Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday, June 29th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Eli Barzilay will speak about Implementing Domain Specific Languages with PLT Scheme.

Additionally, we are still accepting proposals for up to two volunteers to each give of a 5-minute Lightning Talk (followed by 2-minute Q&A).

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday June 29th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Tuesday, May 26th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Norman Ramsey will speak about Using Higher-Order Functions and Continuation-Passing Style to Make Dataflow Optimization Simple.

Additionally, we are still accepting proposals for up to two volunteers to each give of a 5-minute Lightning Talk (followed by 2-minute Q&A).

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Tuesday May 26th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

Lightning Talks are series of short strictly timed five minute talks each followed by two minutes for questions and answers during which the next speaker gets prepared (by e.g. disconnecting the previous speaker's laptop from the projector and connecting his own instead). The formula was used at ILC'2009 in sessions of 4 to 8 talks, and was a tremendous success.

Indeed you don't need to have that much to say to give a Lightning Talk, and so the formula lowers the barrier to entry and allows for a wider diversity of ideas to be presented at such events. At the same time, the strict constraint forces the speaker to be more concise, maybe even poetic, in conveying his ideas. Several participants remarked that since Lightning Talks were both so short and precisely timed, you could rehearse them many times before you gave them, making delivery more powerful. Additionally, some argued that the short duration limits the potential for either speaker humiliation or listener boredom, once again giving incentive for people to participate on both ends of the communication, promoting the exchange of ideas.

And so, I instituted such Lightning Talks at the Boston Lisp Meeting; so far, they have been well-received, and many people have subsequently volunteered to give one -- which makes me hopeful about their positive impact on the exchange of ideas within the community.

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Next Monday, April 27th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Noah Goodman will speak about MIT-Church, a non-deterministic Scheme.

Additionally, we are still accepting proposals for up to two volunteers to each give of a 5-minute Lightning Talk (followed by 2-minute Q&A).

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday April 27th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

As previously announced, there will be a Boston Lisp Meeting taking place Next Monday, March 30th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Carl Eastlund will speak about Modular ACL2. http://fare.livejournal.com/140695.html

Additionally, having observed the success of the formula at ILC'2009, I'm instituting Lightning Talks at the Boston Lisp Meeting. At every meeting, before the main talk, there will be two slots for strictly timed 5-minute talks followed by 2 minutes for questions.

Our first Lightning Talks will be given by Matt Knox and François-René Rideau. http://fare.livejournal.com/140960.html

Matt Knox has been hacking on Ruby and Scheme for the last 3-4 years. Looking at Rails, and how to fundamentally improve it, he came up with GoaloC (Generate on a Lot of Crack).

I, François-René Rideau, am a story-teller who dream of myself as a software author. I will address designers of computer languages and systems about Better Stories, Better Languages.

Dinner: ITA Software, is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our monthly Boston Lisp meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake. However, we appreciate it if you let us know in advance you're coming, and what food taboos you have. Tell us by sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net (you remain anonymous, no spam, no ack unless requested).

Finally, our next next meeting will happen on Monday 2009-04-27, and will feature Noah Goodman on MIT-Church, a non-deterministic Scheme. The previously announced speaker, Norman Ramsey, will hopefully be speaking in May, on purely functional dataflow optimization (in Haskell).

Carl Eastlund will give a talk about Modular ACL2.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday March 30th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

Dimitris Vyzovitis will give a talk about Programming gerbils: Distributed programming with PLT-Scheme.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday February 23th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

David O'Toole will give a talk about Common Lisp and Rogue-like Games.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday January 26th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

Gregory Marton will give a talk about the meanings of English words as programs.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

Tim McNerney will give a talk about Verifying the Correctness of Compiler Transformations on Basic Blocks using Abstract Interpretation.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday October 27th at MIT, Room 32-124.

Rich Hickey will give a 90' talk about Clojure.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday September 29th at MIT, Room 34-401B.

Due to the organizer (me) doing too many other things this summer and lacking the foresight to delegate, no speaker was found for August. I don't feel like rushing things so late in the game, so unless a surprise speaker is found on short notice, there won't be a Boston Lisp Meeting this August.

But lo and behold, we have speakers for September and October. On Monday September 29th 2008, 1800, Rich Hickey will give a long talk on Clojure, his new Lisp dialect for the JVM, at the usual venue MIT 34-401B. Official announcement will follow later this month.

In October (Monday 27th?), Tim McNerney will hopefully talk about his past work on verification of correctness of a compiler transformation pass through abstract interpretation.

Jay McCarthy will give a 25' talk about Cryptographic Protocol Explication and End-Point Projection.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday July 21st at MIT, Room 34-401B.

Danny Yoo will give a 25' talk about DivaScheme.

Shriram Krishnamurthi will give a 50' talk about Relationally-Parametric Polymorphic Contracts

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Wednesday June 25th at Northeastern University, Shillman Hall Room 135.

ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (full disclosure: I work there), has kindly offered to sponsor a dinner for our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Please send mail to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net with a list of attendees so we may order the correct amount of food.

Ivan Krstić will give a 25' talk about Security and Programming Languages. Ivan Krstić http://radian.org/ is notably the prized author of Bitfrost, the security architecture for the OLPC XO laptop.

Greg Cooper will give a 50' talk about FrTime: A Dataflow Extension of DrScheme. Dataflow programming extends functional programming with time-varying values called signals. Signals provide a simple, declarative mechanism for expressing event-driven programs without callbacks or explicit side-effects. This talk will present FrTime, an extension of PLT Scheme with dataflow evaluation. The language's distinguishing features include an event-driven evaluation model, transparent reuse of Scheme code, support for reactive data structures, and integration with the DrScheme programming environment. The talk will include a demonstration of the language and programming environment, along with a discussion of the key design decisions and main ideas underlying the implementation strategy. Greg Cooper developed FrTime while he was a graduate student at Brown University, working with Shriram Krishnamurthi. He now works for ITA Software.

Please note that the meeting is taking place at an unusual date, to accommodate for the availability of our main speaker.

The Lisp Meeting with take place at MIT, room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

PS: The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on April 22nd was a success with 40 participants, despite a few organizational glitches for which I apologize. Thanks a lot to all those who came. I hope we'll meet again and have more of those interesting conversations.

PPS: We're still looking for speakers. We have a lot of potential speakers, but not enough confirmed speakers at scheduled dates. The call for speakers and all the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html

PPPS: Please forward this information to people who would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times.

For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (full disclosure: I work there), has kindly offered to sponsor a dinner for our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Please send mail to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net with a list of attendees so we may order the correct amount of food. No registration, no food.

Peter Dillinger will give a 25' talk about Theorem proving with ACL2s. ACL2, "A Computational Logic for Applicative Common Lisp", was recognized with the 2005 ACM Software System Award for its power and usefulness in verifying safety-critical applications. New users, however, found it difficult to use for a variety of reasons. ACL2s < http://acl2s.peterd.org/acl2s/ > is an Eclipse-based development environment we have made to make ACL2 easier to learn and use. Peter C. Dillinger is a Ph.D. Student at Northeastern University, Panagiotis Manolios, advisor.

Hans Hübner will give a 50' presentation of The BKNR Common Lisp web application development environment. BKNR < http://bknr.net/ > is a one-stop repository of open source Common Lisp modules used to develop and deploy web applications, featuring a pure Lisp transaction based persistence layer. Hans Hübner has been a hacker for over 20 years, and has discovered Common Lisp as his favourite programming language in 2001. He is a freelance consultant whose research interests include persistence systems and hardware to support dynamic programming.

Please note that the meeting is taking place at an unusual date, to accommodate for the availability of the main speaker, who is coming from Berlin (Germany) to talk to us.

The Lisp Meeting with take place at MIT, room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

PS: The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on March 31st was a big success, with about 70 participants. Thanks a lot to all those who came. I hope we'll meet again and have more of those interesting conversations.

PPS: We're still looking for speakers. We have a lot of potential speakers, but not enough confirmed speakers at scheduled dates. The call for speakers and all the other details are at < http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html >.

PPPS: Please forward this information to people who would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times.

For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or check our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

PLEASE REGISTER FOR FOOD! ITA Software has kindly offered to sponsor a dinner for our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Please send mail directly to me fare at tunes (dot org) with list of attendees so I may order the correct amount of food. No registration, no food.

Alexey Radul will speak about What I hate most about Scheme and what I'm doing about it. Alexey Radul is a graduate student at MIT. He uses the Scheme programming language, for which he has written an extension for probabilistic programming.

Rahul Jain will present DefDoc. DefDoc is a lisp-based document description and processing system. Both macros and object-orientation are available so that the description of a document can be focused as much as possible on content and structure. Rahul Jain is a New York based consultant who programs in Common Lisp for fun and profit.

The Lisp Meeting with take place at MIT, room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

PS: The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on March 3rd was a big success, with about 40 attendants. Thanks a lot to all those who came. I hope we'll meet again and have more of those interesting conversations.

PPS: We're more than ever looking for speakers. We have a lot of potential speakers, but few confirmed speakers at scheduled dates. The call for speakers and all the other details are at < http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html >.

For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting

(Please forward this message to interested people. Apologies for message received multiple times. Permanent URL so far: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html for this call and http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting for the monthly meeting in general)

I will be organizing a monthly Boston Lisp Meeting.

By "Lisp", I mean any programmable programming system. However, speakers and attendants will be welcome to discuss any ideas relevant to programmers using or developing such a programmable programming system, whatever language was or wasn't previously used to express those ideas. (Note how I specifically avoided including or excluding any given system as Lisp. Anyone programming a programming system is welcome; people writing COBOL with parentheses will probably get bored.)

The meetings will usually take place on the last Monday of every month at 6pm. (Not the first Monday, which conflicts with the meetings of Grey Thumb, not the 4th Monday which is harder to figure out, not on Tuesdays, and not according to any of the other rules that were or weren't considered. Exceptions will be made to accommodate speakers or organizers.)