Web608 Beta

"Josh Berkus has been a member of the PostgreSQL Core Team since 2002. He is CEO of PostgreSQL Experts Inc., a PostgreSQL professional services company. Prior to working on PostgreSQL, he worked with a variety of other software, including OpenOffice.org, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle PL/SQL, and (shudder) COM+. He also does Perl." - http://it.toolbox.com/people/josh_berkus/

I apologize for the short notice, but Josh graciously offered to do a talk while he's in town on business.

Josh suggested a "PostgreSQL talk, or just Q&A." I don't have any more details than that since we've been working on getting a venue and such, so it'll probably be pretty laid back. Some people might even go out for food or drinks afterwards. You never can tell about kids these days.

Please distribute this information as widely as possible. We'd like a good turnout and that might be difficult with short promotional time.

Date

July 13, 2010 - 7:00pm

Links

http://www.fpm.wisc.edu/smomap/building.aspx?building=0055&wing=

http://www.map.wisc.edu/?initObj=0055&wing=

http://www.physics.wisc.edu/groups/particle-theory/Visitors.htm

Location

Alloy is a modeling language that combines ideas from relational algebra, object-oriented programming languages and specification formalisms. It's now been in use for a decade, and has been applied in many different settings: not just design analysis, for which it was conceived, but also test case generation, program verification, website synthesis, and more. This talk is three-in-one. First, I'll give a whirlwind tour of the essential ideas of Alloy: its nifty generalization of relational join, its strange but largely invisible type system, its reduction of analysis and simulation to SAT solving, and its support for unusual idioms. Second, I'll describe some of its successful applications, and the sometimes embarrassing mistakes its analysis has uncovered.

Date

November 4, 2009 - 3:30pm

Links

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/abstracts/1302.html

Location

Abstraction is at the center of much work in Computer Science. It encompasses finding the right interface for a system as well as finding an effective design for a system implementation. Furthermore abstraction is an important way to make progress within computer science: once the right abstraction has been defined, it allows previously unresolved problems to be ignored from then on and provides a building block for future work. This talk will discuss abstraction mechanisms, their support in programming languages, and their use in designing and implementing programs.

Date

October 20, 2009 - 7:45pm

Links

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/abstracts/1333.html

Location