I would like to reflect today about what a good time I had at the conference on Wednesday. And not just because of all the free stuff, although the stuff was pretty cool. Hacker playing cards? Check. Ubuntu stickers? Of course. And a myriad of other neat things. But the real value in the conference was all of the speakers that came and spoke passionately about open source software.
The first speaker that I went to see was my professor, Dr. Bowring. He used some of our blog posts to illustrate his approach to teaching a Software Engineering course. In the first semester, this approach begins with having teams within the classroom pick an open source project they find interesting and testing various components of that project. For the second semester, which is called the Practicum, the teams up the ante by becoming part of a project's community and contributing something meaningful like patches to the project's code base, plug-ins , and/or documentation. What this does is make the entire year a capstone project that ties together everything that the student has learned in Computer Science thus far. I'm really lucky to have been a part of the experience, and encourage other professors to consider using this approach. It beats just regurgitating passages from a textbook.
The next session that I went to see was by Don Taylor, the CTO from Benifitfocus, who talked about their software stack and how it works. They have developed a system that allows 3rd party developers to easily customize web pages that they provide as a service. In fact, that is the essential concept, software as a service. It is a really interesting concept and is right out there on the cutting edge of what is being done in web applications today. Also there was a drawing for an ipad...I did not have the winning ticket.
Next up was lunch. They provided some tasty box lunches as well as a salad bar, and the idea was to take in a BOF (birds of a feather) session while eating your lunch. So I grabbed a box and headed over to see Jon "Maddog" hall, who was going to talk about Linux. Jon has been working in the world of professional computing since 1969 and had a thing or two to say about open source operating systems. And he knows Linus Torvald...on a personal level. He began by talking about how awesome Linux is, and how quickly it caught on in the early years. One of the main reasons that it caught on in the first place was the portability to multiple architectures that was built into the kernel early on. Another reason that it was adopted early on, especially by government agencies, was that because of Linux's relatively small footprint it was easy to parallel multiple machines for the purpose of supercomputing. Apparently this filled a vacuum left by Cray supercomputers, who went bankrupt in the mid-90's. Maddog wrapped up by taking questions, one of which was from a 14 year old in the audience. The question was, why open source and not Apple OS or Windows? Maddog's response: control. Open source give you control over the source code that enables a user to customize and fix whatever is needed. Well said, sir.
The last session that I attended was the presentation by Dr. Steven Brodsky from IBM. He gave a really cool speech about Big Data and the methods that IBM uses to sort meaning from the 1.8 zettabytes of information that is out there. One of the techniques that he talked about was called "map reducing" of data. What happens is that vertical and horizontal slices of large data sets are taken, and then frequency counts are done on those slices. It is a very quick and efficient way of dealing with these sets. He also talked about Watson, the supercomputer that beat the two best contestants in Jeopardy history. Watson uses a process called Deep QA for cluster processing all of the data that was needed to compete on the show. I actually worked up the nerve to go up and talk to Dr. Brodsky after his presentation, and ask him a little bit about future applications for Watson. I specifically asked if he thought Watson could ever be used as a diagnostic tool in a medical setting. While he did not speculate on that possibility, he said that research is being done right now to investigate if Watson could be used as a sort of call-in reference for prescription drug interactions. And that was it! My pulse then returned to normal.
Altogether I mark this off as a great experience that was totally worth waking up at 5am for. I look forward to attending next year as a software professional instead of a student, and can't wait to see how things change and improve over the next year.
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