Bristol Branch

Venue: Glendinning Lecture Theatre (room 2D67) UWE Frenchay Campus
Poster: Please help promote this event by displaying the poster on your company noticeboard

In association with the University of the West of England, we are please to bring you a special evening series of lectures as part of the Healthgrid 2011 conference.

Speakers/Panellists

This discussion meeting will be followed by a reception. In order to arrange catering, we need to know numbers. BCS Bristol members please indicate your intention to attend by emailing cbms2011@uwe.ac.uk with the subject line BCS Event and giving your name. Thanks.

This is joint event brought to you by the IET and BCS Bristol branches.

Venue: Lecture theater 1.11 Merchant Venturers’ Building, University of Bristol, Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB Map

Please help promote this event by putting this Poster on your notice board.

What may well be the most extraordinary surviving artefact from the ancient Greek world was discovered just over a century ago. Found in 1900 in a wreck off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Antikythera, the device contains over thirty gear wheels and dates from around 100 B.C. Now known as the Antikythera Mechanism, it is an order of magnitude more complicated than any surviving mechanism from the following millennium, and there is no surviving precursor. It is clear from its structure and inscriptions that it is an astronomical calculator, although its exact purpose is still shrouded in mystery. Over the past few years an international research program has involved scientists from Greece, the UK and HP labs in Paolo Alto, California. The use of cutting-edge technology has revealed a great deal more about the structure, function and inscriptions of the Mechanism. This illustrated review will describe the modern research methods we have used, and the profound implications of the results for the development of ancient Greek astronomy, philosophy and technology.

Speaker: Nick Flaherty, editor of SiliconSouthWest

City of Bristol College, Bristol (see Venues)

The South West, and Bristol and Bath in particular, is home to the largest group of silicon designers in Europe, creating a 'silicon gorge'. Nick Flaherty, editor of SiliconSouthWest, looks at the history and background of silicon design in the region and the influence that has on the region today. He looks at the current state of silicon design and other activities in the region, from established companies and design centres to successful new ventures such as Icera Semiconductor, picoChip, Nanotech Semiconductor, Phyworks and XMOS Semiconductor, and new startups, as well as the different markets that are being addressed

This part of the series of talks on Mobile Applications Development. Booking and payment is essential. For booking details please see the main article.

Speakers: Ian Pond The Fireplug and Rick Chapman, Park View Consultants

City of Bristol College, Bristol (see Venues)

Apps Marketing on a shoe string! (Ian Pond)

Without the vast marketing budgets of network operators, the reality for most app companies is creating maximum bang for minimal bucks. This is made all the more difficult by the almost endless choice of apps the consumer has to choose from. How can practitioners make progress under these challenging conditions?

Show me the money! (Rick Chapman)

Creating an app is often the easy part. Monetizing it is a significant challenge. With an increasing numbers of apps on a plethora of platforms and an expanding range of stores, how can you create a revenue stream from your app? We've all heard the stories of people becoming overnight millionaires with a simple idea, but what are the alternate strategies to trusting to blind luck and pushing an app out there?

This part of the series of talks on Mobile Applications Development. Booking and payment is essential. For booking details please see the main article.

Speaker: Alasdair Allan

City of Bristol College, Bristol (see Venues)

Continuing on from the development session but you will learn more about the types of features that you may want to use to distinguish your application e.g. GPS, actuator, compass, building an attractive GUI, etc.

First Alasdair Allan will guide you through developing applications for the iPhone that make use of the on-board sensors: the three-axis accelerometer, the magnetometer (digital compass), the camera and the global positioning system. You’ll learn how to make use of these on-board sensors and combine them to build augmented reality applications. This will give you the background to building your own applications independently using the hottest location-aware technology yet for any mobile platforms.

Then Tom Melamed shows us a world full of HD, 3D and stereo in a way that no app will ever be. But with the correct use of context you can weave the real world and your app together to create a rich and fully immersive experience that goes far beyond pushing some buttons on a screen. This talk will provide an introduction to creating those kind of apps, with examples.

This part of the series of talks on Mobile Applications Development. Booking and Payment is essential. For booking details please see the main article.

Speaker: Stuart Scott and Kieran Gutteridge, intohand.com

City of Bristol College, Bristol (see Venues)

Everything you need to know about developing an app: operating systems, development languages, SDK's etc. And how to test your application.

Android + iPhone application development
So you have an app idea, how are you going to take this idea and actually get a working application on a handset. Which platform should you develop for? what are some of the highlights and lowlights that you will encounter with the different SDKS, is native application development necessarily the right way to go?

Stuart Scott CEO of Intohand, providers of tools to publish to the small screen and makers of apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Java Mobile, Web

This part of the series of talks on Mobile Applications Development. Booking and payment is essential. For booking details please see the main article.

Speakers: Ben Trewhella, Mubaloo and Chris Book, bardowl

City of Bristol College, Bristol (see Venues)

The team at Mulaboo give us a complete guide to mobile apps.

• Delivering apps commercially (Ben Trewella)
  • An introduction to Mubaloo, an app development agency
  • The marketplace for mobile app services
• A Purposeful App (Gemma Ravensdale)
  • What makes a purposeful app
  • The role of an app in marketing to consumer and business audiences
  • Meeting commercial targets, gaining momentum and proving performance
• Design for Mobile (Eli Newman)
  • From UX to UI – Smart Application Design
• Mobile Apps for Enterprise (Ben Trewhella)
  • The role of mobile apps in the enterprise
  • Integration with corporate IT
  • Distributing and controlling mobile apps

Chris Brook of bardowl then gives us An overview of the mobile apps ecosystem

• How we got here, history of mobile apps.
• The different platforms. J2ME, Symbian, Meego, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, Bada, WAC, JIL, W3C.
• Other developer platforms. Sencha, phoneGap, Appcellerator. App Statistics.
• Different strategies for mobile app development.
• A look to the future, what playforms might win out in the end?

How to develop software commercially and avoid ending up in court (or, at worst, win)

Speaker: Martyn Thomas CBE FREng

Building 8West, University of Bath (see Venues)

Many software projects overrun time and budgets or get cancelled. When this happens, more and more customers seek financial compensation through mediation or litigation, and most suppliers lose. The compensation is often millions of pounds, and so are the legal fees.

Over the past fifteen years, I have acted as an expert witness in several large cases. Often, the result hinges on issues that did not seem especially important to either the customer or the supplier during the project, and often the supplier's case is weakened because they tried to be too helpful and accommodating.

In this talk, Martyn Thomas will explain and illustrate some of the key lessons that have come out of my cases, and give some insight into what is involved in acting as an expert witness.

Martyn Thomas undertakes consultancy assignments and acts as an expert witness. He was a founder of Praxis and a former partner in Deloitte Consulting. He is now entirely independent.

He is a visiting professor of software engineering at Oxford University Computing Laboratory. He was recently awarded a CBE for services to software engineering, and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is a director and the principal consultant of MTAL.

The room is in 8 West, on the top left of the map next to the West Car Park. It is probably easiest to arrive via Quarry Road, the entrance from North Road, as at present the through-route is a bit restricted and prone to change due to building work that is going on. There will be signs to direct people, and the room itself is very close to the car park and accessible by wheelchair.

Speaker: Jo Reid

City of Bristol College, Bristol (see Venues)

In this talk Jo Reid will give an overview of Pervasive Media and then focus on experience design guidelines for location aware mobile apps. Jo will include a number of case studies and past work to illustrate her points.

Jo is currently Creative Director at Calvium, responsible for working with customers to create location aware mobile apps for the iPhone and Android phones. In addition to providing consultancy services to help people create mobile apps Calvium have developed a suite of software services for people to easily create their own context aware mobile applications.

Jo was formerly a senior researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories with expertise in experience design and user centred research, specialising in mobile location aware experiences or mediascapes. Jo has also worked for Texas Instruments on information engineering expert systems and Xerox on HCI prototyping systems.

She holds an MBA, a BSc in Computer Science and is currently working on a PhD researching how people make sense of pervasive technologies and environments.

Bristol Branch Christmas Lecture

6.30 Refreshments and opportunity to interact with the robot (all ages welcome)
7:30 Talk (but talk will be technical)

Venue: Ramada Bristol City, Redcliff Way, Bristol, BS1 6NJ Map

Technology has been the actors friend for many years. From the creation of amphitheatres to the blu-ray disc, engineers continually find new ways to deliver the story. But what about automating the actors themselves?

In fact this is already common place, computer generated imagery often replaces actors in today's films. Robo Thespian extends this to the physical world, a real robot that you can watch and interact with, appearing 'live' for its audience.

Will Jackson of Engineered Arts Ltd demonstrates the technology, and discusses the appeal of watching robots perform.

Extending 'The willing suspension of disbelief' into the real world.

Topics of discussion include:
The value and application of robots for entertainment.
The psychology of human - robot interaction.
The current state of the technology.
Future plans and projects.

Booking is not required for this event, but to give us an idea of numbers, please register your interest with the "Go" button above.

This event was originally advertised as the 9th December - please note that the date is now Wednesday 8th December.