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UKUUG Annual General Meeting 2010

UKUUG's 2010 Annual General Meeting will be on held Thursday 23rd September 2010 at 6pm in the Tudor Room, Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB.

Documents

• Revised Draft Accounts for 2009
• Chairman's Report
• Treasurer Report
• AGM Minutes
• Agenda, Proxy Form, and other documents.

After AGM Speaker

Please note: The talk is open to all, members and non-members are welcome and encouraged to attend.

Talk starts at 6:30pm in the Tudor Room.

Speaker: Simon Peyton-Jones

Title: Getting from A to B: fast route-finding using slow computers

Slides: PDF

We all now take it for granted that online maps will rapidly display a fast route from A to B. But these maps are gigantic: a map of Europe has 20 million intersections and 40 million road segments. How can a computer find the shortest path in such a large map, without examining all those intersections and roads?

This is a classic graph problem, known as the Shortest Path problem, with solutions that date back to 1960. But in the last few years there has been significant progress (some of it at Microsoft Research) that dramatically speeds up the solution.

In this talk Simon will explain both the old solutions and the new cool ideas. You should go away with a clear example of how some clever computer science can take a problem that previously required a big, fast computer, and make it fast enough to run on a slow, mobile device.

Biography

Simon Peyton Jones, MA, MBCS, CEng, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before moving to Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998.

His main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He has led a succession of research projects focused around the design and implementation of production-quality functional-language systems for both uniprocessors and parallel machines. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages.

More generally, he is interested in language design, rich type systems, software component architectures, compiler technology, code generation, runtime systems, virtual machines, and garbage collection. He is particularly motivated by direct use of principled theory to practical language design and implementation -- that's one reason he loves functional programming so much.

His home page is at http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj