Due to my involvement in the UNAM/DGAPA/PAPIME PE102718 project on the ”creation of teaching materials regarding privacy and anonymity mechanisms”, as the Southern half of the world gets ready for the warm season, I was invited to participate during the first weekend of December in Primavera Hacker 17. With around 350 participants spanning a good chunk of Latin America, this was a most interesting experience.
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Here’s some personal highlights of this year’s ACM UIST (User Interface Software & Technology) conference, which took place in Quebec, Canada — just a few days ago. Continue reading
I should introduce myself before jumping in with my first post here in the XRDS blog. I am a long time Free Software enthusiast and developer, and that might be the single item that has most influenced my professional life. I am 41 years old, and have been a systems and network administrator for over half of my life.
As a consequence of my job, I have always been interested in information security. Particularly I’ve interested in the question “how the end user perceives security?” This fragments into more detailed questions such as: How can I implement services securely without it being a major inconvenience for my users? How can I help my users adopt reasonable practices security-wise? How can we as computing professionals influence our societies so that their expectations on security, privacy and reliability are met?
That prompted me into starting a Masters degree on Information Security at ESIME Culhuacán, Instituto Politécnico Nacional. And, in turn, being a graduate student led me to XRDS. So it’s all connected in the end.
Having said that, lets get this blog started!
Fig. 1: Group photo for the 2017 Debian Conference, held at Montreal, Canada, August 6-13
I have recently arrived back home after attending DebConf17 — The Debian Conference, which was held this year in Montreal, Canada. For many of the regulars to DebConf, this is the high point of the year, the two weeks of high bandwidth communications with our online colleagues we eagerly look forward to, and its nearness is easily felt in the different communication channels the project uses for its day-to-day development.
Recently, I was in Austin, Texas to attend ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering) and MSR (Mining Software Repositories) conferences. The authors presented excellent papers on a variety of topics concerning software engineering. Despite their excellent technical content, I was discontented by the presentation skills exhibited by some of the authors. It’s not only the students, but even some of the experienced researchers gave not so exciting presentations. Continue reading
In a previous post I summarized some of the plenary talks from the most recent ICDM held in Atlantic city. In this follow up, I will discuss some of the ideas from sessions.
In the main conference track, there were sessions spanning over many of today’s trending topics in computer science: Big Data, social network mining, clustering, spatio-temporal and multilabel learning, classification, dimensionality reduction, and online and social learning. The approaches and applications varied from session to session and talk to talk, but there was, naturally, an overarching theme of efficiently and effectively working with data.