Hi Everyone,
I’m Patrick Eisenmann from the GT Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. If you’ve expressed interest in teaching or taking classes in our TechTopics program (which we had been calling Options Classes/Saturday Classes/SIGoptions), then you’ll be excited to hear we”re having a meeting today Tuesday, January 12th in (Edit: CoC 52) at 6PM. (Location may change, but we’ll email and post a sign if it does)
In case you’ve forgotten, TechTopics is a series of lectures taught by students, faculty, or external companies on a variety of topics that most students won’t get in regular classes. This includes languages like PHP, Perl, Ruby, Objective-C, and Javascript; frameworks like jQuery, YUI, GWT, and Rails; and mobile apps for all smart phone platforms. There is, of course, room for many more topics, I’m just listing what’s been popular in discussions
The purpose of the meeting will be to:
- Finalize the format of the classes / Get your input
- Discuss the first class that we’ve already planned (Topic: Intro to PHP)
- Encourage anyone who might want to teach to follow through and plan a class
- Select a new leader of the TechTopics program, since I’ve graduated
- Eat our food
I hope to see everyone there!
–
Patrick Eisenmann
TechTopics Coordinator
GT Association for Computing Machinery
gtacm.org
Officer elections: if you’re a curent officer or paying member, you get to judge who will help run and grow GTACM in the future! Only paid members and officers can vote, but ***anyone can run for a position***, even if you haven’t been involved with us before. It’s not especially formal- you’ll have to tell a little bit about yourself and why you’re interested in the position.
This will be tonight (11/23) at 7pm in Klaus 1447.
We’re going to list the available officer positions and describe their responsibilities. You’ll have a chance to ask questions and know what you’re getting into! Then we’ll go through the positions and elect people.
We won’t have food. Sorry! And we do understand that Lockheed Martin is having an event at the same time, so we plan on having this event again either later this semester or at the beginning of the next one if you didn’t get a chance to come this time.
Our first members meeting this semester is going to be Thursday 11/19 @ 7pm and is open to everyone! Members meetings are to showcase all of the teams and projects in our organization and to promote our available leadership positions with a variety of roles and time commitments. If you’re interested in getting involved in any way, stop by!
Many of our officers will be graduating soon, so there are some great opportunities to get really involved! If you’re interested in developing your leadership abilities and other important skills, or if you come to our events and enjoy them, please take some time on Thursday to learn about how you can help, especially if you enjoy running social events. Pizza will be served!
Palantir will be presenting information about their company and then performing some technical demos on Wednesday, 11/18 @ 6:30pm in Klaus 1116. Free Wingnuts!
Here’s some more details:
Speaker: Ari Gesher, Senior Software Engineer at Palantir Technologies.
Ari will discuss how Palantir Technologies is revolutionizing the analysis of hard and important problems that face our world today, as well as showing off a live demo of Palantir’s software.
Palantir Technologies is working to radically change how groups analyze information. Founded in 2004 by a handful of PayPal alumni and Stanford computer scientists, Palantir Technologies has doubled in size every year while retaining early-stage values: a startup culture, strong work ethic, and rigorous hiring standards. Palantir currently offer two products: Palantir Government and Palantir Finance. Both are platforms for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing the world’s information. They support many kinds of data including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial. Their products are built for real analysis with a focus on security, scalability, ease of use, and collaboration.
Some of the GT GameFest Fall 2009 photos are now uploaded to our flickr group. Enjoy!
On Thursday, 11/12 at 6:15 pm in Klaus 2456, Tim Carr, (Software Manager, Homeland Defense at Northrop Grumman) will be giving a talk about “Agile Systems Development”. Pasta will be served!
Speaker profile
Mr. Timothy Carr has been working in the software engineering field for over 16 years. During this time he has gained extensive experience in all phases of the software development lifecycle in various roles and industries within both the public and private sectors. He has experience leading projects implementing object-oriented technologies (C++ and Java) in real-time embedded systems and business applications, following waterfall and iterative development models. He is currently serving as a software engineering manager within Northrop Grumman’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive weapons (CBRNE) business area supporting multiple projects.
Presentation description
It is difficult to work in the software engineering field these days and not hear about Agile software development methodologies. More and more companies are recognizing the value of implementing Agile principles and moving away from the more traditional “heavyweight” waterfall models. This presentation will introduce Agile principles, terminology, process flows, roles, activities, and artifacts. In addition, I will share my personal experiences using both methodologies.
We will have pasta for 50 people. ACM members and officers get priority.
GT GameFest, a semesterly LAN party and gaming tournament, was held this past weekend in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building. The event was sponsored and operated by the Georgia Tech Association for Computing Machinery (GTACM) and SIGgame in coordination with the Residence Hall Association (RHA) and Student Government Association (SGA). Attendance for this semester’s GameFest ballooned to over 500 attendees, including over 250 tournament participants.
The most popular tournament was Team Fortress 2, with 10 six-person teams participating. Other tournaments included Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare, Counter-Strike Source, DotA Allstars and Starcraft: Brood War on PC; Halo 3 on Xbox 360; and Super Smash Brothers Brawl on Wii. Over $1,500 in prizes, funded by tournament fees, were awarded to the tournament winners. Four hundred burritos, 80 pizzas and over 1,500 sodas, energy drinks and bottles of water fueled the event.
SIGgame is a special interest group organized under the GTACM umbrella that is focused on all things related to games and gaming. SIGgame founded GT GameFest and has a successful Starcraft team that competes in organized intercollegiate competitions. SIGgame is also working on a game to be submitted to the 2010 Independent Games Festival (IGF).
The Georgia Tech ACM SIGGAME will be holding a LAN party that will take place on October 24th and 25th (5pm to 8am). This event will be held in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building. Food and drinks will be provided throughout the event, and we will be giving away prizes for tournaments. We plan on providing the consoles and televisions needed for the console based events, but this is a bring your own PC (BYOPC) and LAN cable event for all PC based games and tournaments. Please see the game pages below for more details on specific tournaments.
If you would like to participate in any of the tournaments there is a $5 entrance fee for unlimited tournament play. This fee will allow you to play in any number of tournaments throughout the duration of the event. All tournaments will have prizes for the winners and we have more than $1500 in prizes to give away! In addition to all of the tournaments listed below there will be free play going on throughout the event. So if you just want to show up, play some games and have a good time you are more than welcome to do so. PC Gamers – Don’t forget to bring a LAN cable, as none will be provided!
Today we’re having Research In Motion (RIM) at 7:30-8:30pm in the Student Success Center, President’s Suites C & D. Go into the building, through the lobby, it’ll be on the left. RIM is best known for making the Blackberry. Expect a presentation about the company, information about internships and full time employment, followed by RIM raffling off a phone and giving away some great swag! Food and drinks will be provided.
Today (Oct 9, 2009) VMware will give a Tech Talk in Klaus 1116W from 12-1PM. There will be free pizza!
This talk will review linked clones, thin provisioning, and deduplication in VMware desktop virtualization solutions.
Keshav Attrey received his Master’s in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in December 2007. He has been a software engineer at VMware since May 2008. Keshav works with the View Composer and ConfigControl development teams.
