Upcoming Events

Special Relativity and the Problem of Database Scalability

Peter Mager — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:39:46 +0000

When:

Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

315

Lecturer(s):

Jim Starkey, NimbusDB, Inc.

Conventional wisdom says that relational or even transactional databases can’t scale. Like most conventional wisdom, this opinion is based on an unstated assumption, specifically, that database consistency depends on transaction serializeability. Serializeability is a property of databases implying that transactions leave the database in the same state whether they run concurrently or serially in some order. Serializeability is analogous to the Newtonian assumption of a universal reference frame that each transaction moves the database from one fixed state to another.

Jim Starkey’s career spans database history from the Datacomputer on the fledgling ARPAnet to his most recent startup, NimbusDB, Inc. Innovations include the date data type to the blob to multi-version concurrency control. At DEC, Starkey created the Datatrieve family of products, the DEC Standard Relational Interface, Rdb/ELN and designed the software architect for DEC’s database machine.

A Common Class of Business-Oriented Database Applications or: How I Hope to Achieve what Microsoft Access Didn't

Peter Mager — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:38:24 +0000

When:

Thursday, February 18, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

315

Lecturer(s):

Eirik Bakke, M.I.T. CSAIL and EECS

Joint meeting with IEEE Computer Society and DAMA

Before fleeing to the US, Eirik evaded military service by spending a year as an end-user of an amazingly obscure (and aquatically themed) database system made specifically for the administration of public Norwegian schools of music, theatre, and visual arts. Now safe in the hands of his advisors Prof. David Karger and Prof. Rob Miller, Eirik is at MIT CSAIL working towards his Master's Degree and, eventually/hopefully, his PhD.

Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon

Peter Mager — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:00:29 +0000

When:

Thursday, January 21, 2010 - 7:00pm

Venue:

IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Lecturer(s):

Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn't flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets -- secrets that every designer should know about. If one looks closely at what the team at Amazon has built, it's filled with innovative functionality and clever designs, all of which creates a delightful experience for its users and directly produces regular profits for its shareholders. But not all is perfect.

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Task-specific Search

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:27:44 +0000

When:

Thursday, December 10, 2009 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

E51-315

Lecturer(s):

Michael Stonebraker, MIT and Goby, Inc.

Historically, search engines have focused on searching the entire web for objects of interest using a single “one-size-fits-all” keyword query system supported by word-oriented indexing. In a task-specific search application such as real estate values (Zillow.com), airline tickets (Kayak, et. al..) and comparison shopping, such general purpose information retrieval (IR) techniques can be drastically improved. One can leverage any or all of the following to generate a vastly improved search experience.

a task-specific user-interface for queries

Mike Stonebraker is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T. and CTO of 3 companies that are commercializing new database related technologies that he initiated. He is widely recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in database technology and is noted for his insight in operating systems and expert systems. Mike received a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton University and Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Michigan.

The Power of Abstraction

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:20:24 +0000

When:

Thursday, November 19, 2009 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building 6 (Eastman Laboratories)

Room:

6-120

Lecturer(s):

Barbara Liskov, MIT

Abstraction is at the center of much work in Computer Science. It encompasses finding the right interface for a system as well as finding an effective design for a system implementation. Furthermore abstraction is an important way to make progress within computer science: once the right abstraction has been defined, it allows previously unresolved problems to be ignored from then on and provides a building block for future work. This talk will discuss abstraction mechanisms, their support in programming languages, and their use in designing and implementing programs.

Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor and head of the Programming Methodology Group at MIT. Liskov's research interests lie in programming methodology, programming languages and systems, and distributed computing.

The Spring Framework: Powering Enterprise Java Development

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:57:49 +0000

When:

Saturday, November 14, 2009 - 8:00am

Room:

MD-G115

Venue:

Harvard University (Maxwell Dworkin)

Lecturer(s):

Ken Sipe, Craig Walls

Spring is a widely used open source framework that helps developers build high quality applications faster. Spring provides a consistent programming and configuration model that is well understood and used by millions of developers worldwide. Spring provides a range of capabilities for creating enterprise Java, rich web, and enterprise integration applications that can be consumed in a lightweight, a-la-carte manner.

This seminar is designed for software practitioners, programmers, and designers. To meet your objectives, you need access to quality resources that explain real solutions using the Spring Framework to solve real problems.

It is best suited to moderately experienced programmers, typically with 2-10 years of software development experience.

Seminar in Detail:

Agenda - Saturday

Growing a Compiler

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:56:40 +0000

When:

Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 7:00pm

Venue:

MIT Building E51 (Tang Center)

Room:

E51-315

Lecturer(s):

Bill McKeeman, MathWorks and Dartmouth College

Self-compiling compilers are common. The question is: How far can one go, bootstrapping a (very) small compiler-compiler into more capable compilers? Context-free grammars are extended to accommodate output. A grammar executing machine (GEM) is introduced which accepts an input text and a grammar, and outputs another text. Both the input text and the output text can also be grammars, permitting the production of ever more powerful grammars. GEM itself can be extended to build-in the capabilities of the previous grammars.

Bill got one of the first computer science PhDs from Stanford University (1966) and proceeded to teach there, at the University of Toronto and then the University of California Santa Cruz (where he became department head) for the next 13 years. He then spent 2 years at Xerox PARC before returning to teach at the Wang Institute (where he was chair of the faculty from 1981-84) and Harvard. He spent 1988-99 doing research and developing compilers at the Digital Equipment Corp (later Compaq).

Project Wonderland: 3D Toolkit for Building Virtual Worlds

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:36:44 +0000

When:

Thursday, September 17, 2009 - 7:00pm

Venue:

IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Lecturer(s):

Nicole Yankelovich, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Project Wonderland is an open source toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds for business and education collaboration. Within a Wonderland virtual world, people can conduct business, interact with team members, and have chance encounters with colleagues, all using natural voice interaction. Most importantly, real work can be accomplished with Wonderland's support of X and Java applications as well as innovative telephone integration. With application sharing as the default, people can create, edit, and share documents within the virtual world.

Nicole Yankelovich is Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments program at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington, MA. She is also the team lead for Project Wonderland, an open source toolkit for building 3D virtual environments targeted at business and education collaboration.

Give REST and SPARQL to Semantic Web future of service oriented architectures

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 01:47:56 +0000

When:

Thursday, June 18, 2009 - 7:00pm

Venue:

IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Lecturer(s):

Rohit Bhardwaj, Kronos Labs

The LinkingOpenData Community Project has accomplished a global RESTful SOA scenario giving access to over two billion interlinked statements (RDF triples) from some 50 distributed providers such as DBpedia, Geonames, MusicBrainz, WordNet, the DBLP bibliography, or the 2000 U.S. Census. All this data is published in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. Each data set is structured as a named graph which can be accessed by a "Cool URI", using a simple HTTP GET.

Rohit Bhardwaj is working at Kronos Incorporated as Principal Software Engineer. He has fourteen years of extensive experience in architecture, design and development of distributed application systems. He got top quality architecture and development skills using latest technologies including Java, C++, Spring, AJAX, Hibernate, EJB 2.0 and 3.0, JPA, RMI, Aspect Oriented Programming AOP,JMS and in-depth knowledge of J2EE and Security. Knowledge of .NET 3.5, C#, web forms, dashboards, Ruby on rails, Groovy on grails.

GBC/ACM 2009 Annual Business Meeting

GBCACM Administrator — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:35:01 +0000

When:

Thursday, June 18, 2009 - 6:30pm

Venue:

IBM Innovation Center, Waltham, MA

Lecturer(s):

Chapter Officers

The Chapter’s annual business meeting will be held 30 minutes before the June evening meeting. The meeting agenda will include a year-end review by the President, the Treasurer’s report and officer elections. The nomination committee has selected the following candidates to run for the following positions. The nominee’s position statements and biographies are included below. The candidates are running uncontested this year.

Edward Freedman (Candidate for President)