Talks:

* Elena Kelareva - War, Space and Science Fiction: Automated Scheduling in the Real World.
* Andy Gelme - Automated Sensor Devices (Arduino)

After the meeting, come have dinner with us at Maria’s Trattoria! 122-124 Peel St.
Elena Kelareva - War, Space and Science Fiction: Automated Scheduling in the Real World

Automated scheduling and planning algorithms have many applications in the real world. This talk will present a few of the more interesting examples, including a tool used by the Canadian Navy to help ships survive many simultaneous missile attacks, and the algorithm used to schedule observations on the Hubble Space Telescope. The talk will give a general introduction to scheduling problems and the algorithms that exist for solving them, as well as describing in more detail some of the issues that arise in applying scheduling to real-world situations.

Elena Kelareva is a software engineer/researcher working for OMC International, a maritime consulting company which makes software for ports. Elena has been involved in developing algorithms for the Dynamic Under Keel Clearance software used by most major Australian ports to determine safe sailing times for ships. She has two published papers in related fields, and is about to start a PhD on automated scheduling algorithms, with a case study of scheduling ships at a port.

Andy Gelme - Hacking the world … using an Arduino or two

Open-source hardware platforms, such as the Arduino, have become reasonably inexpensive, quite capable, with good connectivity options. In addition, a vast range sensors and actuators are now available. Most importantly, active and innovative developer communities have made Arduino hacking a truly fascinating activity. More recently, instrumenting the world with large scale device networks has emerged as a contender for the one of the “next big things”.

This presentation will (briefly) cover the basics of getting an Arduino environment running on Linux. The main focus will be on demonstrating interesting ways in which you can create interactions between your Linux system, some Arduino controllers and a variety of connected devices (including some wearable computing).

Andy Gelme has been working and playing with Unix for a very long time … and got into Linux around the time of SLS 1.03 and kernel 0.99pl12, when everything fitted onto ten 3.5″ floppies. His main area of interest is in distributed systems, particularly when applied to large scale device networks. From 2000 to 2008, Andy was the technical lead of an R&D project that developed home / building automation systems (amongst other things). Some of the resulting distributed system framework and development environment is in the process of being released as open-source. More recently, Andy has been involved in starting the Connected Community HackerSpace in Melbourne.

For more information visit http://www.luv.asn.au/2009/06.