KEYNOTES

JUST ANNOUNCED...

Dances with Robots: The Story of One Engineer, 112 Little Robots and the Toys, Insects and Star Wars Movies that Made it all Possible

James McLurkin, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
Friday, March 7, 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM

The presentation starts with a lighthearted look at society’s views on robots, Hollywood's portrayal of them, the current state of the art, and the future of the technology.  Philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence are discussed, as they pose serious problems for the creation of artificially intelligent devices.  The final conclusion?  Robots are phenomenally stupid and we should be more concerned about the next asteroid strike than a robotic rebellion.  In spite of this, robots are still useful, and swarms are the future of robotics.  McLurkin motivates the need for swarms of robots, and explains the technology required to produce group behaviors on one hundred robots.  Live robot demonstrations and video clips of the swarm in action punctuate the main points.

Agility at Scale: Applying Agile Software Development Techniques on Real-World Projects

Scott Ambler, Practice Leader, Agile Development, IBM
Monday, March 3, 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM

Agile software development techniques are being adopted within the majority of organizations around the world and are now being applied “at scale” in very complex situations. This presentation overviews agile software development, shares data from a recent industry survey as to the adoption rate of agile techniques, and explores scaling issues such as distributed development teams, regulatory compliance, governance, large teams, complex environments, and leveraging legacy assets. Agile approaches enable you to achieve greater quality, improved return on investment (ROI), reduced time to market, and significantly easier governance although require greater collaboration, teamwork, and discipline on the part of IT professionals and business stakeholders.

Beautiful Code

Elliotte Rusty Harold, Author/Adjunct Professor, Polytechnic University
Michael Feathers, Senior Trainer/Mentor/Consultant, Object Mentor
Alberto Savoia, CTO, Agitar Software
Christopher Seiwald, CEO, Perforce
Monday, March 3, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM

What makes code beautiful? Is it all in the eye of the beholder or is there an aesthetic of code we can all agree on? How important is it for code to be beautiful? What trade-offs can or should be made in the name of beauty? Come hear several authors of the best-selling O'Reilly book Beautiful Code discuss these and other questions.

Is Agile Really Working for You?

Per Kroll, Manager Methods, EPF Project Lead, IBM
Tuesday, March 4, 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM

So, you are going agile, but are you really getting the promised benefits? Do you understand how well you are following various agile practices? How you can do better and track ongoing improvements? We will show how teams going agile within IBM have used an Agile Evaluation Framework to answer these questions through self assessments. We will also demo how you can use the open source project Eclipse Process Framework as a source for your agile practices, and how you can leverage the Agile Evaluation Framework to put together an experience report to effectively share your successes.

Object-Oriented Programming and Generic Programming and What Else?

Bjarne Stroustrup, Professor, Texas A&M University
Wednesday, March 5, 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM

Is there any rational basis for choosing among programming styles or is it all personal choice and hype? What are the first-order ideals by which we can judge programming styles and techniques? What about programming techniques and programming languages matters and what is just “noise”? This presentation articulates some opinions and backs them up with code examples and a few simple experiments. The focus of my examples will use C++, and I will touch C++0x only tangentially.

Parallel or Perish!! - Are you Ready?

James Reinders, Chief Software Evangelist and Director of Intel Software Products
Thursday, March 6, 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM

A software revolution is underway, triggered by the shift to multi-core hardware architectures. Intel has unprecedented programs ranging from working with professors around the world, to Intel’s leadership in software development tools for multi-core. A recent Evans Data survey found that, in markets surveyed, Intel “dominated” the multi-core software development tools. Reinders will share examples of what Intel is learning, including some surprising and generally encouraging results. Experiences in this last year, including open sourcing Intel Threading Building Blocks, has given Intel unique insights into what software developers are actually doing. Reinders will extrapolate from these experiences and provide concrete ideas on where this is going to take us, and how Intel products fit into software developer’s needs.