Monday, April 30, 2007

"Multi-Core Architecture" at Google Speaker Series - 2007-May-2 17:15, R7 at NTNU

Talk by Professor Per Stenstrøm from Chalmers University

quote from announcement:
"Computing industry recently made a transition to multicore architectures. Yet, most software is inherently designed to only take advantage of the performance of a single core. As a result, society is faced with a major software crisis and strides have to be taken to smoothen the transition of software to leverage the power of multi-cores.

This talk begins with a brief summary of the reasons why multi-core architecture is the only way forward and why this is a dilemma for the software. The rest of the talk will be devoted to various approaches to convert software to expose parallelism on multi-cores. The main focus will be on architectural techniques researched at Chalmers to aid the compiler/programmer to convert software to run efficiently on multi-core architectures. These techniques include thread-level speculation and transactional memory."

Monday, April 16, 2007

Biggest invention from Trondheim?

Of course hard to compete with the bicycle lift.. but the most used invention is probably the Global Systems for Mobile communications, better known as GSM. GSM was invented by Torleiv Maseng and Odd Trandem here in Trondheim in 1980s.

Another candidate for the biggest Trondheim invention is the microscopic monosized plastic beads used e.g. for cleansing of bone marrow (in the case of cancer). This was created by Professor John Ugelstad in 1979 (at that time it was only possible to create such beads in space under weightlessness conditions)

Hydrogen fuel cell cars approved for Norwegian roads


(Source: FuelCellsWorks)

Trondheim students helps make cleaning system for Lake Biwa in Japan (just north of Kyoto)

A couple of weeks ago, but still worth mentioning.

NOTE: original article is in Norwegian.

"A Different Universe" - talk by Prof. Laughlin

From the invitation:

"Prof R.B. Laughlin (Stanford University) will present a general lecture on Tuesday, April 17, at 12:15-13 in R1, Realfagbygget. The title of his lecture is "A Different Universe". The lecture is aimed at a general audience. Prof. Laughlin is known as an excellent expositor.

Prof. Laughlin received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998, and is the 2007 Lars Onsager Lecturer at NTNU."


For Whom the Bell Curves - Statistics Workshop

From the invitation:
"Statistics as a boundary object between science and the state in connection with the project “For Whom the Bell Curves” we will be holding an international workshop/conference at NTNU Dragvoll 14-16. May 2007, with plenary speakers Alain Desrosières, Susan Leigh Star and more."

World's only bicycle lift?

Friday, April 13, 2007

Circum-Arctic: World's northermost nations mapping the arctic

Noteworthy events earlier this winter

Google Speaker Series:

November 8 - "Efficient Algorithms for Hierarchical Memory" by professor Lars Arge from Aarhus University.

February 5 - "Structured Peer-to-Peer Networks: the Distributed Hash Tables Approach" by professor Seif Haridi from Royal Institute of Technology.

~25 % of the silicon for PCs all over the world is from Norway

Upcoming CS PhD defences at NTNU

April 20th - Thesis title: "Biopolymer-based Nanocomposites: Processing and Properties"

May 3rd - Thesis title: "Architectural Techniques to Improve Cache Utilization"

June 1st - Thesis title: "A Cased-Based Approach to Realising Ambient Intelligence among Agents"

IDI Open - Coding Contest - Apr 14

Quote from the announcement:
"IDI Open is a contest for teams of programmers of all skill levels, from those who are taking their first course in programming, to mad skill code monkeys. Each team can consist of up to three people, using one computer to solve the given problems. The programming tasks in the contest is similar to those found in NCPC (NM i programmering) and TopCoder, but the simplest problems in the set will be easier. You will be asked to write programs that takes an input problem definition and calculates a solution. The programs may be in Java, C or C++. Usually, there are around 9 problems, some easy, some medium, and some hard"

Note: IDI is the Department of Computer and Information Science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) here in Trondheim

Friday, April 6, 2007

Trondheim Conference on Biodiversity Oct 29 - Nov 2 2007

quote:

Key objectives will be to:
  • Illustrate and highlight the role of biodiversity in poverty alleviation and in reaching the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG)
  • Consider progress on the goal to achieve by 2010 “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on earth”
  • Provide insights and inspiration for enhanced implementation of CBD’s Strategic Plan

Technoport Festival - October 17-20.

Technoport is a trade show for tech companies from the Trondheim region.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

High Tech in Trondheim, Norway

Trondheim is Norway's 3rd largest town, with a population of approximately 162000 (more Trondheim facts in Wikipedia).

Quote about Trondheim in Wired Magazine, 2000:
"This thousand-year-old city of 150,000 on the western Norwegian coast may seem an unlikely high tech locus. Yet through the combined efforts of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Sintef R&D center, the town is spitting out 20 new companies a year in sectors ranging from automation to telecommunications. The biggest impediment for new outfits in Trondheim, though, is still hard capital. "There's no legacy of venture capital in Norway," says Gary Ebersole, a VP for Clustra Systems, the Trondheim database company that spun out of Norwegian telco Telenor and recently transplanted to the US. Slowly, that's changing as young companies are gaining the worldwide presence to draw in VC funding."


Since then?
Google, Yahoo, ARM and Sun Microsystems have arrived in Trondheim (either through acquisitions or new engineering locations). More venture capital has also arrived. Several new startups have been started, e.g. nurtured in the University's Center of Innovation or other local incubators.

CAISE 2007 Conference to Trondheim

19th international conference on advanced information systems engineering (CAISE2007)
and it's pre-conference event The 13th Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ), is coming to Trondheim in June.

MIT's Global Startup Workshop in Trondheim

MIT's Global Startup Workshop
(March 26-28)