UC Berkeley Cloud Meetup 011

The UC Berkeley Cloud Community of Practice will be holding our 11th meetup in the Berkeley SkyDeck Penthouse. We have some excellent guests and topics and hope to see you there. We are working on speakers now, but you can expect one academic talk, one tech talk from IT, and one startup!

Everyone is welcome - this is a really inclusive group! You don't have to be an expert, or already know about cloud technologies; we get together so people can learn from each other. The Berkeley SkyDeck is at 2150 Shattuck, on the top floor (press "PH" in the elevator.)

The plan for the meetup's format is to have speakers talk about their work. There will be soft drinks, salad(!) and pizza from Sliver.

AGENDA:

4:30- 5:00 Networking & info sharing / people arrive and food arrives

5:00 Host welcome and announcements

5:10: Speaker: Glenn Parham is the CEO and founder of Pundit Analytics (https://punditanalytics.com/), a political tech company based in Berkeley that automates competitive intelligence. As the 2020 election heats up, they are leveraging cloud infrastructure to process unprecedented amounts of political data and extract valuable insights for their clients.

Invasion of the Canadians (2 related talks):

5:30 Speaker: Lindsey Heagy, Project Jupyter (10 min) Lindsey will be giving a brief talk about JupyterHub in for research & education and talking about projects like Callysto & Pangeo and how these will evoke the need for a strategy for higher education for interactive computing (like Jupyterhub). Some of you may recall that Lindsey spoke at our first meetup last year: https://cto.berkeley.edu/cloud/meetup/2019-03-26 - we are thrilled to have her back!

5:45 Speaker: James Colliander (Director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical sciences) launched Canada's national JupyterHub infrastructure Syzygy (https://intro.syzygy.ca/). Colliander will present on the future of interactive computing including how Jupyter's future could play out internationally via consortia of institutions collaborating on delivering and consuming common infrastructure.

6:20: Q&A - Discussion & feedback

6:35: Networking & info sharing

7:00 pm - End/Doors close

Note: in order to make the event as inclusive as possible please know it is OK to bring kids - the SkyDeck is a child (and baby)-friendly venue. If you can't make it at this time, we do film all the talks and post them on YouTube.

About the format of the talks-- presenters have been invited to share their experience with a ~15 minute story framed around 3 questions:

1. WHY - Start with Why & the business value/value to mission. Why did you need cloud computing? Describe the big vision, business problem and/or academic challenge (not technical!) that you were trying to solve. (For example, teaching thousands of Berkeley students data science and making it come alive, or enabling citizen scientists around the world to crowdsource bird migration data to ascertain patterns...)

2. HOW - How did you end up using cloud computing to solve the challenge? How did you architect, build, design, etc. How do the pieces fit together and how does it work?

3. WHAT - What was the result? What did you learn? Share your war stories, lessons learned, insights, gotchas etc.