Adam Jones & Robert Boone - Accelerate framework and PDF Reader library

We will have two short presentations this month, one by Adam Jones on the Accelerate framework, and another one by Robert Boone about the open source vfrReader PDF library.

Accelerate framework

Description: The Accelerate Framework is a collection of C APIs for vector and matrix math (BLAS and vecLib), digital signal processing (vDSP), and image processing (vImage). It provides a generic API which optimizes the binary for each specific processor's specialized math instruction sets. For instance the NEON SIMD instruction set in ARM Cortex 8 and 9 (Apple A4, A5+) allows single instruction 64 or 128 bit data operations (like multiplying two vectors as one operation). For large data sets the performance improvements can be staggering.

Bio: Adam is currently a mechanical engineer, looking for a more challenging field. He has been doing iOS development on the side for the past two years, with a long history of programming for fun and research.

vfrReader PDF library

Description: We will go through a brief tour of the PDF libraries available currently, and then review the vfrViewer application. We will perform a simple modification of vfrViewer, which will be an interesting demonstration of what this library can do.

Bio: Robert began his career as a student programmer building West Texas A&M's online university in PHP. He later became the system administrator and ultimately the webmaster for the university. In 2006, he joined cpanel, inc as a Perl developer. In 2012, Robert formed JRLBConsulting, where we works on client projects focusing on iOS and Ruby on Rails.