Talks by Austin Seipp and Alexey Radul!
Details
Another fantastic lineup this month, including guest speaker and GHC engineer Austin Seipp joining us from Austin, TX.
START TIME CHANGE: As mentioned last time, per Akamai's request, we will be changing our start time to 6:30 for good. As usual, we'll hang out and have pizza for the first.
6:45-7:45: Austin Seipp - Fast, production ready binary serialization.
In the Haskell world, the venerable binary package has been serving us well for almost a decade, for both inter-operability between systems and general serialization purposes. Yet, in the real world we can improve upon binary dramatically in output size, code speed, and memory use - all on top of a more modular design.
In this talk, I'll discuss and give a broad overview of the (eventual) successor to binary: binary-serialise-cbor. We'll go over it's fundamental design differences with binary, performance numbers, current development status, and future plans. At the end, we'll also talk about what it takes to 'productionize' a Haskell library of this nature for general users and developers.
8:00-9:00: Alexey Radul - Probabilistic Programming Live-code
I will live-code a small program for a (toy) problem we normally think of as requiring (a little) intelligence. I'll code it in Venture, a probabilistic programming platform my research group and I have been developing for the last few years. (If there's time, I could also show a similar program written in Haskell, but it's a good deal longer and trickier.) I hope to illustrate some of the basic characteristics of trying to program things that are supposed to show a little "creativity"; and I'll say a few words about machine learning too. Statistics will be kept to a minimum.
Speaker Bios:
Austin Seipp:
Austin is a software developer at Well-Typed LLP, living in Austin TX and writing Haskell for clients around the world. He's primarily known in the Haskell universe as a GHC developer and tinkerer, but does in fact do other things. In a prior life, Austin did application security research and development, and before that, worked on data backup software. His interests include code optimization, cryptography, programming language implementation and general low-level computer nonsense.
Alexey Radul:
Alexey is a research engineer at MIT, with the Probabilistic Computing Project http::// http://probcomp.csail.mit.edu/ . His coworkers call him the lead developer of the Venture probabilistic programming platform, for two years now. Previously, Alexey has worked on automatic differentiation, optimizing compilers, and the propagator model of computation.
Logistics:
If you can, please plan on arriving between 6:15pm and 6:30pm, but there will be someone in the lobby to greet stragglers.
Food:
Pizzas, salad and soda.
Afterwards:
If you'd like to stick around, a number of us tend to head down to the CBC (http://www.cambrew.com/) or another pub afterwards to socialize. If you would like to give a talk or if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to follow up here or email one of the organizers.