Dear Branch member,

This month, as well as a reminder about next week's branch meeting, we have forward planning details of several other highly interesting meetings. Put the dates in your diary now!

Our February speaker, Dr Andrew Simpson, doesn't have far to come. He works for the Software Engineering Programme of Oxford University, based in the Wolfson Building where we hold our meetings.

Andrew will review the activities of the Software Engineering group, which have included many grid computing projects with support for climateprediction.net, CancerGrid, Integrative Biology and e-DiaMoND, and then look in detail at the DTI-funded GIMI (Generic Infrastructure for Medical Informatics) project.

Please check the branch website for the latest on parking.

For our 50th anniversary year, the BCS has an extra-special speaker to give the 2007 Lovelace Lecture: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium. The lecture, in London on 13 March, is free and open to members and non-members. It is expected to be very popular so booking is essential.

As a change from our normal lecture-based meetings, our March event is a visit to Unipart Logistics. This is a rare chance for a hosted tour of the facility that Unipart has set up to test the impact and benefits of RFID deployment in terms of strategy, people and process.

There is no charge for this event, which is open to members and non-members, but Unipart need to know the names of people coming. Please book your place using the form on our contact us page.

As our roads continue to become ever more crowded, road user charging keeps hitting the headlines. We are privileged to have Derek Turner CBE, National Traffic Operations Director at the Highways Agency, as the speaker at our AGM in May. Derek was previously Transport for London's Managing Director of Street Management and the chief architect of the Congestion Charge.

The Congestion Charge scheme had at its centre a highly successful IT project exploiting many technologies, and road user charging schemes are clearly being considered for wider deployment in the UK.

Derek is ideally placed to tell us about the technical and the political challenges faced, and lessons learned in delivering and getting the citizen to accept the congestion charge and similar schemes.

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