San Diego ACM Professional Chapter meetings http://www.sdacm.org/meet.htm Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history the GNU Operating System, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide. http://www.fsf.org/events/ucsdspeech Despite herculean efforts by our overcommitted Chair (who is working on a PhD degree, and is begging to be replaced) and Program Committee (effectively one person, who is also overcommitted and wants assistance), no meeting materialized for October. Please watch this space (or, better yet, LEND A HAND!) for news on future meetings. http://www.sdacm.org/meet.htm#20061004 To do superior software work, developers must work on capable teams that manage and control their own work. These are called self-directed teams. To build and lead such teams, the developers must have the proper training, support, and leadership. When they do, these teams do extraordinary work. In this talk, Mr. Humphrey describes the principles of modern software development work and shows how the Team Software Process (TSP) applies these principles in a way that enables software teams to own their own processes, make their own plans and commitments, and consistently deliver quality products on schedule and for their planned costs. The results show that, with the TSP, team productivity is more than doubled, testing time is reduced from months to days, and finished products are essentially defect free. Furthermore, when developers use the TSP, they find the work more enjoyable and personally rewarding. http://www.sdacm.org/meet.htm#20060918 Our yearly planning meeting is just around the corner. We hope to select a new chairman and set out our plans for the coming year. Due to the outstanding efforts of our program committee, we had another good year last year. The upcoming year brings opportunities for more great speakers, and the unusual opportunity of new leadership ... If any of you have ideas for speakers or would like to help run our chapter (it's fun and not hard), please plan to attend. The meeting will be on Friday, July 28 at 11:45 AM at La Salsa, in the Costa Verde shopping center. If you might attend, please let me know (bdemchak@tpsoft.com) so I can reserve a chair for you. http://www.sdacm.org/meet.htm#20060728 George Santayana's statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," is only half true. The past also includes successful histories. If you haven't been made aware of them, you're often condemned not to repeat their successes. In a rapidly expanding field such as software engineering, this happens a lot. Extensive studies of many software projects such as the Standish Reports offer convincing evidence that many projects fail to repeat past successes. This presentation tries to identify at least some of the major past software experiences that were well worth repeating, and some that were not. It also tries to identify underlying phenomena influencing the evolution of software engineering practices that have at least helped the presenter appreciate how our field has gotten to where it has been and where it is. A counterpart Santayana-like statement about the past and future might say, "In an era of rapid change, those who repeat the past are condemned to a bleak future." (Think about the dinosaurs, and think carefully about software engineering maturity models that emphasize repeatability.) The presentation also tries to identify some of the major sources of change that will affect software engineering practices in the next couple of decades, and identifies some strategies for assessing and adapting to these sources of change. It also makes some first steps towards distinguishing relatively timeless software engineering principles that are risky not to repeat, and conditions of change under which aging practices will become increasingly risky to repeat. This presentation is based on Dr. Boehm's keynote address at the International Conference on Software Engineering, held in May in Shanghai, China. http://www.sdacm.org/meet.htm#20060717 Without a doubt the most sophisticated behavior seen in biological agents is demonstrated by organisms whose behavior is guided by a nervous system. Thus, the construction of behaving devices based on principles of nervous systems may have much to offer. Our group has built series of brain-based devices (BBDs) over the last 15 years to provide a heuristic for studying brain function by embedding neurobiological principles on a physical platform capable of interacting with the real world. These BBDs have been used to study perception, operant conditioning, episodic and spatial memory, and motor control through the simulation of brain regions such as the visual cortex, the dopaminergic reward system, the hippocampus, and the cerebellum. Following the brain-based model, we argue that an intelligent machine should be constrained by the following design principles: (i) it should incorporate a simulated brain with detailed neuroanatomy and neural dynamics that controls behavior and shapes memory, (ii) it should organize the unlabeled signals it receives from the environment into categories without a priori knowledge or instruction, (iii) it should have a physical instantiation, which allows for active sensing and autonomous movement in the environment, (iv) it should engage in a task that is initially constrained by minimal set of innate behaviors or reflexes, (v) it should have a means to adapt the device's behavior, called value systems, when an important environmental event occurs, and (vi) it should allow comparisons with experimental data acquired from animal nervous systems. Like the brain, these devices operate according to selectional principles through which they form categorical memory, associate categories with innate value, and adapt to the environment. Moreover, this approach may provide the groundwork for the development of intelligent machines that follow neurobiological rather than computational principles in their construction. http://www.sdacm.org/meet.htm#20060518 Mobile phones promise to replace the desktop as the predominant computing-and-communications platform. Yet, simply reproducing desktop application concepts in a small form factor--e-mail, web browsing, and streaming video, to name a few--cannot achieve this promise. A new vision for mobile computing is required. A critical yet underexplored element of this vision is the use of personal context. For example, early studies showed that context-awareness can improve the usefulness of automated reminders, but little is known about how a context-aware reminder application might be used throughout a person's daily life. Mobile phones provide a potentially convenient and truly ubiquitous platform for the detection of personal context such as location, as well as the delivery of reminders. To study people using location-aware reminders throughout their daily lives, we designed Place-Its, a location-based reminder application that runs on mobile phones. This talk describes the design of Place-Its and a two-week exploratory user study. The study reveals that location-based reminders are useful, in large part because people use location in nuanced ways. Other on-going projects relating to mobile phones are briefly discussed. http://www.sdacm.org/meetings/meet20060420.htm There is very little new in the overall framework of how to engineer software, but this is very new! Barry Boehm and Apurva Jain at the USC Center for Software Engineering have been doing some serious thinking about how to best manage and develop software. This presentation describes the fruits of that powerful thinking by illustrating the five components of their framework: negotiating a win-win solution, characterizing and attending to dependencies, the relative worth of each of the important variables (cost, schedule, features, etc.), the relationship between what we do and what happens, and how we make decisions. The framework will be animated by showing how the components interact and are traversed. And then the framework will be applied to the question of "how much quality assurance is enough?" http://www.sdacm.org/meetings/meet20060320.htm The March Mingle is a technology-agnostic event that brings together developers of all kinds, a sort of annual "Technology Woodstock" or "Ultimate Geek Happy Hour" for San Diego. No sales or technical presentations, just talking shop and munching on (free!) finger food while relaxing and enjoying the games and atmosphere. It takes place at Dave & Busters, downtown. http://www.marchmingle.com/ Graphics accelerators have evolved into nifty little massive computation engines. Their ability to crunch billions of floating point operations per second and blast millions of triangles to the screen has made for some rapid advances in games, CAD, digital films, and areas of research from biology to Wall Street. This talk covers the capabilities of today's GPUs with a look toward future hardware, and gives overviews of many graphics and non-graphics techniques developed for the hardware. http://www.sdacm.org/meet20060216.htm Wireless Java development on Nokia platforms. Srikanth Raju, Senior Technology Manager at Nokia, will discuss the ins and outs of various Java technology implementations in the different Nokia platforms. http://www.sdacm.org/meetings/meet20060126.htm Puppet: Next generation open source server automation. Speaker is Luke Kanies founder of Reductive Labs. Being held at USENIX'05 at the Town and Country Hotel. http://www.sdacm.org/meetings/meet20051205.htm Going Wide: The transition to multi-core architecture. Presented by Adam Lake, of Intel's Software Solutions Group. http://www.sdacm.org/meetings/meet062305.htm Extreme Programming (XP) presentation by Carlton Nettleton of SAIC. http://www.sdacm.org/meetings/meet042105.htm