SYSTEM.OUT - My Experience at CUSEC 2013
On
January 17th, I attended CUSEC 2013 (Canadian University Software
Engineering Conference) in Montreal. Initially, I was interested in
going to hear a talk given by my friend and mentor, Gail Carmichael–
not to mention the chance to meet notable people in the software
industry.
Delegates, organizers, and presenters
The
unofficial theme of the first day seemed to be "visualizing data." One of the speakers I was most excited about was Ben Fry, one of the
co-founders of the Processing language. I've used Processing before,
and Fry used several live examples of Processing programs being used
to visualize information. Perhaps a description from the processing website tells it best:
"Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions. Initially developed to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context."
Me and Gail, waiting for the next talk
Continuing
the theme of visualizing data, the next talk was from the San
Francisco-based company Palantir. Their mission is to simplify the
process of analysing large or complex data sets, by using tools to
visualize it in a more human-readable way. In the hour-long software
demonstration, a live demonstration of Palanir's software was used to
map E. Coli outbreaks across the United States. By
adding data to the map, the user was able to locate the specific
meat-distribution plant that was the source of the outbreak. It
should be evident that this method is both faster and potentially
more accurate that other means of tracking the outbreak.
Overall,
it was a great conference, and introduced me to the cool things that
people are building with software. I had a great time and learned
quite a bit - from the speakers, representatives from software
companies, and students from other Canadian university. I hope to
volunteer with planning CUSEC 2014, and would recommend the
experience to other computer science or software eng students.
-
Liz Allen
@liz_codes
Liz blogged about her experience at the conference she attended as part of the CU-WISE initiative Blog To Attend A Conference Fund. Check out our Opportunities page for more details.
Liz blogged about her experience at the conference she attended as part of the CU-WISE initiative Blog To Attend A Conference Fund. Check out our Opportunities page for more details.
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