Dear branch member,

Very best wishes for 2009 to you from the Oxfordshire Branch Committee.

In this issue: details about our first meeting of 2009, on Thursday 22 January, early information about our February meeting and some other snippets including a couple of surveys you might find interesting. We do hope to see you at one of our meetings.

ICT Departments are coming under increasing pressure to fix problems quickly and fix them for good. Our speaker will show how method-based problem diagnosis can find the root cause of a problem consistently faster than any other approach.

The annual free Turing lecture will be given this year by Professor Sir Michael Brady, who will explore the question "What is Information Engineering?", drawing on the experience of his 20 years work at Oxford University.

Summarising his knowledge in the areas of mobile robotics, computer vision, signal processing, medical image analysis and artificial intelligence, he will then examine what information engineering really means and the possibilities for the future of this field.

Correction: We apologise that the version of this newsletter emailed to members in early January accidentally gave the date as 26 February. We apologise for this mistake and will emphasise the correct date in our February newsletter.

Those of our members who attended our 2007 Christmas lecture will remember Tom Ilube's talk on Identity Fraud and the measures his company, Garlik, is taking to help prevent it. In passing, Tom referred to the huge database of billions of RDF triples which underpins Garlik's Data Patrol service.

At our February meeting we will have the chance to hear from Christian Davis, Development Director & Steve Harris, Head of Architecture at Garlik about the design, architectural and development challenges involved in building such a highly scalable system, which powers qdos.com and foaf.qdos.com as well as garlik itself.

W-Tech 2009, a free inspirational recruitment showcase on in London on 3 February 2009, brings together some of the most well-known employers with women already working, or who are interested in working, in the IT profession. Come along, get CV advice, meet employers, attend workshops, and get connected.

Professor Helen Lawton Smith has asked for input to this survey of the highly-skilled in Oxfordshire. Surveys should be completed by the end of January. A prize of a £50 M&S voucher will be give to a lucky entrant drawn at random at the beginning of February.

Any questions should be addressed to Professor Helen Lawton Smith, AcSS, Director of Research, Oxfordshire Economic Observatory, School of Geography & the Environment, Oxford University, Dyson Perrins Building, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, Tel: 01865 766163, Fax: 01865 275885, http://oeo.geog.ox.ac.uk.

Last year a number of members took part in a survey to gauge public opinion towards electronic Christmas cards versus the traditional printed card.

The results proved very interesting and such was the success of that survey that Prof. Nigel Linge of Salford University would like to repeat it this year, and would be very grateful to anyone who would take part in his short survey at www.christmascardsurvey.co.uk.

The tenth Oxford Geek Night is on 21 January 2009.

Our full meeting programme for 2008/9 is on the branch website.

As usual, in late August 2008 we posted details to BCS members of the branch who live in the UK or mainland Europe. If you missed it, there's a pointer to a downloadable copy on our branch downloads page.

Did you know that BCS members can join up to five BCS Specialist Groups online?

Just sign on to the Members' secure area, and click on "Specialist Groups" in the box headed "Manage your membership". You should then be able to join several Specialist Groups.

BCS members can manage all their BCS email subscriptions online by logging on at https://wam.bcs.org/wam/lsm.aspx.

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