VIRTUAL -- UC Berkeley Cloud Meetup 018

The UC Berkeley Cloud Community of Practice will be holding our 18th meetup, in an all virtual mode (due to covid-19/coronavirus). We have some excellent guests and topics and hope to see you (cameras on!) later this month. Sorry we do not know how to deliver 🍕🍕🍕🥤 remotely !

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.

CONNECT VIA ZOOM: Our Zoom connection info changes each month and is posted here in meetup invite.

AGENDA:

5:00 Host welcome and announcements

5:10: Speakers: Luisa Caldas (Professor, Department of Architecture, Director XR Lab - Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory(link is external), Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) & Elnaz Tafrihi (PhD Student in Architecture, Building Science and Technology. Research Focus: Design and Simulation in Immersive Environments) Luisa and Elnaz will present about their platform that enables multiple users to collaborate on design ideas using virtual, augmented and mixed reality, significantly extending the capabilities of digital technologies in remote learning. Their project uses cloud computing, running Unity's 3D cloud based development platform.

5:40 SkyDeck Startup Showcase Speaker: Shirley Pan (Founder/CEO: Fibulas). Shirley will talk about her company's vision of becoming the Github for the life sciences, and about how their product, MetaLocker™ BioFlash Drive™ uses cloud computing today.

5:50 Speaker: Poorvi Acharya from the UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies will present an app she developed that uses the Google Vision API for multilanguage text recognition of images. It also creates a convenient wrapper to capture an image on screen to bridge the gap between less technical users and google vision services. She will demo the app and also discuss how it is relevant for the research community.

6:30 pm - End/ "Doors" close.

About the format of the talks-- presenters have been invited to share their experience with a short 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.