Key People and Events in Computer Science – Dates to Celebrate

New Years Day often coincides with people making plans and new years resolutions for the year ahead. Having liked the idea of celebrating Pi Day (http://www.piday.org) for the past few years now (P.S. you will note that this post was published at 1:59), I started to wonder what other key events and people should one celebrate during the year that relates to computing. Hence the creation of this list.

Many people like to know of others who share the same birthday as themselves, hence this list may act as a useful resource mapping your birthday to well known computer scientists and key events in the world of computing.

Many days in the list below are still to be filled in, so perhaps with the help of all those out their in the Blogosphere and the Social Media Universe we can piece together a list occupying each day of the year, thereby allowing the celebration of Computing right throughout the year.

January

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Jan	Brian Kernighan	AWK	B 1/1/1942, Toronto, Canada. Co-developer of the AWK programming language (K), also contributed to the development of Unix. (more info).
02-Jan
03-Jan	Peter Chen	E-R Model	B 3/1/1947, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC. Well known for developing the Entity-Relationship Model to describe database structure. (more info).
03-Jan	Gordon Moore	Moore’s Law	B 3/1/1929, San Francisco, California, USA. Co-founder of Intel. Known for Moore’s Law an observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. (more info).
04-Jan	Shmuel Winograd	Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm	B 4/1/1936, Tel Aviv, Israel. The Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm the fastest known algorithm for square matrix multiplication until 2010. (more info).
05-Jan	Stephen Cole Kleene	Recursion theory	B 5/1/1909, Hartford, Connecticut. Worked with Alonzo Church on Lambda Calculus. Invented regular expressions. (more info).
06-Jan
07-Jan	Stephen R. Bourne	Bourne Shell	B 7/1/1944, UK. Well known for the Bourne Shell – the standard command line interface for Unix, also worked on the ALGOL68 compiler. (more info).
08-Jan
09-Jan
10-Jan	Donald Knuth	TeX	B 10/1/1938, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Well known for a series of books called The Art of Computer Programming, also created TeX.(more info).
11-Jan	C. A. R. Hoare	Quicksort	B 11/1/1934, Colombo, British Ceylon. Developed the Quicksort algorithm in 1960, also known for Hoare Logic and CSP. (more info).
12-Jan
13-Jan
14-Jan
15-Jan
16-Jan
17-Jan
18-Jan
19-Jan	John Gustafson	Gustafson’s law	B 19/1/1955. Gustafson’s Law describes a limit on the speed-up that parallelization can provide. (more info).
20-Jan
21-Jan
22-Jan
23-Jan
24-Jan	Alain Colmerauer	Prolog	B 24/1/1941, Carcassonne. Developed the programming language Prolog. (more info).
25-Jan
26-Jan
27-Jan
28-Jan
29-Jan	Joseph Kruskal	Kruskal’s algorithm	B 29/1/1928. Known for Kruskal’s algorithm for computing the minimal spanning tree (MST) of a weighted graph. (more info).
30-Jan	Douglas Engelbart	Developing the Computer Mouse	B 30/1/1925, Portland, Oregon. Well known for inventing the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext. (more info).
31-Jan

February

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Feb
02-Feb	John Henry Holland	Genetic algorithms	B 2/2/1929, Fort Wayne, Indiana, US. Known for pioneering the subject area of genetic algorithms. (more info).
03-Feb
04-Feb	Ken Thompson	C & UNIX	B 4/2/1943, New Orleans, Louisiana. Developed the C Programming language and the UNIX OS with Dennis Ritchie. (more info).
05-Feb
06-Feb
07-Feb	Loren Carpenter	Fractal Terrain Generation	B 7/2/1947 Brighton, Michigan. Well known for creating Vol Libre – the first example of computer generated terrain. Later he went on to develop the Genesis Sequence from Star Trek II the Wrath of Kahn. (more info, more info).
07-Feb	Leslie Lamport	LaTeX & Distributed Systems	B 7/2/1941, New York City, New York. Well known for developing LaTeX, the typesetting system used by mathematicians, computer scientists and many others the world over. (more info).
07-Feb	Max Newman	Colossus	B 7/2/1897, Chelsea, London. Worked on the development of Colossus. (more info).
08-Feb
09-Feb	John Knoll	Photoshop	B 9/2/1962, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Together with his brother Thomas Knoll were the original creators of Photoshop. Is a visual effects supervisor and chief creative officer (CCO) at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM). (more info).
10-Feb
11-Feb	Emil Leon Post	Post–Turing machine	B 11/2/1897, Augustów, then Russian Empire. Developed the Post-Turing machine. (more info).
11-Feb	Richard Hamming	Hamming code	B 11/2/1915, Chicago, Illinois. Known for the development of the Hamming Code, was also a founder and president of the Association for Computing Machinery. (more info).
12-Feb
13-Feb
14-Feb
15-Feb	Niklaus Wirth	Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon	B 15/2/1934, Winterthur, Switzerland. Developed the languages Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon.(more info).
16-Feb
17-Feb
18-Feb
19-Feb
20-Feb
21-Feb
22-Feb	Thomas E. Kurtz	BASIC	B 22/2/1928, Oak Park, Illinois. Co- developed the Beginners All-purpouse Symbolic Instruction Code with John G. Kemeny. (more info).
23-Feb
24-Feb	Steve Jobs	Co-founder Apple	B 24/2/1955, San Francisco, California. Co-founder, Chairman and CEO, Apple Inc. Co-founder and CEO, Pixar, Founder and CEO, NeXT Inc. (more info).
25-Feb
26-Feb
27-Feb	Grady Booch	UML	B 27/2/1955. Developed the Unified Modeling Language with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. (more info).
28-Feb
29-Feb	Herman Hollerith	Punch Cards	B 29/2/1860, Buffalo, New York. Developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards. (more info).

March

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Mar
02-Mar
03-Mar
04-Mar
05-Mar
06-Mar
07-Mar
08-Mar	Gerard Salton	Vector space model	B 8/3/1927, Nuremberg. Developed the vector space model and inverted index. (more info).
09-Mar
10-Mar
11-Mar	J. C. R. Licklider	HCI	B 11/3/1915, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Worked in several fields, laid the foundations for HCI as we know it today. (more info).
12-Mar
13-Mar
14-Mar	Pi Day	Celebration of Pi	An annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi). Generally celebrated on 3/14 at 1:59. (more info).
15-Mar
16-Mar	Richard Stallman	GNU Project	B 16/3/1953, New York City. Known for launching the GNU Project, founding the Free Software Foundation, developing the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and writing the GNU General Public License. (more info).
17-Mar
18-Mar
19-Mar
20-Mar
21-Mar
22-Mar
23-Mar
24-Mar
25-Mar	Jean Ichbiah	Ada	B 25/3/1940. Was the initial chief designer of the Ada programming language. (more info).
26-Mar	Larry Page	Co-founder Google	B 26/3/1973, East Lansing, Michigan. Co-founded Google alongside Sergey Brin. (more info).
27-Mar
28-Mar
29-Mar
30-Mar
31-Mar	Edwin Catmull	Texture mapping & Bicubic patches	B 31/3/1945, Parkersburg, West Virginia. Discovered texture mapping and bicubic patches, invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. President of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. (more info).

April

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Apr
02-Apr
03-Apr
04-Apr
05-Apr	Cuthbert Hurd	Helped in developing the IBM 701	B 5/4/1911, Estherville, Iowa. Helped in developing IBM’s first general-purpose computer, the IBM 701. (more info).
06-Apr
07-Apr	The First RFC	RFC1	7/4/1969. Request for Comments (RFC) define the Internet. (more info).
08-Apr
09-Apr	J. Presper Eckert	Development of the ENIAC	B 9/4/1919, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Developed the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC) along with John Mauchly. (more info).
09-Apr	Jacek Karpiński	The first differential analyzer that used transistors	B 9/4/1927, Turin, Italy. Developed one of the first machine learning algorithms for character and image recognition, designed of one of the first minicomputers, the K-202 in 1971. (more info).
10-Apr
11-Apr
12-Apr
13-Apr
14-Apr	Yukihiro Matsumoto	Ruby	B 14/4/1965, Osaka Prefecture. Known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language. (more info).
15-Apr
16-Apr
17-Apr
18-Apr
19-Apr
20-Apr
21-Apr
22-Apr
23-Apr
24-Apr
25-Apr
26-Apr
27-Apr	Eric Schmidt	CEO of Google	B 27/4/1955 Washington DC. Served as the CEO of Google 2001 – 2011. (more info).
28-Apr	Kurt Gödel	Incompleteness theorem	B 28/4/1906, Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic). (more info).
29-Apr
30-Apr	Claude Shannon	Digital circuit design	B 30/4/1916, Petoskey, Michigan. Founded information theory and digital circuit design. (more info).

May

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-May
02-May
03-May
04-May
05-May
06-May
07-May
08-May
09-May
10-May
11-May	Edsger W. Dijkstra	Dijkstra’s algorithm	B 11/5/1930, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Well known for Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm and the semaphore construct amongst others. (more info).
12-May
13-May
14-May
15-May
16-May	Ivan Sutherland	Sketchpad	B 16/5/1938, Hastings, Nebraska. Developed Sketchpad in 1963. (more info).
17-May	Alan Kay	Smalltalk	B 17/5/1940, Springfield, Massachusetts. Led the team that developed Smalltalk at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC. (more info).
18-May	Bertrand Russell	Mathematical logic	B 18/5/1872, Trellech, Monmouthshire, United Kingdom. Mathematical logic, Type Theory, Type systems. (more info).
19-May	James Gosling	Java	B 19/5/1955, Near Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Known as the father of the Java programming language. (more info).
20-May	Manindra Agrawal	Primality testing	B 20/5/1966, Allahabad, India. Co-created the AKS primality test with Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena. (more info).
21-May
22-May
23-May
24-May
25-May
26-May
27-May
28-May
29-May
30-May	John Cocke	RISC	B 30/5/1925, Charlotte, North Carolina. Known for developing Reduced Instruction Set Computing. (more info).
31-May	John G. Kemeny	BASIC	B 31/5/1926, Budapest, Hungary. Known for co-developing the Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code with Thomas E. Kurtz. (more info).

June

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Jun
02-Jun	E. Allen Emerson	Model Checking	B 2/6/1954, Dallas, Texas, USA. Developed Model Checking along with Edmund M. Clarke and Joseph Sifakis. (more info).
03-Jun
04-Jun
05-Jun
06-Jun
07-Jun
08-Jun	Tim Berners-Lee	World Wide Web	B 8/6/1955, London, England. Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founder of the World Wide Web Foundation (more info).
09-Jun
10-Jun
11-Jun
12-Jun
13-Jun
14-Jun	Alonzo Church	Lambda Calculus	B 14/6/1903 Washington, D.C., USA. Known for several contributions including: lambda calculus, Church–Turing thesis, Frege–Church ontology, Church–Rosser theorem. (more info).
15-Jun
16-Jun	John Tukey	FFT	B 16/6/1915, New Bedford, Massachusetts. Developed the Fast Fourier Transform along with James Cooley. Also known for Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller–Tukey lemma. (more info).
17-Jun
18-Jun
19-Jun	Blaise Pascal	Mechanical calculator	B 19/6/1623, Clermont-Ferrand, Auvergne, France. Developed the Mechanical calculator. (more info).
20-Jun
21-Jun
22-Jun
23-Jun	Vint Cerf	TCP/IP	B 23/6/1943, New Haven, Connecticut. Was a program manager for DARPA, was instrumental in the funding and formation of ICANN. (more info).
23-Jun	Alan Turing	Turing machine	B 23/6/1912, Maida Vale, London, England. Developed the Turing machine – a model for the general purpose computer. (more info).
24-Jun
25-Jun
26-Jun
27-Jun
28-Jun
29-Jun
30-Jun

July

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Jul	Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	First-order predicate calculus	B 1/7/1646, Leipzig. Contributions to theoretical foundations of computer science. (more info).
02-Jul
03-Jul
04-Jul
05-Jul
06-Jul	Adi Shamir	RSA	B 6/7/1952, Tel Aviv, Israel. Co-inventor of the RSA algorithm along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman. (more info).
07-Jul
08-Jul
09-Jul
10-Jul
11-Jul	Max Levchin	PayPal	B 11/7/1975, Kiev, Ukraine (then USSR). Co-founder along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk of PayPal was also the CTO. (more info).
12-Jul
13-Jul
14-Jul
15-Jul
16-Jul
17-Jul
18-Jul	Intel	Intel was Founded	18/7/1968. Founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. (more info).
19-Jul
20-Jul
21-Jul
22-Jul	Pi Approximation Day	Celebration of Pi	Celebration of Pi 22/7, also observed on 3/14 at 1:59 – Pi Day, (more info).
23-Jul
24-Jul
25-Jul
26-Jul
27-Jul	Edmund M. Clarke	Developing Model Checking	B 27/7/1945. (more info).
28-Jul
29-Jul
30-Jul
31-Jul

August

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Aug
02-Aug
03-Aug
04-Aug
05-Aug
06-Aug	World Wide Web	WWW debut	6/8/1991 marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet, Berners-Lee also posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. (more info).
07-Aug
08-Aug
09-Aug	David A. Huffman	Huffman Coding	B 9/8/1925, Ohio. Known for Huffman Coding a widely used compression algorithm. (more info).
10-Aug
11-Aug	Steve Wozniak	Co-founder Apple	B 11/8/1950, San Jose, California. Invented both the Apple I and Apple II. (more info).
12-Aug
13-Aug
14-Aug
15-Aug
16-Aug
17-Aug
18-Aug
19-Aug	Edgar F. Codd	Developed the Relational Model for DBMS	B 19/8/1923, Isle of Portland, England. Developed the Relational Model while working at IBM(more info).
20-Aug
21-Aug	Sergey Brin	Co-founder Goodle	B 21/8/1973, Moscow. Co-founded Google along with Larry Page. (more info).
22-Aug	James Rumbaugh	UML	B 22/8/1947. Developed the Unified Modeling Language with Grady Booch and Ivar Jacobson. (more info).
23-Aug	WWW made Accessable	Internaut’s Day	23/8/1991. Initially the service went live on the 6th August, but became available to new users on the 23rd. Hence is considered the anniversary of the WWW. (more info)
24-Aug
25-Aug
26-Aug
27-Aug	Kristen Nygaard	Simula	B 27/8/1926, Oslo, Norway. Developed the proto-object oriented language SIMULA with Ole-Johan Dahl. (more info).
28-Aug
29-Aug
30-Aug	John Mauchly	Developed the ENIAC	B 30/8/1907, Cincinnati, Ohio. Developed the ENIAC along with J. Presper Eckert. (more info).
31-Aug

September

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Sep
02-Sep	Ivar Jacobson	UML	B 2/9/1939, Ystad, Sweden. Developed the Unified Modeling Language with Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh. (more info).
03-Sep
04-Sep	John McCarthy	LISP	B 4/9/1927, Boston, Massachusetts. Developed LISP and coined the term “artificial intelligence” (AI). (more info).
04-Sep	Google	Google Founded	4/9/1998. Incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. (more info).
05-Sep
06-Sep
07-Sep
08-Sep
09-Sep	First Computer Bug	Moth found in Harvard Mark II	9/9/1947. Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. (more info).
09-Sep	Dennis Ritchie	C & UNIX	B 9/9/1941, Bronxville, New York, U.S. Worked with Ken Thompson to develop the C programming language and UNIX. (more info).
10-Sep
11-Sep
12-Sep
13-Sep
14-Sep
15-Sep
16-Sep
17-Sep
18-Sep
19-Sep
20-Sep
21-Sep
22-Sep
23-Sep
24-Sep
25-Sep
26-Sep
27-Sep	Larry Wall	Perl	B 27/9/1954. Known for the development of the Perl programming language. (more info).
28-Sep	Seymour Cray	Cray Research	B 28/9/1925, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Founded Cray Research in 1972, known world wide for the development of supercomputers. (more info).
29-Sep
30-Sep

October

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Oct
02-Oct	Martin Hellman	Public key cryptography	B 2/10/1945, New York. Known the invention of public key cryptography with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. (more info).
03-Oct
04-Oct
05-Oct
06-Oct
07-Oct
08-Oct
09-Oct
10-Oct
11-Oct	Jack Elton Bresenham	Bresenham’s line algorithm	B 11/10/1937, Clovis, New Mexico. Well known in computer graphics for Bresenham’s Line Algorithm to allow the plotting of a straight line on a 2-dimensional raster. (more info).
12-Oct	Ole-Johan Dahl	Simula and OO Programming	B 12/10/1931, Mandal, Norway. Developed Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard. (more info).
13-Oct
14-Oct
15-Oct
16-Oct
17-Oct	Spreadsheet Released	VisiCalc was shipped	17/10/1979. The electronic spreadsheet – considered by many to be the first “Killer Application”. Developed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston whom founded the company Software Arts Inc. to develop the application. (more info, more info).
18-Oct
19-Oct
20-Oct
21-Oct
22-Oct
23-Oct	Randy Pausch	HCI & Alice	B 23/10/1960, Baltimore, Maryland, US. Founder of the Alice software project. Well known for a number of lectures including “Time Management” and “The Last Lecture”. (more info).
24-Oct
25-Oct	Peter Naur	BNF & ALGOL60	B 25/10/1928, Frederiksberg, Denmark. Contributed to ALGOL60 and BNF. (more info).
26-Oct
27-Oct
28-Oct
29-Oct
30-Oct
31-Oct

November

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Nov
02-Nov	George Boole	Boolean Algebra	B 02/11/1815, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England. First Professor of Mathematics at University College Cork. (more info).
02-Nov	Sergey Alexeyevich Lebedev	MESM	B 2/11/1902, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Lead the team that developed the Small Electronic Calculating Machine (more info).
03-Nov
04-Nov
05-Nov
06-Nov
07-Nov
08-Nov	Gottlob Frege	Developed first-order predicate calculus	B 8/11/1848, Wismar, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany. Considered to be one of the founders of modern logic. (more info).
08-Nov	Bill Joy	Vi	B 8/11/1954, Farmington Hills, Michigan. Developed the Vi text editor. (more info).
09-Nov
10-Nov	Bert Bos	CSS	B 10/11/1963, The Hague. (more info).
11-Nov
12-Nov
13-Nov
14-Nov
15-Nov
16-Nov	Gene Amdahl	Amdahl’s law	B 16/11/1922, Flandreau, South Dakota. Known for developing a key law on the limits of parallel computing – Amdahl’s law. (more info).
17-Nov
18-Nov
19-Nov
20-Nov	Windows	Windows 1.0 released	20/11/1985. 16-bit graphical OS, developed by Microsoft. (more info).
20-Nov	Benoit Mandelbrot	Mandelbrot Set	B 20/11/1924, Warsaw, Poland. Was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, discovered the M-Set. (more info).
21-Nov
22-Nov	Jeffrey Ullman	Formal Language Theory, Database Theory	B 22/11/1942. Known for textbooks on compilers in particular the Dragon Book. (more info).
22-Nov	Rasmus Lerdorf	PHP	B 22/11/1968, Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland. Known for developing the PHP server-side scripting language. (more info).
23-Nov	Edward F. Moore	Moore finite state machine	B 23/11/1925, Baltimore, Maryland. Known for developing the a Moore machine – a finite-state machine whose output values are determined solely by its current state. (more info).
24-Nov
25-Nov
26-Nov
27-Nov
28-Nov
29-Nov
30-Nov

December

Date	Person / Event	Know for	Further Info
01-Dec
02-Dec
03-Dec	John Backus	Development of FORTRAN	B 3/12/1924, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Directed the team that developed FORTRAN, also developed BNF (more info).
04-Dec
05-Dec
06-Dec	Grace Hopper	Developed the first compiler	B 9/12/1906, New York City, New York. Navy Rear Admiral. Found the first computer bug, developed the first compiler. (more info).
07-Dec	Noam Chomsky	Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory	B 7/12/1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics”. (more info).
08-Dec
09-Dec
10-Dec	Ada Lovelace	Analytical Engine	B 10/12/1815, London, England. Known for her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, & the creation of the first algorithm intended for use on a machine. (more info).
11-Dec
12-Dec	Seymour Ginsburg	Automata theory, formal language theory	B 12/12/1927, Brooklyn. Known for contributions to automata theory, formal language theory, and database theory. (more info).
13-Dec
14-Dec	Stephen Cook	Polynomial-time reduction (a.k.a. Cook reduction) and NP-completeness	B 14/12/1939, Buffalo, New York. Made major contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. (more info).
15-Dec
16-Dec
17-Dec	Kenneth E. Iverson	APL	B 17/12/1920, Camrose, Alberta, Canada. Known for developing the APL programming language in 1962. (more info).
18-Dec
19-Dec
20-Dec
21-Dec
22-Dec	Tommy Flowers	Designed Colossus	B 22/12/1905, Poplar, London, England. Designed Colossus the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer. (more info).
23-Dec	Bob Kahn	TCP/IP	B 23/12/1938, Brooklyn, New York. Noted for developing TCP/IP along with Vint Cerf (more info).
24-Dec	Wim Ebbinkhuijsen	COBOL	B 24/12/1939, Amsterdam. Considered one of the “fathers of Cobol”. (more info).
25-Dec
26-Dec	Charles Babbage	Difference Engine	B 26/12/1791, London, England. (more info).
27-Dec	Jean Bartik	One of the original programmers for the ENIAC	B 27/12/1924, Gentry County, Missouri. Was one of ENIAC’s first programmers. (more info).
28-Dec	John von Neumann	Von Neumann architecture	B 28/12/1903, Budapest, Austria-Hungary. Developed the Von Neumann architecture upon which all modern computers are based. (more info).
28-Dec	Linus Torvalds	Linux & Git	B 28/12/1969, Helsinki, Finland. Known for developing Linux and Git. (more info).
29-Dec
30-Dec	Bjarne Stroustrup	C++	B 30/12/1950, Aarhus, Denmark. Known for creation and development of the C++ programming language. (more info).
31-Dec	Leonard Adleman	RSA & DNA Computing	B 31/12/1945, California, United States. Co-invented RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) in 1977. (more info).

Advertisement

UIST 2013 Student Innovation Competition in Video (40+)

On Thursday 10th October myself and two others from a team of four took the train down to Leuchars to take part in the UIST 2013 Student Innovation Competition being held at St Andrews as part of the 26th UIST Symposium.

The team was made up of four of our 3rd year undergrad Computer Science students who were all quite busy undertaking a 1 year full-time work placement at various locations around Aberdeen, working for the likes of companies focused on Software Development and the Oil Industry. We heard of the competition in perhaps early August and had a few weeks to put an application together. Towards the end of August we received the hardware – consisting of a Prototype from Microsoft of their (FDK) Fountain Development Kit. The mission was to use the FDK to create a new and interesting means of interaction. I should say a big thanks to (http://www.codify.ltd.uk) for sponsoring our team.

The competition on Thursday evening was quite amazing, I believe that we were probably the only undergrad team present out of about 30 entries. PhD students from near and far took part, such as from the likes of Dundee just a few miles from St. Andrews to MIT and beyond.

On the day of the competition our team met up at the train station in Aberdeen around 14:30 so we could get to the venue and start setting up for around 17:00. The judging took place between about 18:00 and 20:00 followed by the conference dinner. We had to leave early to catch the 21:33 train back to Aberdeen, getting in around 23:00. At which time the conference was still going strong, and from some tweets I saw continued well into the early hours of the following morning.

The variety of entries was quite amazing, the following videos should give you some sense of what they were like. Should you wish to look at them directly on YouTube then you can access the following Playlist. You can also access some 200+ photos from the event on Flickr.

Details of the winners are available on the competitions web page (http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2013/contest.php).

The 1st Peoples Choice Winner was for WaterPong.

The 2nd Peoples Choice Winner was for XBox H2O.

The 3rd Peoples Choice Winner was for Team BIT.

The 1st Creativity Winner was for Team Flame Challenger.

The 2nd Creativity Winner was for Team Ring Ding Dong.

The 1st Usefulness Winner was for Team TUM IN.

The 2nd Usefulness Winner was for Team Fillagio.

Some of the other Entries included

All those at the event were kept warm with some Gas Fired Heaters !

YouTube Channel hits 200000 Views and Counting

Some time back, the 4th February to be precise my YouTube channel reached 100,000 views after 13 months of operation. Now seven month further on the number of views has doubled to 200,000.

At the time my most popular video was of a roller coaster in Blackpool, with just under 5000 views. Today it now stands at a little over 15000. Why it is the most popular I have no idea, as I have a number of other roller coaster videos that are far more exciting (see the following playlist).

The following are some recently uploaded videos of some kite aerobatics, enjoy.

Over the past seven months the most popular YouTube video Gangnam Style has amassed and additional 500 million + views. It stood at 1.25 billion back at the start of February and is now 1.78 billion. How long more will it take to reach 2 billion. Will it reach 2 billion by the end of the year?

1000 WordPress Blog Followers and Counting

In the past hours I have just gained my 1000th Blog Follower (The Happy Lifeaholic). The total number of followers now stands at 1178 (which includes 160 Twitter Followers). The next milestone for some strange reason is 1337 Blog Followers, I wonder how long it will take to reach this number.

The number of page views stands at just under seven hundred shy of 40,000. Quite recently WordPress changed the notifications archive, prior to this once could see milestones for the number of likes – under the Awards section, but this is no longer the case. When last I looked I was again just a few hundred likes away from 10,000.

Does anybody know how to view the number of WordPress likes a site has received, given the recent change with the notifications area?

Speaking of numbers, my YouTube channel stands at 183,917 views so not long now before reaching 200K.

Some other recent Blog Followers include
Painting Painting Painting
Toby Gant’s Photography Blog
The Xavi’s Photoblog
Adolfo Viana Photography
Matthew Richards Photography
Keeping My Eye On the Sparrow Photography (with a whopping 27,457,599 views and counting)

BP Big Screen Duthie Park Puccini’s opera Tosca

This evening from around 19:00 to 22:30 their was a showing of Puccini’s opera Tosca organised by BP on a BIG Screen in Aberdeen’s Duthie Park. Details about the show can be seen on Aberdeen City Councils events page. Their was quite literally thousands upon thousands attending the screening that was being relayed live from the Royal Opera House, London. During the intervals their was a chance to see other locations around the UK to which it was also being broadcast. The photos below should give some sense of what it was like in Aberdeen. The weather had been amazing all day long and stayed quite mild for the duration of the screening. Chances are it was the only location around the UK with a constant flutter of Seagulls hovering overhead!

Treknology – Are we there yet?

At present in the early part of the second decade of the 21^st century we have now become heavily dependent on technology. The rate of technological advancement in the past fifty years alone has been incredible, particularly since in development of the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004 in 1971. Since the first incarnation of Star Trek in the 1960’s audiences have been amazed by the technological wonders that seems to be available in the 23^rd &   24^th centuries. What’s more amazing however is the fact that many of these technologies are now a reality and yet we are still in the infancy of the 21^st century. If the advancement of technology continues to increase at its present rate then it is almost impossible to imagine what the world will be like in fifty or even a hundred years, never mind what it may be like in a few centuries.

Tractor Beam Technology
Recent weeks have seen some interesting technological advances. Just a few days ago (25^th January 2013) it was announced that a Star Trek “style tractor beam” had been developed by scientists, the project being led by researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. This work makes use of lasers to attract microscopic particles. A simple example of a Star Trek tractor beam in operation on a small-scale can be seen in the S1E3 Episode “The Naked Now”, where Wesley Crusher develops his own “hand held” tractor beam capable of moving furniture and other small objects. In the very same episode he scales up and “reverses fields” on the Enterprises Tractor Beam to help give it a push-off from another starship thereby saving it from being destroyed from an oncoming star fragment.

 Organic Data Storage
Just a few days earlier (23^rd Jaunary 2013) a BBC News story discussed another development in Nature showing that DNA would be “perfect for digital storage”. A selection of media types were encoded within the DNA including an image, text and audio. All were read back with 100% accuracy. The article states that “One gram of DNA ought to be able to hold about two petabytes of data”. DNA is also a great way to archive data capable of reliably storing information for a much longer period that any technologies we currently have such as hard disks or CDs/DVD’s.

In Star Trek of course we often hear the term “Isolinear Chip” being used, capable of storing 2.15 kiloquads of information. In terms of the use or organics within Star Trek the one thing that immediately comes to mind are the Bioneural Gelpacks featured on the USS Voyager.  One disadvantage with the organic nature of the Bioneural Gelpacks was their susceptibility to bacteria and viruses. On the positive side they were able to make a “best guess” rather than computing the solution in a more linear manner.

Transparent Aluminium
I am sure you are all well aware of Star Trek IV the Voyage Home, particularly of the scene where Scotty divulges the formula for transparent Aluminium to a scientist in the 20th century. The interesting thing of course is that a material with very similar properties has already been developed (see this article dated 12 Jan 2012). The material is called Aluminium Oxynitride or ALON & is capable of maintaining structural integrity in temperatures up to 1200 degrees C.

 Touch Screen Technology
Touch Screens have become very much the norm and are standard on all smartphones of today. I am sure that everybody thought the touch screen consoles in Main Engineering of the Enterprise NCC1701-D shown in the mid to late 1980’s were really amazing.

 If you were lucky enough to have attended CES 2013 in Las Vegas they you would have probably seen Panasonic’s 20inch 4K Tablet PC, so certainly table top computing is well on the way.

 Another nice example of table top computing is the Microsoft/Samsung SUR 40 capable of sensing up to 52 concurrent touches. Quite appropriately in the vein of Star Trek and exploring the University the application demonstrated in the video below is called NUIverse that allows one to explore the likes of our solar system and star constellations.

 More Science Investment in the News
A BBC News Article dated 28th Jan 2013 discusses the investment of two billion euro into two research projects. The Human Brain project will seek to develop a computer-based copy of the human brain allowing scientists to understand neurogical disorders and the effects of drugs. The second project will look at the use of Graphene – a material with amazing properties such as being stronger than steel and having conductivity better than copper. The “Possibilities” to quote Spock are seemingly limited only by our imagination.

Some other recent developments of interest includes the news of Intel investing four billion USD to build a 14nm chip manufacturing plan in Ireland helping to keep Moore’s Law going strong.

Has Film/TV Influenced Technology?
This post is of course not an exhaustive list of Star Trek type technologies that are currently in existance. I am sure you can think of many more exampes. An interesting question to pose is –  has the technology we have seen in film influenced the evolution of actual technology? Certainly every single time I see a Tablet Computer of today I think of the PADD from Star Trek, and similarly with Mobile Phones becoming almost akin to Tricorders with the ever increasing computing and sensory systems that are now onboard.

 So are we there yet?
To Answer my Initial question – Are we there yet? Well certainly from the examples mentioned above it looks like we have already developed many of the technologies that mesmerised us for so many years in the Star Trek TV shows and movies. Perhaps the Final Frontier is closer than we think!

If you would like to find out about some more technologies then you may enjoy watching the documentary below.

Evolution of the New Build at the Garthdee Campus

The following photographs give a sense of the evolution of the New Build at the Garthdee campus of Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen over the course of about sixteen months. Additional detail may be seen by following the hyper-linked dates of when the photographs were taken. Beginning in October 2011 one can see the initial stages of the main building and library starting to emerge from their foundations and evolve over time to a fully clad and glazed structure. If you take a look at the photoset from the 15th August you will see some interior images. The most recent set located towards the very bottom of this post were taken on the 15th January 2013, you may like to compare these to a set taken one year before on the 14th January 2012 to see the progress made over the course of a year. Its expected that the building will start being occupied from July of this year.

Additional information about the project may be seen at http://www4.rgu.ac.uk/campusdev/masterplan. The embedded video below (from the RobertGordonUni YouTube Channel) provides a fly-through of the build and should give a good sense of what the completed project should look like, both inside and out.

29th October 2011

4th December 2011

14th January 2012

22nd January 2012

8th February 2012

26th February 2012

8th April 2012

11th April 2012

26th May 2012

27th May 2012

12th June 2012

14th July 2012

1st August 2012

11th August 2012

15th August 2012

30th September 2012

1st October 2012

15th January 2013

Versatile Blogger Award

Little did I know that when I started my venture into the world of social media at the beginning of this year that others out their in the blogosphere could nominate you for awards. I was delighted to see today (30^th April) that I have received a Versatile Blogger Award.

A special thanks to Sharing My Italy … The Blog  (30^th April 2012) for this nomination (see post), I again received this award two weeks ago from Zen and Genki  (16^th April 2012 (see post)) but hadn’t blogged about it at the time as I was trying to decide on what other blogs I should nominate, now certainly seems to be a good time to do this.

As per the rules of being nominated, I am to:

•  Thank the person who gave me the award (Done!)
•  Include a link to their blog (I’ve done that too – above!)
•  Select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly.
•  Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award and include a link to their site.  Here they are:

1. Dreams and Zeros
2. Alex Mufatti
3. Brian Gaynor Photography
4. Sam Whelan Art & Technology
5. Klaus Rossler Photography
6. Observatorydiscoveratory
7. Travelwithscott
8. Clive Jennings Photography
9. A New Yorker in Paris
10. Postcards for Colorado
11. iPhone Photographer
12. The Blissful Adventurer
13. Craig Hill
14. The Thesis Whisperer
15. Ramblings of this guy you know!

And finally – Tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

1. I enjoy TV shows such as Battlestar Galatica, NCIS, CSI & Star Trek to name a few.
2. I lecture is subjects ranging from computer programming to graphics, video & multimedia.
3. Signed up to SETI@Home over 12 years ago (during its first year of operation).
4. Have a keen interested in distributed computing (hence SETI@Home).
5. It’s only been in the past month I have build  a computer myself from scratch, done lots of upgrading in the past, never a complete build.
6. Have been interested in Astronomy for as long as I can remember.
7. Archaeology has always been of interest (perhaps due to watching Indiana Jones so much).

And finally to end this post with a spot of colour