Reflections Projections - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Reflections Projections is an annual technology-related conference

Academic conference

An academic conference or symposium is a conference for researchers to present and discuss their work. Together with academic or scientific journals, conferences provide an important channel for exchange of information between researchers.-Overview:Conferences are usually composed of various...

hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

. The conference has been held in October or November each year since 1995 and features a job fair

Job fair

A job fair is also referred commonly as a career fair or career expo. It is a fair or exposition for employers, recruiters and schools to meet with prospective job seekers. Expos usually include company or organization tables or booths where resumes can be collected and business cards can be...

, numerous guest speakers from various fields in computing

Computing

Computing is usually defined as the activity of using and improving computer hardware and software. It is the computer-specific part of information technology...

, technology

Technology

Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...

and occasionally webcomic

Webcomic

Webcomics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or often in self-published books....

s, as well as an AI

AI, A.I., Ai, or ai may refer to:- Computers :* Artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science* Ad impression, in online advertising* .ai, the ISO Internet 2-letter country code for Anguilla...

programming competition. The conference is noted for being free for general attendees and being run entirely by student volunteers.

History

reflections|projections began as the 1995 Midwestern ACM Chapter Conference. The conference was originally held in the Digital Computer Laboratory but has since moved most of its operations to the Siebel Center for Computer Science. A job fair was incorporated into the conference in 1996. Other events that have been part of the conference have included movie showings, barbecues, as well as an evening social

Party

A party is a gathering of people who have been invited by a host for the purposes of socializing, conversation, or recreation. A party will typically feature food and beverages, and often music and dancing as well....

. Early instances of the conference included registration fees for general attendance, though the conference is now free.

1995

The first conference featured Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak

Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak is an American computer engineer and programmer who founded Apple Computer, Co. with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne...

as its keynote speaker. It was sponsored by Andersen Consulting, Citrix Systems

Citrix Systems

Citrix Systems, Inc. is a multinational corporation founded in 1989, that provides server and desktop virtualization, networking, software-as-a-service , and cloud computing technologies, including Xen open source products....

, Enterprise Integration Technology, O'Reilly & Associates

O'Reilly Media

O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics...

, Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...

and Symantec

Symantec

Symantec Corporation is the largest maker of security software for computers. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index.-History:...

. "Reflections, Projections" was the theme

Theme

-Art:* Theme , the unifying subject or idea of the type of visual work* Theme , the unifying subject or idea of a story* Theme , the initial or principal melody in a musical piece...

for the conference and would later become the title for the conference as a whole.

1996

The second conference also used the "reflections, projections" theme. It included keynote speeches by representatives from Spyglass, Inc. and Be Inc.

Be Inc.

Be Incorporated was an American computer company founded in 1990, best known for the Be Operating System and BeBox personal computer. Be was founded by former Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassée with capital from Seymour Cray....

as well as general talks by local UIUC presenters. Sponsors for the 1996 conference included AMD, Boeing

Boeing

The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...

, Citrix Systems

Citrix Systems

, Cray Research, Intel, Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman Corporation is an American global aerospace and defense technology company formed by the 1994 purchase of Grumman by Northrop. The company was the fourth-largest defense contractor in the world as of 2010, and the largest builder of naval vessels. Northrop Grumman employs over...

, Symantec

Symantec

and others.

1997

The 1997 conference was sponsored by Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories is an American-based global, diversified pharmaceuticals and health care products company. It has 90,000 employees and operates in over 130 countries. The company headquarters are in Abbott Park, North Chicago, Illinois. The company was founded by Chicago physician, Dr....

, Andersen Consulting, Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...

, Boeing

Boeing

, John Deere

John Deere

John Deere was an American blacksmith and manufacturer who founded Deere & Company, one of the largest and leading agricultural and construction equipment manufacturers in the world...

, Green Hills Software

Green Hills Software

Green Hills Software is a privately owned company that builds operating systems and development tools for embedded systems. The company was founded in 1982 by Dan O'Dowd and Carl Rosenberg...

, HP, InstallShield

InstallShield

InstallShield is a software tool for creating installers or software packages. InstallShield is primarily used for installing software for Microsoft Windows desktop and server platforms, but it can also be used to manage software applications and packages on a variety of handheld and mobile devices...

, Intel, Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, the NSA, State Farm

State farm

State farm can refer to:*Sovkhoz, a type of state-owned farm in the Soviet Union*Volkseigenes Gut, a type of state-owned farm in East Germany*Państwowe Gospodarstwo Rolne, a type of state-owned farm in People's Republic of Poland...

, Symantec

Symantec

, and Tellabs

Tellabs

Tellabs, Inc. is a telecommunications company that designs and manufactures equipment for service providers.Ranked among the BusinessWeek InfoTech 100, Tellabs is part of the NASDAQ-100 Index, NASDAQ Global Select Market, Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index and the S&P 500...

. The conference included talks on OpenGL

OpenGL

OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...

, web commerce

Web commerce

Web commerce is a form of electronic commerce that is conducted primarily through the World Wide Web, but may also use email and other aspects of the Internet....

, and the Y2K bug.

1998

The 1998 conference was the first to bear the name "Reflections | Projections". Corporate sponsors included Wolfram Research, Crowe Chizek, Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories

, Motorola

Motorola

Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...

, Lucent Technologies

Lucent Technologies

Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc., originally Lucent Technologies, Inc. is a French-owned technology company composed of what was formerly AT&T Technologies, which included Western Electric and Bell Labs...

, PricewaterhouseCoopers

PricewaterhouseCoopers

PricewaterhouseCoopers is a global professional services firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest professional services firm measured by revenues and one of the "Big Four" accountancy firms....

, as well as Microsoft

Microsoft

, HP, Allstate

Allstate

The Allstate Corporation is the second-largest personal lines insurer in the United States and the largest that is publicly held. The company also has personal lines insurance operations in Canada. Allstate was founded in 1931 as part of Sears, Roebuck and Co., and was spun off in 1993...

, Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin is an American global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technology company with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta in March 1995. It is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Washington Metropolitan Area....

and TRW

TRW

TRW Inc. was an American corporation involved in a variety of businesses, mainly aerospace, automotive, and credit reporting. It was a pioneer in multiple fields including electronic components, integrated circuits, computers, software and systems engineering. TRW built many spacecraft,...

1999

Topics for the 1999 conference included OpenBSD

OpenBSD

OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995...

, artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

and open-source software

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

with talks by Eric Allman

Eric Allman

Eric Paul Allman is an American computer programmer who developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at UC Berkeley.-Education and training:...

, Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator For Life" , meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary...

and others.

2001

The 2001 conference included a keynote talk by Fred Brooks

Fred Brooks

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. is a software engineer and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month...

, as well as general talks by John Draper

John Draper

John Thomas Draper , also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman , is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a legendary figure within the computer programming world.- Background :Draper is the son of a U.S...

, and Alexy Pajitnov. This conference also included workshops on Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

and Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

2002

The 2002 conference included a PGP

Pretty Good Privacy

Pretty Good Privacy is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, E-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security...

key signing party

Key signing party

In cryptography, a key signing party is an event at which people present their PGP-compatible keys to others in person, who, if they are confident the key actually belongs to the person who claims it, digitally sign the PGP certificate containing that public key and the person's name, etc...

, talks by Michael Hart

Michael S. Hart

Michael Stern Hart was an American author, best known as the inventor of the electronic book and the founder of Project Gutenberg, a project to make ebooks freely available via the Internet...

, Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock is the founder of the Debian distribution and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company.- Life and career :Murdock was born in Konstanz, Germany....

, Marcus Brinkmann

Marcus Brinkmann

Marcus Brinkmann is a German computer programmer. He is one of the lead developers of the Hurd/L4 which is supposed to supersede the GNU Mach microkernel in GNU...

, and Hal Berghel. Sponsors included Allstate

Allstate

and Microsoft

Microsoft

, as well as Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories

, Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory is the first science and engineering research national laboratory in the United States, receiving this designation on July 1, 1946. It is the largest national laboratory by size and scope in the Midwest...

, Lucent Technologies

Lucent Technologies

Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc., originally Lucent Technologies, Inc. is a French-owned technology company composed of what was formerly AT&T Technologies, which included Western Electric and Bell Labs...

, Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin

and the NSA.

2003

The 2003 conference included talks by Matt Blaze

Matt Blaze

Matt Blaze is a researcher in the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania; he received his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University.In 1992, while working for...

, Seth Schoen

Seth Schoen

Seth David Schoen is senior staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology civil rights organisation, and has been actively involved in discussing digital copyright law and encryption since the 1990s...

, Vernon Burton, as well as Mike Kulas and Mark Allender.

2004

Sponsors for the 2004 conference included ADM

Archer Daniels Midland

The Archer Daniels Midland Company is a conglomerate headquartered in Decatur, Illinois. ADM operates more than 270 plants worldwide, where cereal grains and oilseeds are processed into products used in food, beverage, nutraceutical, industrial and animal feed markets worldwide.ADM was named the...

, Apple, Nvidia

NVIDIA

Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...

, Volition, Xanga

Xanga

Xanga is a website that hosts weblogs, photoblogs, and social networking profiles. It is operated by Xanga.com, Inc., based in New York City.-Origins:...

, Microsoft

Microsoft

and ThinkGeek

ThinkGeek

ThinkGeek is an American online retailer that caters to computer enthusiasts and other "geeky" social groups. Their merchandise includes clothing, electronic and scientific gadgets, unusual computer peripherals, office toys, pet toys, child toys, and caffeinated drinks and candy...

. Speakers included Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....

, Thomas Cormen

Thomas H. Cormen

Thomas H. Cormen is the co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, along with Charles Leiserson, Ron Rivest, and Cliff Stein. He is a Full Professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and currently Chair of the Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science. Between 2004 and 2008 he directed...

, Owen Astrachan

Owen Astrachan

Owen Astrachan is Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Duke University where he is also the department's director of undergraduate studies...

, David Anderson

David P. Anderson

David Pope Anderson is a Research Scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston...

, Richard Gray

Richard Gray (game designer)

Richard "The Levelord" Gray is a video game designer who is best known for designing levels for 3D video games. His most famous works are perhaps the levels for Duke Nukem 3D, and SiN...

, Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling

Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...

, and Phil Zimmermann

Phil Zimmermann

Philip R. "Phil" Zimmermann Jr. is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy , the most widely used email encryption software in the world. He is also known for his work in VoIP encryption protocols, notably ZRTP and Zfone....

. This was also the first conference to use the current logo.

2005

Sponsors for the 2005 conference included Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

, Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

, Apple

Apple

The apple is the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, species Malus domestica in the rose family . It is one of the most widely cultivated tree fruits, and the most widely known of the many members of genus Malus that are used by humans. Apple grow on small, deciduous trees that blossom in the spring...

, Microsoft

Microsoft

, Cerner

Cerner

Cerner Corporation is an international health care information technology corporation that specializes in providing complete systems for hospitals and other medical organizations to manage and integrate all electronic medical records, computerized physician order entry , and financial...

, Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies, Inc., headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tysons Corner, Virginia, New York City and Covent Garden, London, is a software company that produces the Palantir Government and Palantir Finance platforms...

, Wolfram Research and others. Speakers included Peter Hofstee

Peter Hofstee

H. Peter Hofstee was born in the Netherlands and received his doctor's degree in theoretical physics from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, in 1988...

, Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.- Biography :...

, Blake Ross

Blake Ross

Blake Aaron Ross is an American software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla web browser; in particular, he started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt, as well as the Spread Firefox project with Asa Dotzler while working as a contractor at the Mozilla Foundation...

, and Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka

Something Awful

Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a variety of content, including blog entries, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as it grew, so...

2006

Sponsors for the 2006 conference included Amazon.com

Amazon.com

, Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...

, Bank of America

Bank of America

Bank of America Corporation, an American multinational banking and financial services corporation, is the second largest bank holding company in the United States by assets, and the fourth largest bank in the U.S. by market capitalization. The bank is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina...

, Electronics Arts, General Electric

General Electric

General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

, Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm headquartered in New York City serving a diversified group of corporations, governments, financial institutions, and individuals. Morgan Stanley also operates in 36 countries around the world, with over 600 offices and a workforce of over 60,000....

, Nvidia

NVIDIA

, Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies

and others. Speakers included Adrian Bowyer

Adrian Bowyer

Adrian Bowyer is a British engineer and mathematician, currently an academic at the University of Bath.Born in 1952 in London, Bowyer is the older child of the late Rosemary and John Bowyer; the latter was a writer, painter and one of the founders of Zisman, Bowyer and Partners, consulting engineers...

, Burnie Burns

Burnie Burns

Michael Justin "Burnie" Burns is an independent filmmaker living in Texas. His best known contributions have been in machinima, although he has also worked with live-action. In April 2003, Burns, along with several of his friends, created the Internet machinima series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch...

, Robert X. Cringely

Robert X. Cringely

Robert X. Cringely is the pen name of both technology journalist Mark Stephens and a string of writers for a column in InfoWorld, the one-time weekly computer trade newspaper published by IDG.- Biography :...

, Chris DiBona

Chris DiBona

Chris DiBona is the open source and public sector engineering manager at Google. His team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches on Google...

, Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim is a Bangladeshi German American technologist and co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube...

, Max Levchin

Max Levchin

Max Rafael Levchin is a Ukrainian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur widely known as one of the co-founders and for his role as the former chief technology officer of PayPal....

, Yale Patt

Yale Patt

Yale Nance Patt is an American professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering. In 1965, Patt introduced the WOS module, the first complex logic gate implemented on a single piece of silicon...

, and Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky

Avram Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog...

2007

Sponsors for the 2007 conference include Amazon.com

Amazon.com

, Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory

, Bank of America

Bank of America

, E-Trade, Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...

, Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, Google

Google

, Intel, LimeWire

LimeWire

LimeWire is a free peer-to-peer file sharing client program that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems supported by the Java software platform. LimeWire uses the gnutella network as well as the BitTorrent protocol. A free software version and a purchasable "enhanced"...

, Microsoft

Microsoft

, Yahoo, VMware

VMware

VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....

and others. Speakers included Phil

Phil Foglio

Philip "Phil" Foglio is an American cartoonist and comic book artist best known for his humorous science fiction and fantasy work.-Early life and career:...

and Kaja Foglio

Kaja Foglio

Kaja Foglio is a Seattle-based writer, artist, and publisher. Foglio co-won the first Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story in 2009 for Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, and has continued to co-win two Hugo Awards the following years.-Early life and education:Born in...

, Randall Munroe

Randall Munroe

Randall Patrick Munroe is an American webcomic author and former NASA roboticist as well as a programmer, best known as the creator of the webcomic xkcd...

, Gary McGraw

Gary McGraw

Gary McGraw is a globally recognized authority on software security and the author of eight best selling books on this topic. His titles include , , , , , and ; and he is editor of the Addison-Wesley Software Security series. Dr. McGraw has also written over 100 peer-reviewed scientific...

, Jon Stokes

Ars Technica

Ars Technica is a technology news and information website created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Ars Technica is known for its features, long articles that go...

, Eric Traut

Eric Traut

Eric Traut is an American software engineer and software emulation pioneer. Traut graduated from Stanford University in 1992. From 1993 to 1995 he worked for Apple Computer, creating a Mac 68K emulator to be used in PowerPC-based Macintoshes...

, Jeffrey Ullman

Jeffrey Ullman

Jeffrey David Ullman is a renowned computer scientist. His textbooks on compilers , theory of computation , data structures, and databases are regarded as standards in their fields.-Early life & Career:Ullman received a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering...

, and Steve Yegge

Steve Yegge

Steve Yegge is a programmer and blogger who is known for writing about "programming languages, productivity and software culture". He received a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Washington and has two decades of industry experience, developing across domains including...

2008

Sponsors for the 2008 conference included Bloomberg

Bloomberg L.P.

Bloomberg L.P. is an American privately held financial software, media, and data company. Bloomberg makes up one third of the $16 billion global financial data market with estimated revenue of $6.9 billion. Bloomberg L.P...

, Caterpillar Inc.

Caterpillar Inc.

Caterpillar Inc. , also known as "CAT", designs, manufactures, markets and sells machinery and engines and sells financial products and insurance to customers via a worldwide dealer network. Caterpillar is the world's largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas...

, Cerner

Cerner

, Citadel LLC, Facebook

Facebook

, Intel, Microsoft

Microsoft

, Navteq

NAVTEQ

Navteq is a Chicago, Illinois-based provider of Geographic Information Systems data and is a dominant company in providing the base electronic navigable maps...

, Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman

, the NSA, Nvidia

NVIDIA

, Raytheon

Raytheon

Raytheon Company is a major American defense contractor and industrial corporation with core manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military and commercial electronics. It was previously involved in corporate and special-mission aircraft until early 2007...

, Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

, SpaceX

SpaceX

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or more popularly and informally known as SpaceX, is an American space transport company that operates out of Hawthorne, California...

, VMware

VMware

, Yahoo and others. Speakers included Al Aho, Jeff Bonwick

Jeff Bonwick

Jeff Bonwick was a Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems, later a Vice President at Sun and then a Senior Software Architect at Oracle until his departure from the company on 30 September 2010.He led the team which developed ZFS for Solaris....

, Scott Draves

Scott Draves

Scott Draves is the inventor of Fractal Flames and the leader of the distributed computing project Electric Sheep. He also invented patch-based texture synthesis and published the first implementation of this class of algorithms...

, Rands

Rands

Rands is the pen name and alter ego of Michael Lopp , a webcomic author, software engineering manager, and blogger. Lopp originally used the name "Rands" as his chat room handle; it became the name of his "grey"-styled alien character in his webcomic Jerkcity, and it is his persona when writing...

, David Roundy

David Roundy

David Roundy is a physicist known primarily as the author of the darcs version control system.His parents are Virginia Roundy & Willard Roundy. He obtained a B.A. in Physics and Chemistry in 1995 and a Ph.D. in physics from Berkeley in 2001. Between 2001 and 2006 he did postdoctoral work at MIT...

, Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas (programmer)

Dave Thomas is a computer programmer and author/editor. He has written about Ruby.Dave and partner Andy Hunt wrote The Pragmatic Programmer and run The Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing company.Dave Thomas lives in Flower Mound, Texas...

, William Townsend

William T. Townsend

Bill Townsend founded Barrett Technology in 1988. He is credited with introducing the WAM arm, the first haptic robot and one of the first haptic devices based on novel differential and high-speed cable drives....

and Larry Wall

Larry Wall

Larry Wall is a programmer and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987.-Education:Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976....

2009

Sponsors for the 2009 conference included Bank of America

Bank of America

, Beckman Coulter

Beckman Coulter

Beckman Coulter Inc., is a company that makes biomedical laboratory instruments. Founded by Caltech professor Arnold O. Beckman in 1935 as National Technical Laboratories to commercialize a pH meter that he had invented, the company eventually grew to employ over 10,000 people, with $2.4 billion in...

, Bungie

Bungie

Bungie, Inc is an American video game developer currently located in Bellevue, Washington, USA. The company was established in May 1991 by University of Chicago undergraduate student Alex Seropian, who later brought in programmer Jason Jones after publishing Jones' game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of...

, Cerner

Cerner

, Facebook

Facebook

, General Electric

General Electric

General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

, Infosys

Infosys

Infosys Limited, formerly Infosys Technologies Limited is a global technology services company headquartered in Bangalore, India. It is the second largest IT exporter in India with 133,560 employees as of March 2011. It has offices in 33 countries and development centers in India, China,...

, Intel, LimeWire

LimeWire

, Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin

, Microsoft

Microsoft

, Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman

, the NSA, Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies

, Palm

Palm, Inc.

Palm, Inc., was a smartphone manufacturer headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that was responsible for products such as the Pre and Pixi as well as the Treo and Centro smartphones. Previous product lines include the PalmPilot, Palm III, Palm V, Palm VII, Zire and Tungsten. While their older...

, Raytheon

Raytheon

, Salesforce, SpaceX

SpaceX

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or more popularly and informally known as SpaceX, is an American space transport company that operates out of Hawthorne, California...

, State Farm

State farm

, ViaSat

ViaSat

ViaSat is a communication company based in Carlsbad, California, that provides equipment and services for military and commercial communications, primarily in satellite related technologies...

and VMware

VMware

. Speakers included Alex Martelli

Alex Martelli

Alex Martelli is an Italian computer engineer and member of the Python Software Foundation. Since early 2005, he works as "Über Tech Lead" for Google, Inc. in Mountain View, California...

, Bram Moolenaar

Bram Moolenaar

Bram Moolenaar is an active member of the open source software community. He is the author of Vim, a text editor that is very popular among programmers and power users....

, Raymond Chen, Ryan North

Ryan North

Ryan M. North is a Canadian writer, computer programmer, and occasional songwriter who is the creator and author of Dinosaur Comics, and co-creator of Whispered Apologies and Happy Dog the Happy Dog....

, Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur, best known for his ongoing involvement in the development of the JavaScript language, and for having popularized the data format JSON , and for developing JSLint...

, Alexis Ohanian

reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...

, Don Stewart, Tony Chang and Robert J. Lang

Robert J. Lang

Dr. Robert J. Lang is an American physicist who is also one of the foremost origami artists and theorists in the world. He is known for his complex and elegant designs, most notably of insects and animals. He has long been a student of the mathematics of origami and of using computers to study the...

2010

Sponsors for the 2010 conference included Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent is a global telecommunications corporation, headquartered in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, France. It provides telecommunications solutions to service providers, enterprises, and governments around the world, enabling these customers to deliver voice, data, and video services...

, Andreesen Horowitz, Bazaarvoice, Cerner

Cerner

, Chopper Trading, Country Financial

COUNTRY Financial

Country Financial is a group of US insurance and financial services companies. Its corporate headquarters are in Bloomington, Illinois.-History:...

, Facebook

Facebook

, Factset Research, General Electric

General Electric

General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

, Palm

Palm, Inc.

, IGT

IGT

IGT may refer to:*Impaired glucose tolerance, a term associated with diabetes* Interlinear Glossed Text, a structured representation language text in various forms...

, Infosys

Infosys

, Intel, Interactive Intelligence, Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin

, Medtronic

Medtronic

Medtronic, Inc. , based in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the world's largest medical technology company and is a Fortune 500 company.- History :...

, Microsoft

Microsoft

, Orbitz

Orbitz

Orbitz Worldwide, Inc. is an Internet travel company headquartered in the Citigroup Center in Near West Side, Chicago, Illinois. Through its primary web site Orbitz.com, Orbitz Worldwide enables travelers to research, plan and book a broad range of travel products, facilitating 1.5 million flight...

, Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies

, Riverbed Technology

Riverbed Technology

Riverbed Technology is a technology company that specializes in improving the performance of networks and networked applications. It was founded May 23, 2002 by Jerry Kennelly and Steve McCanne in San Francisco, California where its world headquarters remains...

, Salesforce, Selerity, VMware

VMware

, ViaSat

ViaSat

ViaSat is a communication company based in Carlsbad, California, that provides equipment and services for military and commercial communications, primarily in satellite related technologies...

, WMS Gaming

WMS Gaming

WMS Gaming is a manufacturer of slot machines, video lottery terminals and software to help casinos manage their gaming operations. The company is based in Waukegan, Illinois.- History :...

, Wolverine Trading and Yelp. Speakers included Jeph Jacques

Jeph Jacques

Jeph Jacques writes and illustrates the webcomic Questionable Content. He was born in Rockville, Maryland, and graduated from Hampshire College with a degree in music...

, George W. Hart

George W. Hart

George William Hart is a geometer who expresses himself both artistically and academically. He is also a research professor in the department of computer science at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, New York....

, Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz is an American programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He is best known in programming circles for co-authoring the RSS 1.0 specification...

, and Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is a British scientist and the chief designer of the Mathematica software application and the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine.- Biography :...

2011

Speakers for the 2011 conference will include Cliff Click, Joshua Bloch

Joshua Bloch

Joshua J. Bloch is a software engineer, currently employed at Google, and a technology author. He led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the Java Collections Framework, the java.math package, and the assert mechanism...

, Jon Hall

Jon Hall

Jon Hall was an American film actor.-Biography:Born Charles Felix Locher in Fresno, California, and raised in Tahiti by his father, the Swiss-born actor Felix Locher, he was a nephew of James Norman Hall, one of the authors of Mutiny on the Bounty...

, Mark Russinovich

Mark Russinovich

Mark E. Russinovich is a Technical Fellow in the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft. He was a cofounder of software producers Winternals before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2006.-Early life and education:...

, Scott Klemmer, Mark Makdad, Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...

, Richard Powers

Richard Powers

Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology.- Life and work :...

, Ari Gesher, Jason Fennell, Rachael Brady, Fred Gallagher, Jay Kreibich, Ben Kamens, and Alex Bratton. Sponsors for the conference include Adreesen-Horowitz, Apple, Inc., Bazaarvoice, Bright Edge, CME Group, Dropbox

Dropbox

Dropbox was a five-piece American rock band formed in 2002. The group had one minor hit song in "Wishbone" which received some air time on MTV2 and Fuse and was featured in TV commercials...

, Esri, Facebook

Facebook

, Google

Google

, Halcyon Molecular, HP webOS

Palm, Inc.

, IMC Financial Markets, Intel, Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin

, Microsoft

Microsoft

, Palantir

Palantir Technologies

, Salesforce, Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

, Vista Print, VMware

VMware

, Wolfram Research, and Yelp. The MechMania programming competition is being sponsored by Dropbox and will make use of a REST

Rest

Rest may refer to:* Leisure* Human relaxation* SleepRest may also refer to:* Rest , a pause in a piece of music* Rest , the relation between two observers* Rest , a 2008 album by Gregor Samsa...

API and JSON

JSON

JSON , or JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange. It is derived from the JavaScript scripting language for representing simple data structures and associative arrays, called objects...

MechMania

Running alongside guest speaker presentations at the conference is an artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

programming competition called MechMania. The competition typically attracts student groups from neighboring universities. MechMania is usually funded by a corporate sponsor which provides monetary prizes to the victors. During the opening ceremony of the conference, participants are presented with the rules to a game for which they must build an AI. Teams have twelve hours after this presentation to formulate a strategy and 24 hours to write and submit their solutions. Final judging for the competition has varied but usually involves a tournament bracket

Bracket (tournament)

A bracket is a tree diagram that represents the series of games played during a tournament, named as such because it appears to be a large number of interconnected brackets....

. Sponsors for the competition have included Google

Google

, Microsoft

Microsoft

, O'Reilly & Associates, Amazon.com

Amazon.com

, Dropbox

Dropbox

Dropbox was a five-piece American rock band formed in 2002. The group had one minor hit song in "Wishbone" which received some air time on MTV2 and Fuse and was featured in TV commercials...

and others.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

MechMania

See also

External links