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Hot Topics for Tech Talks?
HCIGuy asks: "A few of us are working within a local school of engineering and technology to set up a seminar series unique to the area. We envision a sequence of monthly seminars that focus on bleeding edge technology, presented by vendors' engineers, and attended by students, faculty, and industry folk. No marketing hype allowed; we want only the facts. We obviously want this to be of high interest to everyone, so we're asking for input on what topics would be of sky-high fascination right now. What would it be? We're leaning toward wireless for our first program, but all comments gratefully received. What topic would make you rush out and drive across town to hear it? We have only an hour and a half to commit to this, so the material has to be narrowly focused. We plan on holding up to six per school year, and we don't intend to hold over subjects from one time to the next."
I dont think people really understand how powerfull this scripting language is and how useful it is becoming in real world applications. Perhaps talking about a real world implementation and how ti can quickly change and scale would probably a lot of people's eyes.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Really, it's a special circle of hell.
Really now, if the criteria is that I'd drive out to see it in person it has to be sex. I can read about any other topic by using the universal trampoline site (google). Perhaps a talk on genetic programs that adapt to spam? Genetic rules for detecting enlargement schemes? The possibility for puns is endless.
Some companies provide loaner equipment to universities. It would be interesting to find something that is of interest/use on your campus and then get some hardware to play with. Videoconferencing equipment (end point stations and MCUs) might be a good start.
SIP and VOIP. This is something that is cool, fun and fairly accessible to folks with a decent network connection. And, if you have the energy, the administration on your campus might be interested to hear that it could save them money.
Games. Games are an interesting and fun topic. With a bit of thought, a talk could be constructed that mixed fun with learning (grin).
Internet2 Days. Advanced Networking. If you are at a school that is involved in Internet2, there are resources that are available.
Microsoft Resrach Group. Evil blah blah yes, whatever. Say what you will, but they are still smart people. Your login indicates that you might be interested in HCI, so Dumais's site might be a good start. Other companies are also listed in various places.
GRID. buzz buzz buzz. You say that no marketing hype is allowed. Well, for all the buzz about GRIDs, the folks that can give you the skinny are prob to be found here. Depending on your location, asking one of them might just get a visit.
As you are at a university (and I am assuming you are in the U.S.), you might find that someone from the NSF would be able to give you some interesting insights into what they consider to be important, interesting and fundable. Again, not sure how successful you would be at getting anyone to visit, but it is a a starter for ideas.
Lastly, many of the folks that you might want to have present will be busy. It might be worth considering an interactive presentation over video. Sounds cheezy, but many folks are used to this type of presentation.
Like Nano Technology and .NET.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
If you can only get a sales rep, don't bother. Most are trained towards talking with decision maker types and focus on business value. You'll want a sales engineer or someone techier.
One good way to approach this is to invite local CTO's to come speak. Start by contacting the marketing group at a company -- they have the power to arrange for speaking engagements that the strong techs can speak at. Frame it as a way to get local students/engineers familiar with the company and for a chance to have the CTO to get a look at what recent grads are doing. Companies, during any market climate, are always looking for extraordinary talent and welcome opportunities to peek inside the local university. Note that if you do get someone with hiring power to show up, make it clear that unless okayed in advance, don't drop a 100 resumes on the person.
Another source to look at is the school's graduate program. Talk to the faculty about researchers that are comfortable with presenting and have some interesting research going on. You're bound to have a grad student or PhD candidate that would love to talk about what they do and you're certain to get a truly technical talk from someone who can answer real questions.
I'd be partial to a covering of the latest and greatest developments in the electronic paper field and its various methods and applications. From organic LEDs that can be painted and baked onto carboard surfaces to the eventual replacement of every student's text book with the one book they'll ever need again, I find this topic infinitely fascinating.
If you are shooting for "material (that) has to be narrowly focused" then "leaning toward wireless for our first program" dose not sound like a good idea. There are dozens of sub topics that could easily fill an hour and a half time frame.
Don't get me wrong I think this is a great idea. I'd drive across town for some thing like this. As long as the speaker had a clue and with others attending that would be interested in various topics worth discussing. And to meet that really hot geek chick that I know is out that some place. That was for the post about driving across town for the sex (timdaly).
I think people would drive to see things they can't really experience well on their own monitors.
1. Virtual Reality -- with a chance to get inside yourself. 3D goggles...
2. High End Graphics, e.g. wall of pixels.
3. Seeing and maybe trying on Wearable Computers.
Suggest mixing some academic project presentations with the industrial presentations. Import someone from the http://www.hitl.washington.edu/ or from Univ. North Carolina, where they do some cool VR work.
Anything futuristic/sci-fi. Sci-fi authors? Local professors/futurists talking about the future of X...
Segway - it's sortof becoming a joke, but they are fun to ride. Find someone local who has one. Talk about the control system, give people rides. A local electronics distributor who wanted our business conned us into letting them give a short seminar on their line card by bringing 2 segways for us all to ride.
Robots - Any cool robot researchers in the area? Have them talk & make sure they bring some hardware for show & tell.
NASA/Space - Any NASA centers near by? See if someone would be willing to give a talk on something cool.
Cheers,
-Bill
Could someone please tell me what bleeding edge technology is? and more importantly does it actualy meen something usefull or is it just a buzz word used cos it sounds cool?
Roses are Red Violates are Blue im not very good a poetry but i have many other redeming qualitys
I'm not sure from the original article whether you're looking for mainly physical things, mainly software, or some combination of both, but here are a few ideas:
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I cannot think of any topic of greater current interest to the average, non-technical person (ANP) than CMS. The interest in CMS's is soaring right now because ANP's want to be able to create & maintain a website without the intervention of a web professional. That's just one of the benefits of a good CMS. Others include the handling of workflow (e.g., ensuring that Editor B receives the article/document from Editor A on time and in correct form, so that Editor B can, in turn, meet her own deadlines), versioning, deployment, etc. An example of a good, general purpose, open source CMS is OpenCMS.
IMO, a good CMS represents plenty of bleeding-edge technology, especially with respect to software development. There are many CMS's, but few good ones, a testament to the difficulty of writing a good one. Furthermore, administering a CMS by yourself is a lot of work. You need to know web administration, network admin, RDBMS admin (at least rudimentary), and adminstration of the CMS software itself.
You can probably find a sales person (and sales engineer) for any one of the many proprietary CMS's, but why bother? The open source CMS's will soon vanquish them. You may be able to find a local person knowledgeable as to open source CMS's by consulting your local users' groups (e.g., Linux users' groups, Web administrators' group).
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
At the last Global Grid Forum, you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many keynote speakers (Folks from IBM, Microsoft and HP were the big names) had "Stop the Hype" in their presentations. Of course, the hype machine himself, Ian Foster, didn't even show up.
Here's a one sentence description of Globus: It let's you execute programs on systems in different (virtual) organizations. The interaction between virtual organizations is where globus becomes useful. If you are only staying within your organization (or group) then Globus isn't really worth the effort.
For your type of group, you may be better off playing with Condor. Less hype, and a lot more useful if you are only going to be working on computers that are under your control.
You may also want to check out IBP if you are into distributed filesystem stuff.
Bleeding edge spammer techniques and the best ways of countering them.
Electronic surveillance of citizens and of foriegn locations. The IEEE Spectrum magazine had a big article on this in a recent issue.
Computer Vision and Graphic analysis.. I have heard of faculty at various canadian universities creating computer vision programs to analyze traffic and spot abberant patterns (i.e. drunk drivers.) I have also seen demos of 3D models of sunken ships created using videos shot by divers who swimming over it in specific formations.
Leading edge microprocessor design. Some of my own engineering profs are doing research into creating processors with a dynamically changing ASM language(!!!).
I've seen this set up twice, at the same place (it was a big place), by two different groups of people. Both seminar series ended with frustration.
My advice would be:
1) Don't make it an open-ended seminar series. By that I mean, don't say "We're doing them from now on". The reason I say this is that sooner or later you're going to run into a roadblock to where either you can't figure out a topic, or you won't have someone to do it, or both. If you're starting off, do about four topics, then end it. Then find out what people thought of it.
2) Come up with a list of topics that people can find out about well in advance. Nothing's worse than finding out that an interesting topic was coming up, and not being able to go because of other schedule conflicts.
3) Serve food/beverages. If you do this at lunch, order pizza for people.
Definately do #1 and #2, but don't underestimate the power of drawing people in with #3.
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Back to the real question:
1) Wireless (802.11x)
2) Setting up a PHP website (phpNuke, postNuke, etc)
3) RSS
4) XML
with the Christmas lectures is the following approach. They choose a certain general topic (such as time, symmetry, processors). Then they skip the formula's, instead they try to explain the principles with simple experiments. Even impossible science and technology becomes understandable _because_ there are no formulas. However, you need to think better on how to present this.
NO FORMULAS, try and see if the talk is still interesting.
nosig today
For a while, the Amateur Radio, Electronics, and Computer club at my college would host a couple of prsentations per quarter on various tech topics. The best way to get topics was to talk to the faculty and find out what types of interesting work they were involved in, whether it was as research or an outside hobby project. If the school of engineering at your university is large enough, you should be able to find a faculty member knowledgable and more than happy to lead a discussion on almost any topic imaginable.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
Pussy and why you're not getting any!
This is the area most engineers need a lot of help with.
No marketing hype allowed; we want only the facts.
You'll be lucky, with this kind of approach. The fact is that 98% of companies approached for this sort of thing will send out a salesman armed with the companies standard spiel. He may chuck in a bit of industry-wide background, but since all he knows how to do is to sell his companies kit, that is all he will do.
I would go the other way round. Find someone interesting and let him talk about whatever he wants to. One approach would be to write to the Cheif Engineer of a reasonably local company or division - by name, if you can - and ask if any of his development engineers could give a talk.
But go for the doers, not the presenters and sellers, if you can. I would rather hear from the guy who has been installing routers for 10 years on developments in networking than from the guy who has been selling them for 10 years.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.