CUTC – Day 2
Posted by Skrud at Saturday, January 13th 2007 at 8:36am
Day 2 was amazing. The opening keynote from Intel was interesting and fun. Following that was a presentation from General Dynamics about the helicopter they’re designing to replace the archaic, museum-worthy Sea King.
I went to a seminar about The “Cool” Internet, by Prof. Parham Arabi from U of T. He’s been working on projects that attempt add “smarts” to web applications. For example, he presented ModiFace which allows you to upload pictures and mix and match facial features. All you have to do is drag a box around the face – and the software is capable of automatically picking out features like eyes, nose and mouth, and realistically blends them into another face. Another project was ViewGenie which is capable recognizing people or objects in a photo, and then finding those same people in other photos. In the example we saw, the software was able to pick out the same person from the back of his head! It was really interesting, awesome stuff.
Then there was the TechExpo, which is CUTC’s career fair. There were booths for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Siemens, Nortel, Linden Labs, Evertz, Motorola, RIM, and others … I spoke to lots of people and planted a number of resumes. Apparently, Apple is hiring lots of people to work on OS X…
The Linden Labs stuff also looks interesting, since they recently open-sourced the client code to Second Life, and they’re looking for people to work on developing the platform further. I downloaded the Second Life client and I figure I’ll give it a shot. It seems like cool stuff to work on. (If you’re so inclined to give Second Life a shot, make sure you say that “Skrud Salubrius” referred you.)
Dinner deserves a post all its own… for now I’ll just say that we ate at the best restaurant ever.
It turns out there are some University of Ottawa people on our floor, and so we had a good alcoholic hallway sit, chatting and hanging out, while my TechTeam worked on finalizing our presentation for this morning. I ended up checking out the club party at this place called Flirt – and it was pretty damn lame (except for Iourri rocking out like crazy).
Now I’m sitting in my suit, at the breakfast table, waiting for my presentation time. I’ll tell you about the TechTeam after we give our presentation. But you can imagine that if I’m sitting here in my suit, that it’s got pretty high stakes.
Knock em dead Skrud!!!