Abstract:

The goals of building software in a professional environment are vastly different from those of a course assignment. In this talk, we’ll cover the differences between the environments, best practices during development and tips from years of experience with troubleshooting production issues.

Speaker Bio:

Becky Plummer is the software engineering team leader responsible for content collaboration applications for the Bloomberg Terminal and the Global Head of the Engineering Champions Program. Becky made a name for herself as a software engineer by creating the trade confirmation alerting system that was fully crash recoverable for the Bloomberg Fixed Income Electronic Trading platform. She created the Engineering Champions program in 2011 to empower developers to influence change and collaborate on improving the development environment tools. Finally, she has run both small scale implementation projects as well as cross engineering projects including hundreds of developers. She is a graduate of University of Maine and Columbia University with a Master’s degree in Computer Science. Joined Bloomberg LP in New York in 2006 and moved to London in 2014 to gain a global perspective.

More information at this link.

Abstract:

Moore’s Law has been the main driver behind the extraordinary success
of computer systems. However, with the technology roadmap showing a
decline in transistor scaling and hence the demise of Moore’s law,
computer systems will be increasingly specialised and diverse. The
consistent ISA contract is beginning to break down. As it stands,
software will simply not fit. Current compiler technology, whose role
is to map software to the underlying hardware is incapable of doing
this. This looming crisis requires a fundamental rethink of how we
design, program and use heterogeneous systems. This talk proposes a
new way of tackling heterogeneity so that, rather than deny and fear
the end of Moore’s law, we embrace and exploit it.

Speaker Bio:

Michael O’Boyle is a Professor of computer science at the University
of Edinburgh. He is best known for his work in incorporating machine
learning into compilation and parallelization, automating the design
and construction of optimizing technology. He has published over 100
papers and received three best paper awards. He was presented with
the ACM CGO Test of Time award in 2017. He is a founding member of
HiPEAC, the Director of the ARM Research Centre of Excellence at
Edinburgh and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in
Pervasive Parallelism. He is a senior EPSRC Research Fellow and a
Fellow of the BCS.

Abstract:

Lurch is an open-source word processor that can check the steps in students’ mathematical proofs. Users write in a natural language, but mark portions of a document as meaningful, so the software can distinguish content for human readers from content it should analyze.

This talk begins with an overview of the most recent release of the system, the ways in which it impacts students’ learning of mathematical proofs, and how it needs to be improved in the future. I will then cover how we are making those improvements in the next version, which will lead naturally to an introduction of the Lurch Web Platform, a foundational set of tools that we will use to bring the project to the web.

That platform is available on GitHub for other mathematical software developers to use in their own projects. It includes a web editor with mathematical typesetting, an interface for marking up documents with mathematical (or other structured) meaning, OpenMath support, meaning visualization tools, and document dependence and sharing features, among others.

Speaker Bio:

Nathan Carter uses computer science to advance mathematics. He writes open source mathematics software for university mathematics education, in areas including mathematical logic and abstract algebra visualization. He is a past winner of the Mathematical Association of America’s Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning College or University Mathematics Faculty Member and his first book, Visual Group Theory, won the 2012 Beckenbach Book Prize from that same society. His second book, Introduction to the Mathematics of Computer Graphics, was published in 2016. His current book project will be an edited volume entitled Data Science for Mathematicians, intended to help mathematics faculty make the transition into teaching and doing research in the fast-growing field of data science.