Wednesday, 3 November:

Dana Blankenhorn | Linux and Open Source Writer, ZDNet | The Year of Apache

2010 has been a big year for Apache, in terms of its projects, its business model, and its license. Analysts say Apache's model is the coming thing. Google loves Apache. And open source is now seen as American as apple pie. Journalist Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet Open Source reviews these and other trends, asks some questions about the future, and gives you ample room to disagree. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

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Thursday, 4 November:

Daniel Crichton | Program Manager and Principal Computer Scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory | Leveraging Open Source Technologies to Enable Scientific Discovery

Scientific discovery is largely a collaborative endeavor. From the design and execution of a robotic mission to explore the solar system to the evaluation of biomarkers that identify a particular predisposition to cancer, the scientific community depends on multi-institutional collaboration as a key component of the discovery process. Science data systems play a key role in enabling the collaborative model in scientific discovery and must apply many of the same principles that involve scientific collaboration to software  development and deployment. Rather than being built in isolation, they must be developed in a collaborative model to ensure they can be run in multi-center deployments and support the varying and evolving needs of the scientific community. Open source software plays a vital role in enabling this process. From its vary nature, open source allows software development to turn scientific data system projects into multi-institutional and international systems by developing the communities around software product lines.

This talk will provide a background on scientific projects in planetary science, earth science and cancer research and the use of open source to enabling scientific data systems.

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Friday, 5 November:

Dr. Bob Sutor | Vice President of Open Systems and Linux, IBM Corporation | Data, Languages, and Problem

Much research work over the next decade will be driven by those seeking to solve complex problems employing the cloud, multicore processors, distributed data, business analytics, and mobile computing. In this talk I'll discuss some past approaches but also look at work being done in the labs on languages like X10 that extend the value of Java through parallelism, technologies that drive cross-stack interoperability, and approaches to handling and analyzing both structured and unstructured data.