IT Lightning Talks: session #2

Currently the way we interact with computers can be done much more naturally with touchless technologies powered by new hardware and computer vision. A good example is the Microsoft Kinect, that changed not only the way we can play games at our homes but also how we can experiment a work of art. I am presenting some of these technologies and what they can be used for, in the hope that there might be use cases at CERN that could use these solutions.

Ensuring database stability and steady performance in the modern world of agile computing is a major challenge. Various changes happening at any level of the computing infrastructure: OS parameters & packages, kernel versions, database parameters & patches, or even schema changes, all can potentially harm production services. This presentation shows how an automatic and regular testing of Oracle databases can be achieved in such agile environment.

Nowadays it's quite important never to stop learning, to keep up with the new achievements of your field, especially in IT. Personally, I'm a big fan of meetups, hackathons and competitions. Beside their educative effect, they have a strong social aspect which can boost your motivation and serve as a source of inspiration as well. I'm going to talk about two meetups: Geneva Haskell Meetup, and CERN Coding Sessions. As both of them are excellent platforms to share, learn, inspire and get inspired, I'd like to spread the word about them.

IdeaSquare is a new pilot project meant to connect people inside and outside CERN to work together and helping the CERN-inspired innovations to create positive impact on society. We started our work last October with a five-month student project, Challenge Based Innovation (CBI) that has gathered some quite nice feedback along the way (http://cern.ch/go/wmM7), but is only one of our activities. Our big goal is scaling this collaboration up for different kinds of people all around the world to participate easily. We want to start by providing the student engineers, industrial designers and economists in the next round of CBI-course with better tools and services for working together and sharing their ideas. And in the long run, we want to create a scalable system that would allow a lot more people to work together and learn in similar constructive projects in the future. What are the tools at CERN we should use during the next round of CBI - Sharepoint, Vidyo, Owncloud, social.cern.ch... and something else? Interested to get involved in planning the next steps?

Are you interested in building your own skynet and have a batch of T-800s under your commands? And on top of that only by using javascript? In other words, let’s create a javascript powered Arduino bot connected to a machine-to-machine instant messaging network.

Python code is much easier to write than C, yet much less efficient. It's often assumed that Python is not performance-oriented and therefore making effort to optimize it doesn't pay off. While in many cases it's true, at a certain moment of a development, especially right before reaching production-ready state, it might turn out that a Python code runs slowly and one needs to find a culprit. In this talk I'll not tell how to make your program faster. Instead, I'll show different techniques to look for the bottlenecks in the code. The presentation will be built around a live demo using real-life Python code.

CERN's social media manager, Kate Kahle, gives an insight into how and why CERN is using social media.

Stand up and give a spontaneous talk!