Where in the World is Hilary

This morning opened the technical conference, and the session chairs highlighted some of the papers and new paper categories. The trends this year were:

• Web for the People - social networks, developing regions, pervasive access, security
• People Powered Web - social tagging, user-behavior search

The plenary panel discussed the promise of the semantic web. There were several very interesting points made, but one was about the repesentation of concepts; with the flickr API, you can put in a term, and have an image of that concept automatically returned to you.

After that I attended a presentation from the w3c track on Rich Internet Applications. The presenters briefly reviewed the specs for XMLHTTPRequest, DOM level 3 events, Remote Events for XML (REX), Selectors, etc.

The session concluded with a presentation on “The Power of Declarative Thinking”, which brought up the interesting point that spreadsheets are one of the only ‘programs’ routinely written by non-programmers. Spreadsheets, of course, are declarative. Why aren’t there more such languages?

The conclusions on the advantages of declarative development:

• Accessible applications
• Device independance
• Re-use
• Less coding

The main conference reception was held at Edinburgh Castle, which was closed to the public. I took some wonderful photos on my walk up and around. The light was wonderful!

There were canapes and lots (and lots) of wine, and some fascinating conversation. I managed to end up in a room that was sparsely populated, which created an opportunity to actually talk. I heard later on that the other rooms were crammed full, so I’m glad I missed that.

After the event I attended the Tresky.com “pub crawl”, though only two of the three places were real pubs. There was a rather entertaining trivia quiz, and my team only got one wrong (but we lost to a group that got them all right). Not bad, considering the questions were about Scottish history, and none of us were Scottish.

I know what most of you are interested in, so without any digression, here is the list of free stuff I have gathered so far:

• A Microsoft Live T-shirt (size P - it might actually fit!)
• A cute little stuffed Tresky goat
• A ‘free drink token’ for the Tresky pub crawl tonight
• A bag from Ask
• A mug from the National e-Science Centre
• A foam thingie obviously intended to be thrown around from Microsoft
• A bunch of pens - Ask, BCS, NEC, etc.

CS conferences always have the best stuff. And now, onto the academic content (it’s okay to stop reading here):

The program was opened by the conference organizers, and a few words from the First Minister of Scotland. The keynote was delivered by Sir David Brown, chairman of Motorola, Ltd. He was an excellent speaker, and I think he was a daring choice for a tech conference. He spoke with an engineer’s perspective about the future of the web, with a strong emphasis on mobility and “seamless experience”. He had a fabulous image of the “disruptive spiral” of business and technology innovation (one following the other following the other).

He did repeat the phrase “the devices formerly known as mobile phones” just a few too many times. It was at least double digits, which makes it mockable, and a few of the afternoon’s presenters made a point of using it. Of course, that could be what Sir David was after in the first place.

After the keynote and coffee break, I attended the Current Best Practices in Web Development and Design. This long workshop was a series of presentations by David Leib, CTO of IBM.com, and David Schrimpton, a professor at the University of Canterbury. The main topics were:

• Web 2.0 - hype or not? What does it mean? What makes something “web 2.0-ish”?
• Web services in the context of web standards
• Expreme programming and agile development practices in the content of web application development

All three topics were related but different, and I enjoyed all three segments of the presentation. It gave me some good ideas for future work. I also got to hear about WOW, and the WOW tech minute, which seems like a great podcast.

Overall, I’m really enjoying it so far, learning a lot, and meeting a ton of interesting people!