Big Techday 6

In their multivision talks, Alix von Melle and Luis Stitzinger take you to the fascinating world of the Eight-thousanders. 16:9 picture ratio, picture effects, video casts and musical backup bring the events on expeditions enthrallingly alive to the audience. Through changing perspectives in the narration, an animated live-dialogue is created which describes the adventures of a challenging mountain decent suspenseful from different points of view.

Jim will talk about the following works: Kryptos, Topographic Projections, Implied Geometry, Atomic Time and Terrestrial Physics. Furthermore, he will give an introduction into his newest series, Without Provenance 2012.

This talk explains how machine learning techniques and technologies used by Yandex to routinely respond to users' search queries help solving fundamental problems in modern physics. As an example we'll take a look at how Yandex’s machine learning techniques are applied to decay analysis of events happening at CERN LHC. The talk will also tell about what the results of these analyses mean for modern physics and describe the quality criteria for selection of the best machine-learning algorithm for a specific analysis task. Specific techniques and technologies provided by Yandex to CERN will also be covered in this talk.

Mercateo is Europe’s leading procurement platform on which more than hundreds of providers and thousands of manufacturers interact with more than a million business customers. Core of the Mercateo website is the open marketplace, where more than 9 million articles are offered by more than 1.000 providers at the moment. Additionally to this, even as much articles in closed exclusive areas, in which our clients can host their frame contracts with Mercateo and compete against the open marketplace, need to be added. We show how Mercateo managed to solve the thereby arising problems over the last 13 years, with a fully in-house developed Java based system stack

• How does one find duplicates within articles, in order to establish a competition between providers?

• How does one search through such a huge amount of data efficiently?

• How does one categorize the articles on the basis of a text description of changing quality?

• How does one deal with multilingual content sufficiently?

• How does one guarantee the necessary performance and availability?

The UK government does not have a good history of IT delivery, with many projects arriving late, over budget, or cancelled after billions spent and years in development. Even after delivery, many services are hard to use, expensive to maintain or are simply unreliable. In this talk, I will present how the Government Digital Service (GDS), a new "startup" team within Cabinet Office, has been overhauling central government publishing and transactions by delivering user-centered services using open source tech and agile development.

In-Memory data processing was investigated at the Hasso Plattner Institute. Based on this research SAP develops their in-memory data base SAP-HANA which makes it possible to process huge data sets - the famous big data - in almost real-time. The talk outlines the history of in-memory technology as a successful cooperation between science and business, and describes, how this technology can be used to turn the vision of personalized medicine into reality. At hand of the example of genome data analysis it is shown how in-memory data processing allows to combine alignment, annotation, and analysis of full genome data in real-time.

In his script for "All the President's Men", author William Goldman coined the famous adage "follow the money", giving journalists Woodward and Bernstein crucial advice for their investigation. In the past years, the growth of the Internet has enabled a financially motivated underground marketplace that presents a case perhaps less politically motivated but surely no less thrilling, in which this classic strategy has seen only limited use. In this talk I will describe how following the money trail in this rapidly evolving economy has lead our team to establish techniques to infiltrate vast networks of compromised computers, to provide empirical evidence of the magnitude, diversification, and bottlenecks in this market, and, in the end, to provide factual evidence giving an insider's perspective into the operation of the affiliate programs driving a large portion of this underground economy.

Arduino is an open source platform for electronic prototyping based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. In this talk we want to present some alternative methods to control synthesizers with self-built MIDI-compatible instruments based on the Arduino platform. We will show the BeatSneakers, a lava-lamp with light sensors, the free hand-controlled laser-theremin and their technical implementation as well. Beside the Arduino platform, the very new Leap Motion controller will be shown. This hand- and fingertracking controller accurate to a millimetre is a world’s first in terms of human-machine interaction. With the help of 3D depth sensors it is possible to control objects with free hands.

Modern electronic locking systems promise a maximum size of security – the proof if they can hold this promise though seems to be difficult. While most of the mechanic locks are being tested by many independent experts from the international lock sport community – and therefore the often very little opposition to manipulation is widely known – electronic locks in comparison are seldom tested independently. However, if this happens intensively, extensive weaknesses become apparent regularly. We introduce typical weaknesses using examples and describe the approach how we can find such weaknesses. But that is not enough: an open source approach – in the software industry a common practice, but revolutionary in the security industry – can solve the mentioned problems reliable. Possible soft spots will then be exposed at an early stage and corrected by peer review.

I have never stopped dreaming and for me, a book has never been finished. To me, Steampunk means the freedom to carry science fiction from the past a little bit further. Or vice versa. How would something have looked like in the second half of the 19th century if it already had existed that time? How would a babyphone from Marconi have looked like and how would someone have imagined an electronic letterbox more than 100 years ago? I would like to make you curious why it is worth to take a whole new look at old inventions. I will show you what pleasure it is to be a positive out-of-the-box thinker and what kind of ideas you get when asking yourself: “How would our ancestors maybe have solved the one or other problem if they would have had it?” As your tour guide through a time that might have had existed, I am looking forward to introduce the diversity and beauty of Steampunk to you.

This presentation introduces our efforts to create commercial applications with Augmented Reality (AR), a user interface technology that overlays computer graphics over the user's view of their surroundings. Together with our industry partners, we investigate two scenarios: first, to mobile information browsing on mobile phones (Nokia); second, to industrial product design (Canon). During the last decade, mobile information browsing on mobile phones has become a widely-adopted practice. This was made possible by the increase of wireless networking infrastructure and the ever increasing amount of online data. By employing AR, we enable users to access digital data much more fluidly and therefore assist everyday tasks much more effectively than with previous user interfaces. An example is AR X-Ray vision, which enables users to look through buildings and other obstacles. A common task in industrial product design is to create physical prototypes of new products. A common prototyping method is to use 3D printers to create physical models. However, 3D printers are slow and expensive and changes to the shape are costly and labour intensive. We are investigating completely virtual prototypes that can be seen through AR and touched through a haptic device. This enables users to interactively change the shape and appearance of a prototype. After having successfully demonstrated virtual prototypes using a pen-shaped haptic device, we are currently developing a system that enables users to touch the virtual prototypes with all their fingertips.

Web cookies and social plugins (Facebook I like etc.) are more and more getting under the focus of data protection specialists. Not only the European regulations in the so called Cookie-Guideline (Art. 5 Abs. 3 of the guideline 2009/136/EG) have set new requirements. The implementation in the single European countries goes so far that the presetting of the browser shouldn’t be enough for an opt-in. Other countries such as Germany do not even have implemented the EU rights, so that uncertainty reigns especially for international companies. Dr. Peter Katko will give rough guidelines for dealing with cookies and social plugins and therefore will especially explain which cookies do even require acceptance and how these can be implemented along with the associated duties to inform.

"The more copyright protection there is, the more works will be created." This is what was thought in the last century. Then Open Source came up and suddenly everything was different. OpenAccess, OpenData, OpenGovernment, OpenKnowledge and OpenSource do have (except “Open”) in common that a new technical development has led to new thoughts and to new law. This talk gives an overview of the status of the movement, tries to find a common definition of “Open” and risks a glance where the whole thing may lead to.

"Cloud Haskell" is the informal label for a set of libraries that offer Erlang-style message-passing distributed concurrency within the functional programming language Haskell. Cloud Haskell offers the programmer a global perspective on distributed programs: instead of writing a separate program for each different node, one writes a single program that will run on all the nodes - not unlike an ordinary concurrent program. The application can make use of the framework's functionality such as discovering and initializing nodes and communicating values between nodes. Higher-level abstractions and programming patterns can easily be implemented on top of the basic primitives provided by the framework. As can be expected in the Haskell world, Cloud Haskell respects Haskell's typing discipline, but allows flexible communication of typed values: values of near-arbitrary types, including functions, can be communicated over the network, encouraging flexible work distribution schemes. Cloud Haskell does not need specific compiler support, making it easy to extend or adapt. For example, the architecture allows for different network transport layers and different back-ends such as local networks, hosted virtual machines etc. Also, Cloud Haskell does not insist on using message passing concurrency everywhere: it can be used in conjunction with other approaches to concurrency and parallelism that the Haskell ecosystem has to offer. The talk will take a practical, hands-on perspective. We aim to develop a few small example programs using Cloud Haskell, and thereby to provide an idea of the look-and-feel of programming within the framework. No prior experience with Haskell is required.

Although high-level declarative languages like Haskell provide powerful abstraction facilities, conventional wisdom holds that such languages are inherently inefficient. I will show that we need not sacrifice abstraction for performance by demonstrating two systems that compile high-level Haskell to efficient low-level code. The first uses recent compiler and library advances to enable transforming numerical Haskell programs into fast machine code that exploits SSE and AVX instructions. The second compiles a subset of Haskell to run on GPUs.

How does it happen that an 18-year-old scripting language that has not quite the best reputation becomes a trending topic worldwide - from Silicon Valley to Unterföhring? And what's even more important: Is it only trending on its own, and you can safely ignore it without the need to feel guilty? Or do you just miss an essential transition, up to *THE* single platform of the future for developing modern web applications? Golo Roden invites you to step back into the past, draw a few forward-looking conclusions, and try to read into the future: Will JavaScript be the next big thing?

The possibility of building a computer based on the concepts of quantum mechanics has recently attracted considerable interest because the quantum bits (qubits) that make up such a computer are more versatile than their classical analogues. In this talk, I will introduce the basic ideas behind quantum computers and discuss how they differ from regular computers. I will also describe some applications that are ideally suited to their capabilities, and will highlight several possible ways to implement qubits, as well as progress toward building a quantum computer.

"In God we trust. Everyone else, bring data" says Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of NYC, when it comes to changing policies and procedures in the administration of his town. And right he is: why should New Yorkers accept change and red tape unless there is good reason for it? In Software Engineering, we tend to accept new tools, techniques, and processes without asking for proof. For instance, in the advocacy for agile methods, where is the data prooving the point? In arguing for model-based software development, what evidence have you seen? All too often, we content ourselves with a gut feeling, a few success stories, the words of a fast-talking consultant, or an enthusiastic article in some glossy magazine or blog. We are craving better solutions for today’s problems so much, that we easily fall for anyone promising a magic solution - the infamous "silver-bullet syndrome". Over the last decade, we have seen a steady increase in the use of empirical methods in Software Engineering research, copying the successful research paradigm of the natural sciences. Clearly, we could benefit from this by increasing the objectivity of our discourses on developing software. Opinions can be turned into hypotheses that may be tested rigorously, to be refuted or confirmed. Over time, thus, opinions turn into facts - or they disappear. Any progress we make this way is true progress that is here to stay, not just a passing fad. The drawback is, of course, that most empirical science is messy, dreary, and slow - there is not much glamour and rock-n-roll in it. In this talk, I will argue why we need even more empirical research in Software Engineering, how it works in practice, report some of its results, and tell you what's in it for you.

Researchers from robotics and artificial intelligence increasingly agree that ideas from biology and self-organization can strongly benefit the design of autonomous robots. Biological organisms have evolved to perform and survive in a world characterized by rapid changes, high uncertainty, indefinite richness, and limited availability of information. The term "Soft Robotics" designates a new generation of robots capable of functioning in the real world by capitalizing on "soft" designs at various levels: surface (skin), movement mechanisms (muscles, tendons), and interaction with other agents (smooth, friendly interaction). Industrial robots, in contrast, operate in highly controlled environments with no or very little uncertainty. By "outsourcing" functionality to morphological and material characteristics - e.g. to the elasticity of the muscle-tendon system - the distinction between control and to-be-controlled, which is at the heart of manufacturing and control theory, breaks down and entirely new concepts will be required. In this lecture I will argue that the next generation of intelligent machines – robots – will be of the “soft” kind and I will explore the theoretical and practical implications, whose importance can hardly be over-estimated. I will be using many examples and case studies. In particular I will be introducing the tendon-driven “soft” robot “Roboy” that we have been developing in our laboratory over the last few months. Although many challenges remain, concepts from biologically inspired “soft” robotics will eventually enable researchers to engineer machines for the real world that possess at least some of the desirable properties of biological organisms, such as adaptivity, robustness, and versatility.

In this talk we'll explore powerful analytic techniques for graph data. Firstly we'll discover some of the innate properties of (social) graphs from fields like anthropology and sociology. By understanding the forces and tensions within the graph structure and applying some graph theory, we'll be able to predict how the graph will evolve over time. To test just how powerful and accurate graph theory is, we'll also be able to (retrospectively) predict World War 1 based on a social graph and a few simple mechanical rules. Then we'll see how graph matching can be used to extract online business intelligence (for powerful retail recommendations). In turn we'll apply these powerful techniques to modelling domains in Neo4j (a graph database) and show how Neo4j can be used to drive business intelligence. <br/> Don't worry, there won't be too much mathematics :-)!

If you continuously develop new features and publish new code frequently, quality must not happen afterwards. This talk should explain, how agility and quality can be reconciled and what this means for the architecture of its software.

AutoScout24 offers a creative and innovative environment that places emphasize on individual responsibility and calling the status quo into question. We are impelled by the enthusiasm to learn through small and quick experiments what creates value for our clients and ourselves. Thereby we work and live after our agile principles in order to enable continuous innovations and sustainable growth:

• think big and learn to break things (disruption)

• validate your ideas in customer value driven iterations and experiments

• start small and learn fast

• optimize for speed not efficiency

• through self-organizing teams

• with radical transparency

• continuous self-improvement and interactive communication

On the basis of our frameworks and with examples from everyday life, you get to know our mindset and approach.

The IT-landscape of many companies is a historically grown jungle of diverse data processing systems, either purchased, open source, or developed individually. In order to support the business processes of the company, these systems need to share data with each other - SOAP, proprietary binary protocols or the good old file sharing, are frequently used. A developer spends a lot of time in these environments, packing data from one protocol into another and editing them for the different systems. Apache Camel is a free, rule-based platform for routing and transformations, which has been modeled after the Enterprise Integration Patterns from Hohpe and Woolfe. This talk gives an overview on how Camel can facilitate the work of developers.

The main focus when introducing agile methods like scrum often lies on the pure process level. In the beginning, one mostly achieves visible progress rapidly, but often the concurrence of traditional management way of thinking and agile mindset causes problems. This talk is responsive to patterns that can often be observed using some examples form the practice and gives food for thoughts to different methods regarding leadership of agile teams and to agile organizational structures.

Load testing is difficult. It is even more difficult to do well. In fact, it is nearly impossible when you factor in the constraints commonto software projects such as: inadequate test environments, short schedules, insufficient funding, and the frequency that severe performanceissues found while preparing for load testing consume the limited time allotted for load testing before it.This session, however, does not focus on load testing. It focuses on performance testing that is fast and easy, requires no investment in tools,fits seamlessly into the development cycle, requires no special skills, and minimizes performance issues that often consume the time allottedto load testing. During this session, Scott Barber shares how he:

• Creates rapid performance test strategies that can generally replace “formal” performance test plans -- in minutes

• Uses freely available tools and utilities to conduct valuable early performance testing -- in minutes

• Conducts competitive performance analysis and/or field studies -- in minutes

• Quantifies end-user acceptance criteria accurately -- in hours

Whether you are a performance tester, or are a performance interested member of a team, you will find the information in this session accessible, implementable and valuable.

With OpenFlow and Network Virtualization, another revolution in data centers is being initiated: The infrastructure of the network is becoming as flexible and automatable as the servers became with the introduction of virtual machines. This offers completely new opportunities and challenges for the modern IT company.Through automation, effort and error rate can be reduced, yet many of the long lasting, dragged-in processes need to be adapted. The results are dramatically newarchitectures for networks that have not been realizable before. This talk gives an overview of the technological approaches and tries to carve out why with SoftwareDefined Networking, another essential jigsaw piece for Devops finds its way into Enterprise Networks.

One of the key benefits of continuous integration servers is to be able to effectively utilize a large number of virtual computers, as they are becoming cheaper and more abundant. Doing this is becoming increasingly important as the expanding computing power clearly comes in the form of higher parallelism, not a faster computer. In this talk, we first look at the basics of setting up Jenkins for a large number of slaves, then look at various techniques enabled by them, such as parallel testing, load testing with many load generating clients, and how to orchestrate those activities. I’ll highlight various plugins in Jenkins that are useful for this goal, and how they can be combined so that you can do the same on your Jenkins.

The same question comes every time when dealing with legacy code: shall we maintain or rewrite the whole application? Tough decision to take! Maintaining the legacy code or rewriting it from scratch may cost lots of money. Another solution would be to migrate the code from step to step by introducing new valuable piecesof software like Drupal does for their upcoming major release. This talk will explain how you can take benefit from famous Symfony2 standalone components to empower and modernize your legacy code. Reusing well known and tested Symfony components will also guarantee a smooth learning curve and the support from the biggest PHP developers community.

PHP is one of the most popular languages for web applications. Despite its original interpretation for the “personal homepage”, many companies nowadays do have small and big PHP applications in action, that often have come into existence over many years and without the use of modern development techniques or frameworks. Today, with Symfony2 and Doctrine, an ecosystem of the new generation exists, that uses a lot of patterns from the latest java and ruby world. Now the question comes up how one can raise legacy applications with several hundreds of thousands lines of code to such a platform. We show a way how we made a modern, testable and stable web application out of a deadlocked legacy application. Meanwhile, the system as a whole stays operational all the time. Thereby, besides others, the features of the framework, the setup of a development environment based on best practices as well as the approach during migration shall be highlighted.