Upcoming conferences and talks

October 18-19 - 2nd Conference on Global Health and Vaccination Research


October 17-19 - Norwegian Conference for ICT in public sector
Keynote speakers include:

• Minister of Government Administration and Reform - Heidi Grande Røys

• sci-fi author/Professor of Computers and Law - Jon Bing

October 18 - Climate Conference: From words to action for the climate challenge - what is technologically and politically feasible? (see also prior posting about Technoport)

November 13 - Biofuels and Sustainable Livelyhoods - Combining Sustainable Energy (Solutions) and Developing Countries needs, talk at NTNU by Cameron Rennie

Spam comes in many flavours, also academic.

When people hear about spam they usually think about email-spam such as for various medications or get rich schemes, one of the lesser known spam types cater what academics enjoy, i.e. getting an article accepted (ref: publish or perish). I thought this was among the most innocent types of spam (getting accepted an article which hasn't been submitted makes no sense), but it seems I might be wrong about that.

Technoport, associated conference tracks (and UKA!)

Technoport (annual tech conference in Trondheim) seems to get a broad and interesting program this year, in addition to the business exhibition it has 4 tracks in an associated conference:

1. Innovation (e.g. design as innovation driver and tax incentives)
2. ICT (e.g. wireless future: wireless cities)
3. Health Technology (e.g. Norwegian health technology to the world)
4. Energy, Oil and Gas with 2 in particular interesting tracks:
1. CO2 capture, Transport and Storage
   
2. Climate, including speakers:
• Norway's prime minister Jens Stoltenberg
  
• VP of Renewable Energy Corporation (REC)

Since this co-occurs with the bi-annual cultural happening in Trondheim - UKA (NTNU student week, actually ~3 weeks) - I am sure the conferences will be quite crowded and the place to be around mid October.

Upcoming PhD defences at NTNU

October 11th - Computer Enhancement of Digital Images, candidate: Peter Boros

October 12th - Impedance Diagrams of the Electrodes in the Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell, candidate: Anne-Kristine Meland

October 19th - Digital Control of a Zero Voltage Switching Inverter for Distributed Generation of Electrical Energy, candidate: Pål Andreassen

2 Trondheim teams among top 7 in Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest!

(2nd and 7th place)

The problems they solved can be found here (and solution outline here).

CAISE Conference and related workshops

This week "The 19th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'07)" is arranged at Britannia in Trondheim. The conference covers these themes, and has the following program.

Corresponding workshops that I find most interesting are:

• Agent-oriented Information Systems
• Agile Methods in Practice: Challenges and Opportunities
• Ubiquitous Mobile Information and Collaboration Systems

(Previous posting about CAISE)

Nobel Prize for Environmental Technology suggested by Trondheim scientific societies

Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters and The Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences suggests creating Nobel prize for environmental technology.

My cat eating strawberry jam

"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."

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?

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

Easter ~150km southwest of Trondheim

Chilly but nice :)

AquaNor Forum - "Welfare-driven Technology" - Aug 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.

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 13^th 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)