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Nottingham and Derby
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Tweets by @NottmDerbyBCSThe BCS Nottingham & Derby Branch serves over 1,000 BCS members in the Nottingham and Derby area and beyond. Our aim is Making IT Good for Society by delivering informative and engaging IT related events for everyone in the East Midlands. For details of our planned activities this year, please see the calendar page.
The branch is run for the benefit of its members and we greatly value feedback. You can either attend a Committee meeting, email us, or send us feedback.
Latest News
Block Chain Today!
Matt Lucas is a technologist with over 20 years of industry experience, currently working at IBM in the global blockchain team.
He is an advisor for the British Blockchain Association, an associate tutor at the University of Oxford and considered a world-wide expert on distributed ledger technologies for businesses, advising on blockchain solution.
Are you curious about Blockchain and what it can do?
Matt will be providing an overview of Blockchain for business applications, why it is so important, where it is being used and how IT professionals can get started and grow their blockchain skills.
How To Be A Success In Data Science: The Key Skills To Make A Difference
Data Science covers a wide range of subjects from including data collection, analysis and modelling. What makes a valuable data scientist stand out in today's business environment is not a straightforward answer and requires a range of skills and experience.
Hugh Cox is recognized as one of the UK's leading data experts by Information Age, Hugh co-founded Rosslyn Data Technologies PLC. Hugh helps executives at public and private sector organizations tackle business issues through technologies including cloud computing, data management and analytics.
Hugh has authored and spoken extensively on the subject of data analysis with particular focus on fraud prevention and detection, through the deployment of cloud-based analytics platforms.
His presentation will be of interest to those who are already working within data science as well as those interested in maximising their potential to enter this interesting, expanding and lucrative profession. The demand for data scientists to make sense of and derive benefit from the increasing volume of data now available has never been higher.
With the ever-increasing cyber threat we have moved towards all-encrypted IP networks in order to secure our information and to allow information with different sensitivities to share the same infrastructure. This is a powerful approach, but within it there are dangers to avoid, associated with traffic analysis and machine learning, as well as threats to some of our most useful tools such as deep packet inspection and WAN acceleration.
Professor Brian Turton (Email:Brian.Turton@Airbus.com) has worked in the area of secure communications for over 15 years with what is now Airbus Defence and Space Limited and his presentation will look at the issues, and for many the surprising results, that are now arising with an all-encrypted approach as the publicly published research starts to highlight the art of the possible.
Presented by Karen Dawson, Enterprise Architect for a large utility company, has been involved in implementing 2 different Enterprise Asset Management systems, each interfacing to a CMDB.
Karen will be sharing her experiences of both EA modelling and CMDB interfaces, including some of the mistakes made as part of this process and sharing where they are now.
Presented by Nigel Haber of University of Nottingham. Michael is an Information Model Developer.
This talk will be using Wardley Maps to show examples of how strategy can be understood visually, particularly in IT and software. There will be an opportunity to try this out using the Wardley Mapping Canvas.
Presented by Nigel King of Nottingham Trent University, Chief Strategy Officer for SafePaaS
The session follows on from our January presentation "Rapid Prototyping of Conceptual UIs using Balsamic", with a DIFFERENCE. The Difference is that it will be held at Lecture Theatre 2, Teaching and Learning Building at Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus, designed to facilitate the interactive and practical nature of this session.
Balsamic is a UI concept development tool whose intention is to allow you to throw away bad ideas quickly, without becoming emotionally invested in an early UI concept. It has enough in the way of widgets for standard UI conventions, that it does not allow the designer to be completely "Off reservation" but allows freedom of pallet and canvas to sketch ideas and rapidly iterate and explore corners of the design.
The presentation will show an example or two, of application concepts, that went from unhappy customer feedback to product proposition within a few hours, driving down that cost to first prototype, compressing the time to first feedback, discovering gaps and designing demo flow and demo data ahead of writing the code and without holding it up. The presenter has found the tool to be very useful in these objectives and is willing to share his learning and discoveries. The audience will be polled for application ideas and begin to develop a prototype together as a group.
Presented by Paul Stevens an Enterprise Architect in the CIO office of a large international utility company.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is viewed by many large companies as the new security perimeter as companies tear down traditional data centre facilities and embrace multiple cloud hosted services. But what does this mean?
The presentation will discuss IAM and what makes it a powerful branch of IT that will enable the next generation of IT services, including the 'Internet of Things' (IoT).
We will also discuss a practical example of how a large company is embracing an IAM model to drive future IT provision.
Presented by Nigel King of Nottingham Trent University, Chief Strategy Officer for SafePaaS
The presentation will show an example or two, of application concepts, that went from unhappy customer feedback to product proposition within a few hours.
The presenter has found the tool to be very useful in these objectives and is willing to share his learning and discoveries.
Also, the audience will be polled for application ideas and a prototype begun to be developed, together as a group.
In our working lives we have tools that would seem magical to employees a hundred years ago. Our hand-held devices connect us immediately to most of the combined knowledge of humanity. Our working conditions have improved immeasurably. So why are levels of anxiety and depression so high?
Poor workplaces cause their staff to feel this way.
This leads to poor decision-making and organisational failure.
We will consider key personal and organisational factors which give rise to workplace stress, and what can be done about them. We'll look at how to build organisations that deliver high performance which is not the result of over-work.
We'll look at the way AI and machine learning help build the kind of places people really want to work. This talk will help you both as an employee and a manager to create an environment which allows for greater wellbeing and higher performance.
Monday 15th October
Gary Thornton (linkedin.com/in/garythornton1956) will provide an insight into the role of competency frameworks and the Digital Industries Apprenticeship Standards and will identify several questions that still need to be answered.
Topics that will be introduced include:
Competency Frameworks, Introduction to competency based qualifications and Employer engagement with the current qualification.
Monday 17th September
Skunk Works originates from World War II when a special R&D centre was set up by Kelly Johnson at Lockheed. Since the inception of the Skunk Works, this term has been generalised to apply to similar high-priority R&D projects at other organisations, which feature a small team removed from the normal working environment and given freedom from management constraints.
The presenters; John Taylor, Chris Davies and Dot Tudor are professionals with years of experience of delivering transformational change programmes across all types and sizes of organisations. John's technical career in the United States Air Force, Chris's award winning programs and co-founder of Condor alongside Dot, a recognised conference speaker nationally and internationally and a published Author, who is not only a Certified Scrum Trainer, winner of Best Agile Coach / Mentor at the UK Agile Awards, but a finalist in the Most Valuable Agile Player UK AND five years running and winner of the Award for Outstanding Contribution to a DSDM Team, combined skills provide a powerful presentation.