PHP with R (Mark Baker) & Understanding static analysis for PHP (Damien Seguy)

Thursday, October 18th, we organise our next Developer Meetup in Deventer with two speakers who will tell about:

• PHP with R - Putting the PoweR in PHP statistics by Mark Baker
• Understanding static analysis for PHP by Damien Seguy

SCHEDULE:
6:30 pm Walk in; get to know Drukwerkdeal.nl and have a drink!
7:00 pm Crunchy pizza’s will be delivered
7:30 pm Opening: short presentation DWD
7:45 pm Mark Baker
8:15 pm Break
8:30 pm Damien Seguy
9:30 pm Drinks and socializing!
10:30 pm Closure

LOCATION:
Drukwerkdeal.nl, Keulenstraat 4 Deventer

BACKGROUND INFORMATION:

Who is Damien Seguy?
Damien Seguy is CTO at Exakat Ltd., a company specialized in PHP code quality solutions for the industry. He leads the development of the exakat PHP static analysis engine, that automatically audit code for version compatibility, security and dead code. Since last milenium, Damien has contributed to PHP, as documentation author, elephpant breeder, conference UFO on all continents. He also enjoys machine learning, gremlin, 狮子头 and camembert.

What about static analysis?
Static analysis is an emerging field, in particular in the PHP world. Reviewing source code at the speed of a computer requires powerful theoretical tools: control flow diagram, abstract syntactic trees, acyclic dependency graph.

If all this seems far and remote from PHP, come and learn how they apply to your favorite language! We’ll see how to combine all those aspects to build a useful auditing engine.

Who is Mark Baker?
Mark Baker is Senior Software Engineer on the SMS team at MessageBird B.V. Originally he's from the UK. Over the years, he contributed to a number of open source projects: some still extant, others lost to history, including a minor submission to PHP’s SPL. More than 11 years he was coordinator and lead developer for the PHPExcel library, and a coordinator and developer on the PHPOffice library suite – PHPWord, PHPPresentation (formerly PHPPowerPoint), PHPProject and PHPVisio. Most recently, he has been working on new datastructures such as Tries, Quadtrees and Matrices; hoping that I’ll eventually be able to get them included in SPL.

Mark is particular interests include PHP integration with office suites, Textual analysis, Geodata and geographic information systems, Generators, and “big data” and data analysis.

Putting the PoweR in PHP statistics?
The R programming language is designed for statistical analysis, graphics, and reporting; and provides provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering), tools for data analysis, and graphical techniques. Designed specifically for that purpose, it provides a more sophisticated set of functions for mathematics and statistics than a more general purpose programming language like PHP. But if we need those mathematical or statistical features within our PHP code, we can integrate the two languages; using the power of R from within our PHP scripts. How do we set about doing so? Let's find out.