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From the desk of Samy,

What is DDDAS? It is a new paradigm, where computer programs act in a more intelligent way. Their outputs depend on their inputs, which are updated values in the real world, used for optimizing the minimum damage/etc of important problems such as natural catastrophes. The other day, Dra. Frederica Darema came to UAB to give us a conference about DDDAS. I attended it. We could say that DDDAS is a new direction for applications/simulations and measurement methodology.

Until now, programs are mostly unidirectional. It means that we have a direction between theory and simulation, and ANOTHER ONE, between simulation and theory. In the same way, we’ve got a third element: measurements.

Theory -> Simulations | Simulation -> Theory | Measurements -> Simulation | Simulation -> Measurements | Theory -> Measurements | Measurements -> Theory

This is too static and serialized. Too slow! This is enough for normal programs and situations, but what happens when LIFES are up to a few minutes? We have to speed it up as much as we can. So, this is DDDAS: Data is not unidirectional but bidirectional. Or in other words, we haven’t got a strong direction, we’ve got a data stream going and coming. A stream data between execution processes.
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From the desk of Samy,

Fortunately, the other day I had the opportunity to attend another conference (I’m getting used to it): Bruce Schneier came to ETSE (my faculty, in UAB) in April, 24. A brief introduction about who Bruce is:

Bruce Schneier (born 15 January 1963) is an American cryptographer, computer security specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on computer security and cryptography, and is the founder and chief technology officer of BT Counterpane, formerly Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.

Bruce is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a “security guru,” Schneier is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

Now that we know a little bit more about him, let’s start! I hadn’t the foggiest about what he was going to tell us and it surprised me: The IT impact on the world nowadays, very close to security matters.

From now on, I’ll write this post according to Bruce, reproducing what he said.
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From the desk of samy,

On April/4/2008, Richard Stallman came to UAB to give a conference about GNU. You can view the WHOLE conference in Spanish at the end of this post (and some pictures as well). I strongly recommend you to view the video as it’s quite interesting.

A brief introduction to who Richard Stallman is:

Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated “rms”, is an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project’s lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he started the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up the Free Software Foundation. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Let’s come back to the conference.

RMS came to UAB to introduce and clarify for us what free software really means, and why we should use it. First of all, I would like to advise you that RMS is a showman. But never mind, don’t lose the thread. Some teachers introduce RMS… While he felt asleep on the table.

The first reflexion was:

- Does this program respect my freedom?

Starting from this question, we should know what a program which respects our freedom means. If it does so, it is a free software (from now on free software is going to be FS). Otherwise, it is a privative software (from now on privative software is going to be PS). So, FS is the one which respects our freedom according to the notes below:
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From the desk of Samy (do you like this start? I hope so, otherwise you should get used to it… From now on, it’s going to be the same haha)

April 1, at 12.30 p.m., Ricardo Baeza-Yates, researcher and director of Yahoo! Research in Barcelona and Santiago de Chile, came to UAB to give a conference about Web 2.0

It was quite interesting as he talked about what the tendency of Internet will be in the following years. The keyword must be Web 2.0.

I took some notes, you can read them below:

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