I noticed one of the topics of the conference is on NodeXL and social capital, which we plan to cover in our lecture tentatively scheduled for July 23rd.

Also, we have been given a 50% discount as well.  Discount Code: guestdgo2012.  Online registration has closed and this would be handled onsite.  I will contact the organizers of the conference to ensure your discount in advance if you email me your interest.

Here’s some specifics.
Location: University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Original Cost waved for 1 ticket: about $400-$870 approximate
Dates: June 4th – June 7th

Here’s the conference flyer:
http://www.dgo2012.dgsna.org/images/pdf/dgoflyerconference25october2011.pdf

Here’s the main conference page:
http://www.dgo2012.dgsna.org

There may come a day when the data source for a web application isn’t a database by default, and the message of this presentation was plan for that day.  This talk, given May 9 during DC PHP Developers’ May meeting at Fathom Creative’s office in DC, was useful to developers of applications large and small.  The presenter was Brandon Savage, a software developer for Mozilla.  Savage pulled from his experience working on Socorro, Mozilla’s web application for handling crash data for applications like Firefox and Thunderbird, to illustrate the importance of building web application data layers thoughtfully and with the future in mind.

According to Savage, creating a scalable data layer can be achieved by doing four things while planning and coding a web application: separating code for data usage from code for data retrieval, organizing the code into components based on the actions the code performs, building applications to be “storage agnostic”, and choosing the correct type of data source from the start.  While all of these steps may be particularly pertinent to an application with terabytes of data, like Socorro, all applications can benefit from this type of forethought.

It could be argued that the presentation needed a few more code samples, but seeing as Savage’s guidance can’t be implemented in a formulaic manner, additional code snippets may have been pointless.  Overall, this was a laid-back meeting, no doubt aided by the abundance of beer.  Also, a small aside, Fathom Creative’s office is beautiful and worth seeing in person.

Savage’s slides are available online: http://www.slideshare.net/brandonsavage/data-abstraction-for-large-web-applications

That may sound straightforward enough, but they also covered deploying a Node app to Heroku (a cloud platform as a service), leveraging the Express framework to build a web server, implementing Twitter Oauth for authentication, storing data in a MongoDB database, using the Jade template engine to render HTML, using CoffeeScript to decrease the amount of JavaScript code needed, and using Mocha for Node testing.  They finished their presentation by discussing when Node should be used and best practices for its use, including the use of a module pattern to prevent banana code.

As a Node newbie with sufficient JavaScript skills, this was definitely immersion style learning for me.  It’s a credit to both Troy and Seth, particularly the organization and clarity of their demo, that I was able to understand their process.  With more than forty attendees, this event was well-attended, and worthwhile, even considering the post-presentation research required to fully appreciate the frameworks and technologies used.

For the SharePoint uninitiated, Jessee’s introduction to the topic–explaining authentication and authorization, claims-based and classic-mode authentication, Azure AppFabric ACS, and the services offered by identity providers–made the subject accessible.  He then demonstrated the creation of a SharePoint 2010 web application and a Facebook app that would verify the users’ identities, the configuration of Azure AppFabric ACS for Facebook support, and the delegation of Azure as the trusted identity provider in SharePoint, which was a fairly straightforward process.

With the identity matters addressed, Jessee went on to demonstrate how the newly acquired Facebook token information of the user could be employed in the SharePoint site to update the user’s display name, provide local weather data, populate a calendar with the birthdays of Facebook friends (if said friends’ privacy settings allowed it), and take pictures with a webcam and upload the pictures to a document library with Microsoft Silverlight.

Jessee’s presentation was the second of the night.  The first was Matthew Bramer’s “The Alphabet Soup of Front-End Development: (XML/XSLT/XPath/jQuery/JavaScript/SPServices/CSS/(X)HTML/CAML/ClientOM)”, which was called off due to compatibility issues he was having with his graphics card and the projector. Hopefully, he’ll have a chance to present this topic at a future meeting.  If not, I’ll be left wondering about the mysterious bacon/unicorn/rainbows slide.

FEDSPUG meetings are a good place to start if you’re at all interested in SharePoint development as the crowd is friendly and technically diverse.  Plus, FEDSPUG is not averse to providing pizza or holding giveaways.

The slides from Danny Jessee’s presentation are available online: http://www.slideshare.net/dannyjessee/sharepoint-2010claimsbased-identity-facebook-and-the-cloud-12296272

The following topics were covered:

• Bayesian estimation with R and JAGS – Grant Cavanaugh
• arules package, apriori algorithm (Market Basket Analysis) – John Dennison
• Example of using R to query the google maps API to create a color-coded map of road and public transit times  - James Leopore
• MCMC with Gibbs Sampling – Katya Vasilaky
• Webscraping with R, RCurl – Robert Vesco
• Git your Version Control on Using R and RStudio – Brian Danielak
• R’s spatial tools – Lee De Cola

To start with, I was impressed by the large community.  Approximately 60+ attended the event.  The immediate takeaway I had as a non-R user, was “get RStudio IDE and try things out!”.   Additionally, the webscraping talk covered XPATH within R, and using Firebug + FireXPATH to help figure out what you want to scrape, before writing R code.  XPATH, as the speaker put it for us laymen types, is the “SQL for HTML documents”.  The Gibbs Sampling talk touched on machine learning through bootstrap aggregating (bagging).

If you’re a data scientist, a statistician, or curious about data analysis, check out this group.  They like new comers.

The 12th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women of Computing (GHC) has opened its Call for Participation.  The annual conference, presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, is the world’s largest gathering of women in computing. The Grace Hopper Celebration will take place from October  3 – 6, 2012 at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, Maryland. This year’s theme “Are We There Yet?” recognizes that technology and the culture of technology are continuously evolving but there are also concrete goals we are striving to achieve.

Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today’s technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering.  The technical conference features well known keynote speakers and invited technical speakers, panels, workshops, new investigator technical papers, PhD forums, technical posters, birds of a feather sessions, the ACM Student Research Competition and an Awards Celebration.

The attendees who range from students to executives use this global platform to get inspired, stay on top of emerging technical trends, learn and network.

Submissions are being accepted in the following tracks. Click on the track name for full details:
* Birds of a Feather (BOFs)
* New Investigators Papers
* Panels, Workshops and Presentations
* PhD Forum
* Posters and SRC Posters
* Social Collaboration Track
* Women of Underrepresented Groups Track

The organizing committee will review all abstracts submitted to the conference on the basis of a set of criteria including the quality of the submission and its relevance to this conference, originality and scope of the subject matter.

For more information, please visit our website –

http://gracehopper.org/2012/participate/call-for-participation/

Deadline for submissions is Friday, March 16th 2012

We look forward to receiving your submissions and to your participation in the conference!

Seema Gururaj
Director of the Grace Hopper Celebration
seemag@anitaborg.org

We invite you to help celebrate the week and raise awareness of computer science education and computing careers. We encourage you to sign the pledge supporting CSEdWeek activities and events. Join with teachers, students, parents and others who are participating in CSEdWeek activities and events and pledge your support here (no donation required).

Here are some cool ideas to get the word out to others:

Schedule an event using the Event Toolkit and check out the videos on the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) website for help.

Contact your area high schools to schedule a presentation to CS, Math or Science students. Check out Programs-in-a-Box for examples of presentations.

Easy-to-do activities:

Create an email signature proclaiming your commitment to CS education.

“Like” CSEdWeek on Facebook and join the conversaion.

Blog, tweet, and post to spread the word and raise awareness using #CSEdWeek.

Put the CSEdWeek countdown widget on your website.

Send a letter to your local school board urging computer science as a core subject.  Handy talking points at Computing in the Core and http://www.ncwit.org/schools.

If you post your plans on CSEdWeek Facebook, we will feature them in the CSEdWeek e-newsletter to all those who make a pledge on the CSEdWeek site.

37th International CMG Conference

December 5-9, 2011

Gaylord National Hotel- National Harbor, MD

 100+ Presentations, Panels, and Workshops on Hot Topics such as Cloud Computing, Capacity Planning, SaaS, SOA, Performance Engineering & Load Testing

The Computer Measurement Group (CMG), a not-for-profit, worldwide organization of IT professionals specializing in performance, capacity and service management has announced its preliminary conference program for this year’s 37th International Computer Measurement Group annual conference (CMG’11) taking place from December 5-9 at the Gaylord National Hotel in the Washington DC area.

The CMG’11 preliminary agenda is available online on the CMG website at http://www.cmg.org/cgi-bin/agenda_2011.pl. With an enhanced search tool, attendees can easily search the lineup of sessions by day of the week, subject area, experience level, and specific focus areas. Also available is a ‘Trip Report’ option that builds a trip report outline. By customizing it with a few comments, these trip reports can be a powerful argument for attending CMG’11 and justifying attendance to employers in these days of tight travel and training budgets.

The CMG’11 Highlights Brochure offers a concise summary of the main aspects of the conference – program structure, distinguished speakers, locations, and more. It is available at http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2011/CMG11-Highlights.pdf.

Registration for CMG’11 is now open (http://www.cmg.org/conference/cmg2011/reg.html).   CMG’11 will feature some of the hottest topics in Performance and Capacity Planning.  Subject areas include:

• Measurement and Tuning
• Modeling and Statistics
• Capacity Planning
• Performance Engineering and Load Testing
• Management and Reporting

Find out more information on their website: http://cmg.org/conference/cmg2011/

For more info and to rsvp, go here:

http://meetup.dcacm.org/events/39072362/

Location: Washington, DC Hilton – Washington Hilton

October 22, 2011 – October 26, 2011

Register now

Twitter: @AMIA2011

The AMIA Annual Symposium is the primary forum for the presentation of research and development related to the structure and management of data, and the design, implementation and evaluation of information systems in the field of biomedical and health informatics. I don’t remember during my 26 years of attending the Annual Symposium when the interest in Biomedical and Health Informatics has been greater than now. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Meaningful Use has stimulated the need for and access to health information technology (HIT). The ultimate purpose of Meaningful Use is to use HIT to improve patient care, which has always been a goal of AMIA. Many of us in the AMIA family will be involved with Meaningful Use. It is critical that we “team-up” and share our experiences to answer the remaining implementation and use questions on what is working and where we are seeing problems and barriers so we can use the vast knowledge base held by AMIA members to make sure we see and can measure the benefits of HIT and prevent the potential unintended consequences.

   R. Scott Evans, MS, PhD, FACMI, AMIA 2011 Scientific Program Committee Chair

This doesn’t mean we should just focus on Meaningful Use and not keep doing what has made AMIA great. Our multidisciplinary field – in which we informaticians collaborate with computer scientists, clinicians, and others – has been impacted enormously by genomics, bioinformatics, pharmacology, consumer health, and public health. We need to continue to push HIT to new levels and use it to develop new methods to improve patient care, research, and public health. This knowledge and experience within AMIA is why its members are at the forefront of national HIT standards and policy committees and their input continues to be requested by government agencies and industry. AMIA’s strength – the close collaboration and exchange of ideas between applied and foundational researchers – has generated many ‘bench to bedside’ translational collaborations and tools in the past. This symposium will again provide room for cross-fertilization and the development of new and intelligent methods for HIT implementation that are so urgently needed. Likewise, AMIA’s larger footprint into global health presents a number of new opportunities and challenges to overcome.

New this year…the AMIA 2011 paper submissions page limit has been changed to 10 pages to provide authors with sufficient space to describe their research. The Symposium will also continue to include posters, panels, tutorials, workshops, theatre-style demonstrations, keynote speakers, special presentations by members of the American College of Medical Informatics, an “Informatics Year in Review”, overviews of new findings from the Joint Summits on Translational Science and Public Health and examples of innovative collaborations with industry. The Awards program will recognize distinguished papers, student papers, posters and signature achievements in biomedical and health informatics. The Symposium will also continue the “journal-eligible” program, which was started in 2008 and allows paper submissions to be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

I look forward to seeing you all in Washington DC this coming October and learning about the multitude of new and interesting studies and applications to improve healthcare.