Our regular series of lightning talks continues with our instalment of Semester 2 2009. Judged by John Haight of the Australian Computer Society and Julian Dermoudy of the School of Computing and Information System at UTAS, this session features talks on Twitter, Computer Vision, splicing MIDI files and more.

Also introduced this time are “surprise slides” talks, where the presenters were given an arbitrary deck of slides from which to present (these participants are marked with a * next to their title).

The running order is:

1. Andrew Bennett — Quack*
2. Alex Berry — Accelerating Towards Doom
3. Peter Billam — Midisox
4. Peter Lyle — Quack*
5. Matthew D’Orazio — How to ‘Sploit iTunes
6. Tim Nugent — My GPS is broken, and how to fix it*
7. Thomas Karpiniec — Twitter
8. Josh Deprez — Feigning It
9. Paris Buttfield-Addison — Developing Games for the iPhone*
10. Christopher Neugebauer — Applications in Computer Vision
11. Tony Gray — 15 Years of TonyEngine

Speaker: Paul Fenwick

Facebook. Your friends are using it. Your workmates are using it. Chances are youre using it. Facebook is already well known one of the worlds most popular social networking platforms, but its also rapidly becoming one of the worlds most popular application platforms too.

The popularity of Facebook applications is unsurprising. Theyre easy to write, as well as being easy to share and install. However most users remain unaware of what information can be accessed by their applications, and more surprisingly, by their friends applications.

Join researcher Paul Fenwick as he examines just how much information he can extract from friends using only the Facebook API.

Speaker: Paul Fenwick

The average individual is given little scope for failure, at least not the type that really matters. The opportunity for catastrophic failure, that influences nations or continents, has been traditionally reserved for royalty, parliament, and others in a position of great leadership.

However in recent times we have developed a profession who have the opportunity to fail like never before. A profession that can make mistakes that are so monumental, so wide-reaching, and so costly they can shake civilisation to its very core. This elite group, rarely seen by every day society, are the foundation upon which modern society depends. The few, the proud, the Software Developers.

Join us for a voyage of discovery as we examine some of the worlds greatest software failures, from ancient times to modern day.

Tech Talk: (MORE) PS3-related Ramblings

• Presenter: Jonathan Adamczewski
• Venue: Centenary 473
• Date: Fri. September 11 @ 14:00

Last time he rambled about drawing fractals with a PS3. This time, hes rambling about the same thing.

Mandelbrot fractals are embarrassingly easy to parallelise, and while they look pretty, drawing them quickly is not - in the scheme of things - especially difficult. So, because he likes a challenge, Jonathan will be talking about his experiences in rendering the Buddhabrot using the Cell BE processor, on the Playstation3.

With pretty pictures, complex mathematics and platform-targeted program decomposition, this talk will have something for everyone, perhaps.

• Title: How to Use Your Camera Phone, Properly
• Presenter: Christopher Neugebauer
• Venue: Centenary 473 (Hobart), V137 (Launceston)
• Time: Friday, September 18, 14:00

This talk is about how to take good pictures with a camera phone, focusing on some simple compositional techniques applicable to many camera phones, including Apples iPhone. Well also look at some of the features that have crept into the recent iPhone revision, what its marketed features actually do, and how you can exploit them. This will be followed by…

• Title: Why CAPTCHAs are Not So Awesome
• Presenter: Simon Arneaud

CAPTCHAs have a reputation for being slightly annoying for users but highly effective at preventing access to bots. The reality is that the opposite is true for many CAPTCHA systems.

• Presenter: Tony Gray
• Venue: Centenary 473
• Time: Friday, August 28, 14:00

Modern CPUs are so fast that they can comfortably emulate systems from the early days of the personal computer in software alone, and there are freely available open-source emulators for almost all of the early systems, such as the Apple II and Commodore 64. But writing your own emulator is a heck of a lot more fun than using someone elses - it can be a great personal challenge, its a terrific way to learn and understand the technology of modern computer systems, and it will totally earn you at least one kudos. This talk covers the process of writing an emulator from first principals, and is unlikely to include any references to bacon.

Date: Friday, 14th of August, 2009 at 2:00-3:00
Location: Hobart - room 473 Centenary Building, Launceston room V137

TUCS' Forthnightly Tech Talks are back for this week, and for the first time, we'll be performing a trial videoconference of our Tech Talk with Launceston. We look forward to welcoming our cross-campus friends to our society!

Talk 1: Alex, Chris and Michael's ACM Adventure. Presenters: Alex Berry, Chris Neugebauer, Michael Ford

In April, three CIS students competed in the World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in Stockholm, Sweden. For this talk, as well as showing off our holiday snaps from the trip, we'll be talking about how we went about preparing for the contest, our experience competing in the contest itself, and how we coped with the copious amounts of ABBA provided by the sponsors.

Talk 2: A Talk on Topicality. Presenter: Alex Berry

Alex Berry presents a talk about things and stuff, specifically, how to write concentrated C++ code and an introduction to E-Sports.