TUCS will be holding its first ever Lightning Talks session on October 15th. This is an opportunity for members of the society (and the general public) to give a 3-minute talk on any topic they like, with or without the aid of slides.

People who give presentations will be eligible for bonus TUCS POINTS SCHEME Points, and it’s entirely possible that there will be prizes awarded for good talks!

What are Lightning Talks?

Lightning talks are a common feature of computing/IT-related conferences: attendees volunteer to give a short talk, at short notice. These talks are given in lightning talk sessions, which can be topic restricted (e.g. a “Python” lightning talks session), or can be general. At linux.conf.au, the general lightning talks session concludes the conference, held in the keynote venue, presented in front of all (~800) delegates.

TUCS is running a Lightning Talks session for the first time in 2008, as a way of concluding our first series of Tech Talks.

If you want to get a feel for what a Lightning Talks session is like, LCA2008’s was most excellent, and can be downloaded from this link (on AARNet, so should be super-quick from on campus).

Registration/More Info

Registrations for talks open today, so if you’re interested in finding out more information, or would like to sign up for a talk, find Chris Neugebauer in the Mac Lab, or send an e-mail to ids-exec@ids.org.au.

Current Line-up

Here’s a list of people who’ve signed up for talks so far (note please that this isn’t the final order for presentations on the day — see rule 7 for details.):

  1. Thomas Karpiniec – A Linux Falsehood
  2. John Swanson – Advice-Taking Reinforcement Learning
  3. Michael Cordover – Secure Password Storage
  4. Joshua Deprez – “On the School of Computing
    (and Information Systems) brackets intentional”
  5. Carl Haynes – Introduction to Latex (or LaTeX).
  6. Alex Berry – #define
  7. Tim Nugent – Constructing your own Laser Guns, for laser skirmish not for melting poor fools or carving titanium or liquefying base defences.
  8. Andrew Bennett – Weird Computing Topics
  9. Jon Manning – Making a Lan Manager using CakePHP and jQuery
  10. Leah Duncan – Linux.conf.au 2009
  11. Tony Gray – Who is Lab Guy?

Rules of the event

In these rules, “The Talks Organiser” is Chris Neugebauer.

  1. Talks will last three minutes at maximum. This will be strictly enforced (possibly via manual intervention!)
  2. Talks must be registered (with a topic) with the Talks organiser, by Tuesday 14 October.
  3. There will be time for at most 15 talks, the first registered talks will be the ones presented.
  4. Slides may be used: They must be in PDF format (no exceptions!), and e-mailed to the organiser by 12:30PM, Wednedsday 15 October.
  5. There is no rule 5.
  6. Talk topics and content should be suitable for a general audience: in particular, content of violent or pornographic nature will not be tolerated. If you’re not sure, ask.
  7. The order of talks will not be those listed above: a random order of talks will be selected on the day.
  8. Only one talk on any given topic will be accepted.