, but we will be hearing about the use of technology by the armed forces, from small arms to tanks and aircraft.

There is also a spendid museum: it's not every day that you have a chance to climb inside an attack helicopter or armoured fighting vehicles of various kinds.

The tour of the museum with its military hardware and vehicles is always a very popular feature of our biennial Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition prizegiving event, so we are delighted that Branch members will also have the oportunity to explore the exhibits.

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Education in the Internet Age and Branch AGM

Date	Thursday 22 May 2008
Time	19:30 (Cheese and Wine buffet from 19:00)
Location	Computing Lab, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QG ..Directions and Map
Calendar Entry	Download this iCal file: depending on your browser settings, your calendar may launch automatically, otherwise double click to add the meeting to your Outlook diary. Procedure may differ for other Calendar tools.
Speaker	Mark Chamberlain, learning platform business manager at RM

After the business of the Annual General Meeting, preceded as usual by a light cheese and wine buffet, Mark Chamberlain will discuss Education in the Internet Age.

Children are now living in a fully accessible, high availability and high speed internet society. To adapt to this new age schools must be ready to embrace IT and offer services to all of its participants - the teachers, school staff, pupils and parents. This presentation will discuss the needs of a modern school before showing examples of how RM is embracing some of those needs with its Learning Platforms suite of products.

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