Everything CUSEC

Here at CUSEC, our goal is to deliver a great experience to all our attendees.

Bringing in diverse speakers is one way we accomplish that. In our Academic lineup, we look for charismatic people with fascinating accomplishments. We want them to talk about stuff our delegates wouldn’t encounter in their daily lives.

Ettore Merlo is an exciting CUSEC 2008 speaker. He’s a professor at the Polytechnique Montreal with research that would interest any web software developer. Merlo’s software automatically scans source code to detect security errors. His research virtually eliminates a whole class of problems—the kind of problems that make headlines.

With him on board, CUSEC will be one step closer to being so good that it makes headlines.

They say that those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. In CUSEC’s case, we’re learning from the past and sometimes we want to repeat it.

The folks who organized CUSEC 2007 did a great job, and I try and learn from the successes. One of those successes came from Jeremy Cooperstock.

Cooperstock is an engaging speaker and teacher from McGill University. After he spoke last year, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. He was one of the best-loved speakers of the 2007 conference.

We could do no better than to invite him to return. He’ll speak about how the problems involved in software engineering for music and games.

[This is the first of four posts about the Academic speakers at CUSEC 2008.]

CUSEC’s Presentations Director, Ed, invited me to find academic speakers for the upcoming conference. “No big deal,” I thought. I told him I would help in any way I could.

Then he told me the conditions. We needed speakers from software engineering academia who are charismatic, friendly, energetic, smart and notable, with great research to boot.

Oh.

Then I found out we offered no compensation — these superstar academics would be volunteering their time and traveling at their own expense.

Oh.

I cast out a net with those conditions and the same name started popping up. Officials at IBM’s Centre for Advanced Studies and students alike recommended Marsha Chechik.

More research made it clear she was the type of speaker we were looking for. Professor Chechik is a likable and distinguished expert in Formal Methods and Model Verification at the University of Toronto with a stellar track record. In the past, she has collaborated with important industry players on several projects.

I’m pleased to say she accepted our invitation to speak at CUSEC 2008.