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Grady Booch on "Computational Thinking"
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Grady Booch, ACM Fellow and Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM, was the speaker for the February 3rd ACM webinar. He defined "computational thinking" as "the processes to describe problems and formulate solutions so that a 'computer' (human or machine) can address it." among his more memorable remarks:
- "The fundamental premise of science is that the cosmos is understandable; the premise of our domain is that the cosmos is computable."
- "I think 'singularity' is a stupid idea. We're continuously evolving toward a greater symbiosis between humans and computing."
- "A cell phone is a computer that happens to have a dialing app."
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Reminder: Migrating Applications to the Cloud
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On Wednesday, February 17, at noon Eastern US time, the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) will present a complimentary BrightTALK webcast on "Migrating Applications to Public Cloud Services: Roadmap for Success". The talk will be based on the CSCC's white paper on the same subject, initially published at the end of 2013. Register here.
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Industrial Internet in Oil & Gas |
| If "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger," then the companies in the oil & gas sector that survive the current bloodbath due to $30 crude prices will emerge in better shape in 2017. But that still assumes that they find some money to wisely invest in automation, asset management, security and other improvements in processes and technologies to be more efficient going forward. The Industrial Internet (the application of IoT to industry, as opposed to consumer devices) has a big role to play in this. That's why we're looking at two conferences, at which Claude Baudoin will present on "IoT in Oil & Gas - Opportunities and Challenges":
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US Data Privacy and Safe Harbor Issues (continued)
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The US and the EU have reached a tentative agreement to continue allowing the storage of EU citizens' data in the US (e.g., when they use a service like Google Apps or Facebook), something that was at risk following the rejection of the "safe harbor" policy by the European Union Court of Justice last October.
A collective sigh of relief would be premature. This "EU-US Privacy Shield" is just a framework, and the actual oversight mechanisms have not been built yet, and it could take a while. On the US side, implementation and oversight are split across two separate agencies, the U.S. Commerce Department and the Federal Trade Commission. The draft pact only serves to delay implementation of restrictions that would have otherwise started on February 1st, but it is not clear at all that the pact will be judged sufficient by the EUCJ or the various EU countries. and will withstand a court challenge similar to the one that brought down Safe Harbor in the first place.
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Next OMG Meeting
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The Object Management Group's quarterly meeting will take place in Reston, Va., on March 14-18. Feel free to contact us if you want to know more about why you may want to go! As usual, it will be impossible to follow all the parallel sessions, but the list below will give a partial idea of what's on the menu:
- A meeting of the Data Residency working group.
- Work to understand the relationships between the various OMG models and notations that describe business concepts such as processes, cases, decisions, value propositions, etc.
- A half-day public forum to present the progress of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), juxtaposed with a half-day on the state of OMG standards that apply to the Industrial Internet.
- Presentations and discussions on the integration between product lifecycle management and model-based systems engineering.
- A "business architecture innovation summit" organized by the Business Architecture Guild, in which you can expect a number of case studies by major companies as well as working groups on various practices within BA.
- Exhibits and demonstrations by vendors of modeling tools.
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Seen Recently... |
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"If you put technology into the hands of learners, they will discover things you could never have taught them on your own."
-- Steve Wheeler, in a
blog post entitled
"#40years of educational technology: Computers"
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