Have you ever taken a moment to think about the sculpters of your destiny? The ones who have chizzeled away at the rough shape of your thoughts, who gave sweat, tears, and blood to cut-away the chunks of rough and unfinished ideas that would have otherwise forever held you back?
Dr. Grogono is one of those sculpters; an artist whose teachings have landed us incredible jobs, brought to us tremendous opportunities, and sparked the passion for our craft.
It was but only but a few days after the fresh start of my software engineering program that a friend had mentioned Dr. Grogono. He had told me: “Whatever you do, if you can take a class with this prof, take it! It doesn’t matter what the class is.” Two years later I did. My friend was more than right. Dr. Grogono was “da bomb”. Along side his regular teachings in class, Dr. Grogono quoted authors such as Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Pete McBreen, and David Thomas in many ways, inviting us to continue our learning outside the classroom. I did.
Finally, Dr. Grogono is the spiritual father of the incredible adventure that has been, is, and will be: CUSEC! Dr. Grogono embarked on this adventure along with John Kopanas and a few other software engineering students at Concordia University many years ago. The years have passed
and CUSEC continues to thrive and, yet again, the passion they have shared with us through this wonderful event will bring us together under one roof to celebrate our craft.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Grogono as a CUSEC 2008 Keynote presenter on Friday morning at 11AM.
In searching for speakers, I looked for a few things in particular:
- Knows how to push thoughts from their own heads to others in a digestible/adhesive delivery method
- Cares about doing interesting, socially impacting things with computers
- Cares more about doing this ^^^ than the platform it happens on
Jon has these qualities in spades; accepting of the term “alpha-geek”, he was blogging before the term was coined, publicizing technological or cultural memes, while still tinkering on his own projects like the LibraryLookup Project.
Yet what really made me want to invite Jon was an interview in which he talked about how even though we’re at a stage where software dreams get implemented significantly faster than they used to, we still have a people problem:
we’re leaving a lot of folks behind. And I’m not just talking about the digital divide that separates the Internet haves from the have-nots. Even among the haves, the ideas and tools and methods that some of us take for granted haven’t really put down roots in the mainstream
This feeling is a core tenet of what I think CUSEC’s about; while our academic environments teach us a lot, it’s inevitable that they’re going to miss out on touching on certain ideas, bleeding-edge or not. By bringing in people like Jon, CUSEC continues to fill that gap.
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.
This is way long overdue. Not only were we really lucky to have Kathy Sierra give a keynote presentation at CUSEC 2006 (yes… just over 12 months ago) but she blogged about us afterwards! She even posted a picture of the organizers, including moi, on her website.
→ read Kathy Sierra’s post influenced by CUSEC
Interested in pushing the frontier of videogames? Meet Kokoromi – Phil Fish, Heather Kelley, and Damien DiFede. Kokoromi is Japanese for “experiment” and boy has this trio experimented with videogames. Last November Kokoromi held a gaming art event in Montreal entitled Gamma 01: Audio Feed where they invited game developers to create audio-driven videogames for huge party in Montreal.
We’re honoured to have such creative local talent joining us at CUSEC. Be sure to check out the interactive session, “Let’s make sweet game together: Game Art in Montreal”.
written by: Kalu Kalu
The team is not done… yesterday a new sponsor… today a new speaker. We are really lucky to get to hear from Austin Hill. Austin Hill is a well known technologist and entrepreneur from Montreal. He is probably best known for co-founding ZeroKnowledge. A company when I was younger I would of given my right arm to work for.
The following is more information about him and his talk.
Title & Description
Chasing Billions with Zero Knowledge – Planning for the Unknown When Starting a Company
Speaker Bio
Austin Hill, Angel Investor & Entrepreneur
Austin Hill is an accomplished entrepreneur who has been creating technology startups for 15 years. He was a founder of Zero-Knowledge (now called Radialpoint) and as its President helped the company raise $75 million between 1997 and 2001.
He served as the Chief Technology Officer for Zero-Knowledge Systems, the CEO of Synomos Inc. (a subsidiary of Zero-Knowledge Systems) and as the Executive-Vice President of Research for Radialpoint.
He was honored as a technology pioneer of the World Economic Forum in Davos (2002) and was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award (Quebec 2001– Emerging Entrepreneur).
He was a founder of the Internet provider Total.Net and built its Canadian network as its Chief Technology Officer. He was also the founder of security consulting firm Cyberspace Data Security.
He is an advisory board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and a past board member of Information Technology Association of Canada. He also serves on the advisory boards of the Atwater Library Digital Literacy project, is a research fellow for Coburn Ventures and through his angel investment firm Brudder Ventures advises a number of Canadian startups and entrepreneurs.
His work on Internet privacy has been profiled on 60 Minutes, and covered in Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and The NY Times.
Austin is currently working on a new project (Project Ojibwe) focused on building a new Internet community service.
Want to plan your schedule for when you are in Montreal at CUSEC? Take a peek at our “As Close To Finalized as Possible Schedule”.
Updated: updated schedule to schedule-3.xls
→ CUSEC 2007 Schedule (excel format)
If you have been on the fence about attending CUSEC this year, which we know you haven’t been and it is just that you have been too lazy to sign-up, then our fifth keynote presenter should be reason enough to push you over the binary edge (my effort at being funny).
I am embarrassed to say that the first time I heard of Venkat was when co-authored “Practices of an Agile Developer” with Andy Hunt of the Pragmatic Programmers (Dave Thomas the co-founder of The Pragmatic Programmers will also be giving a keynote this year). I read the book as soon as I came across it and I did not put it down until I read the book cover to cover. Soon as I finished reading the book I got on the horn to our Director of Presentations (Hugo Levasseur) and insisted Venkat would be an excellent addition to our keynote line-up.
Venkat will be talking either about: Practices of an Agile Developer, How to be a Great Software Developer or From Fragility to Agility. If you have a preference make sure to vote in our comments section.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam’s Biography:
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored more than 3000 software developers the US, Canada, and Europe. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups.
Venkat is also an Adjunct Professor for the Practice of Computer Science at University of Houston and teaches at Rice University School for Continuing Studies. He’s author of “.NET Gotchas” (O’Reilly), coauthor of “Practices of an Agile Developer” (Pragmatic Bookshelf) and coauthor of NFJS Anthology (Pragmatic Bookshelf).
Don’t forget to vote for what you would like to hear Venkat speak on!
- Practices of an Agile Developer
- How to be a Great Software Developer
- From Fragility to Agility