co-located

NёrdCamp Co-located Events

April, 22th-24th, 2011

Here some details about defined educational activities that can be realized in the frames of event (exact dates and time are to be defined):

Out-of-city coworking

The key concept of out-of-city coworking is to recreate for few days city context of a casual working day schedule (work, home, culture, sport) in calm environment of countryside (at a holyday hotel or a resort).

So you get rid of routine logistics (traffic jams, morning subway, food shopping, etc.)

And in turn you find:

  • Wi-Fi connection to do your work,
  • fresh air,
  • evening events and meals with people spending time enjoying the company.

You can join coworking with your own day-to-day business stuff or come with a team to work on a hobby/startup project. To get and idea of how it works please have a look at the last coworking report.

Audience: creative class workers

tbd2

tbd2 is a joint series of strategy & vision sessions initiated by the U.S. Russia Center for Entrepreneurship and O Collider. tbd2 twice stands for Technology, Business, Development and to be defined. The main idea of tbd2 is to get broad vision on how forthcoming technologies impact businesses and society going forward.

The format is

  • to invite experts who see opportunities and risks of specific technological innovations or social and cultural changes
  • to create platform for discussion between experts and business leaders who build their strategies based on emerging global trends
  • to involve a broad audience represented by students and professionals in engineering, economy, culture into discussion
  • to build a vision for the future based on consideration of the following points: what has already been or might be researched and developed soon, how it can be introduced to markets and to society, and what will be the consequences of its adoption in the nearest 4-8 years.

NёrdCamp tbd2 is a pilot-run session with a topic ‘How the Web will Transform Education’ by Yury Lifshits who is a guest speaker.

"The future of education is already here. Hundreds of startups

are working on every aspect of the ecosystem: content, online

degrees, assessment systems, analytics, online tutoring, education

funding, computerized classrooms, mobile learning apps and

educational games. In the first part of this talk we cover the key

trends in ongoing education transformation.

In second part we focus on innovation in educational video".

To get better prepared for the seminar please have a look at

Workshop ‘How to grow places for smart people:

Environments for opportunities in and out of city’

  • Internet changes the way we work, learn and entertain. And it begins to transform our expectations from places and spaces where we spend time doing all that stuff. New types of environments will appear. Web and mobile broadband Internet access gives us unseen before flexibility to shape requirements for infrastructure on different scales: room, building, campus, district, city... Whether to bring work to home or home to work, work to resort or resort to home? Now various transitions and transformations are just available.Together with our NёrdCamp audience we will evaluate appearing and existing infrastructures like Technopark Ingria and Technopolis Pulkovo,
  • Tkachi and Taiga Space
  • Apartment Project, Vostok-6 resort and Vyborg

to discover opportunities for their development and becoming attractors for smart and creative people.

ReSearch Point Seminar

RS(.) - is a seminar about people who are inspired by their term works or graduate thesis and who really care about the results they come to. The first event organized by O’Collider and hosted by Google’s Office in St. Petersburg took place on March, 21.

  • The scheme is to choose a particular science, engineering or organizational topic
  • to invite one or two keynotes, experts and leaders of 5-6 ongoing research projects
  • to organize a presentation of research projects in a sort of elevator peach way that are supposed to get a fast feedback from experts.

So the approach of projects exploring and examination is borrowed from start-ups scene, but it is applied to the subjects and teams that are far from creating business just next year. We focus on cutting-edge technology or humanity advances that are matter of University or even hobby research. At the NёrdCamp we will forget about a particular topic, all the content is to be based on interesting and didactic :) stories from students and senior nerds about their experiences in doing research and writing their term and graduate projects.

Jam Session: Sociology and Economy of IT

The session's scenario is derived from music jam sessions. One, two or three persons lead a main consciousness stream by telling a story based

on their assumptions and ideas regarding a given topic. Other invited guests add comments, tell sub-stories, clarify particular details, 'playing' within main stream, introducing new tones and colours, remixing rhythms, etc.

The format assumes strong participants, some general concept or hypothesis, calm atmosphere and only slight touch of moderation.

The approach was initially ran in EMC St. Petersburg Development Center to discuss convergency of Cloud and P2P architectures in 2008. Then in 2010 it was applied in 'IT Industry Intro' Course for few 'lectures'.

During the session we are going to touch on following questions:

  • "IT as a Clue" or "Is IT a basis or a superstructure?"
  • "How IT changes the real world?"

Invited analyst to tell the story and ask questions is Vladimir Aluferov.

Domain Introduction: Bioinformatics

We choose a domain and invite a person who can introduce it to broad audince, talking in simple but knowledgable way.

Bioinformatics is the application of statistics and computer science to the field of molecular biology. Now it entails the creation and advancement of databases, algorithms, computational and statistical techniques and theory to solve formal and practical problems arising from the management and analysis of biological data.

Nikolay Vyahhi will talk about following aspects of Bioinformatics

    • major applications
    • history of the domain
    • main research areas
    • tools and approaches

Introducing NoSQL, world-class retrieval system Apache SOLR and Apache Hadoop

NoSQL (Not Only SQL) is believed to be a superset of, or sometimes an intersecting set with, relational SQL databases. The concept itself is still shaping, but already now we can say for sure: NoSQL addresses the task of storing and retrieving the data of large volumes in the systems with high load. There is another very important angle in perceiving the concept:NoSQL systems can allow storing and efficient searching of the unstructured or semi-unstructured data, like completely raw or preprocessed documents. Using the example of one world-class document retrieval system Apache SOLR (performant HTTP wrapper around Apache Lucene) as a reference we will check upon its use cases, horizontal and vertical scalability, faceted search, distribution and load balancing, crawling, extendability, linguistic support, integration with relational databases and much more.

Dmitry Kan will shortly touch upon *hot* topic of cloud computing using the famous project Apache Hadoop and will help the audience to see whether SOLR shines through the cloud.

Geo Information Systems around us


The lecture is related to the terminology and documentary management in Geoinformatics. Alexander Klechikov (Deputy director on information technologies, Saint Petersburg regional segment of EIAS) will also touch such topics as main coordinate systems and reference frame; project GLONASS, local coordinate systems and information system on its bases, coming to problems of Russian geo-informatics development.

Workshop: Creating realtime-interactive website right from your browser using GitHub, Cloud9 IDE, Node.js, Socket.IO and MongoHQ

Part 1, theory: Introducing Node.js - innovative asynchronous JavaScript-based web development platform. Why it's so easy to start? Why the hype?

Part 2, practice (prepare your laptops): Create your website using free accounts at GitHub, Cloud9 & MongoHQ. Add realtime using Socket.IO.

Prerequisites:

- A browser.

- Basic knowledge of JavaScript.

Workshop will be conducted by Alexander Schtuchkin.

Workshop results:

User Experience in Changing Environments: Approach and Opportunities

UX design as a lifestyle and as a general approach to everyday life:

— UX design as a strategy to invent and optimize things.

— Going mobile and coming back: mobile UX design as a metaphor for the “everything connected” approach.

— Human-centered UX design: a holistic view of urban user interfaces employing geolocation, social media and sensor networks.

— Multitouch and beyond touch: employing big data, open social data and open government in the next decade.

Nature of Entrepreneurship: Craft, Lifestyle or Science

In an ignition talk and a consequent discussion Alexey Baranov will talk wake our minds up with following points:

  • Business as Science. Should we learn, study and research it? Do we need degrees such as Master of Entrepreneurial Arts and Doctor of Business? Business theory and experiment, ideas and products.
  • Value as oil of business. Curing customers' head aches. Holes, lacks and gaps as opportunities. Growing on your own and your environment's grassroots.

Progress of cloud computing environment

Cloud computing refers to the provision of computational resources such as servers and storages on demand. Cloud infrastructure contains a number of additional services excepting the "raw" server and storage. The most popular cloud (Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure) provides not only the "raw" computing resources but also tools for development of scalable cloud applications:

- services of queue for message passing between servers- structured data in the tables (not a relational DB)- storage of structured data (relational DB)- storage of files and block storage devices- services for network configurationThese cloud services define a new standards of inter-server interactions in cloud environment.Dmitry Petrov will discuss the services in cloud environment on the bases of Amazon and Microsoft clouds, and the progress of such services.

Software Development for Little Ones

Yakov Sirotkin will describe various processes in Software Development and explain how to establish efficient feedback for these processes.