Hello all! I hope you had a nice break between terms. We're going to kick off the spring term fast, so get ready.
ELECTIONS: Thursday, May 10, 4:30 PM, Comfy Lounge (MC 3001) ---
Calum T. Dalek asked me to relay the details of the election. We will be holding the election at 4:30 PM in the Comfy Lounge on May 10th. Nominations are now open, so feel free to write your nominations on the whiteboard in the CSC office, or email them to cro@csclub.uwaterloo.ca.
PALANTIR TECH TALK: "mmap and the Mortgage Crisis" by Palantir Engineers; Monday, May 7, 6:00 PM, DC 1302 ---
Palantir is a Palo Alto-based intelligence analysis software company that has partnered with the CSC to put on a tech talk and social. There will be free food, free drinks, and for one lucky winner, a free iPad, so why not come on out?
Abstract: In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, large banks have been saddled with the prospect of foreclosing on millions of distressed mortgages, at a financial cost of billions of dollars and an incalculable social cost. Crucial to solving this problem is the ability to model and analyze these millions of loans in real time, enabling lenders to price homes so that they can find effective and mutually beneficial alternatives to foreclosure.
In this talk, we'll describe how engineers at Palantir are working on a calculation engine that supports such analyses. We’ll outline our design goals of constructing a platform that supports queries against large sets of data at interactive speeds and exposes a high-level object-oriented interface that enables analysts to construct models intuitively without having to worry about the underlying implementation details. We’ll describe the different architectures we explored in prototyping the system, demo how to use our product to analyze massive datasets, and discuss how we've ultimately deployed it in the field.
Details: Monday, May 7th 6:00 - 7:30pm DC 1302 Free dinner and drinks after the talk at McGinnis FrontRow!
For more details about Palantir and information about their info session earlier in the day, please see their csc-industry post: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/csc-industry/2012-May/000030.html
Good luck in all your classes this semester, or whatever endeavors you may be enjoying the next few months. I hope to see you out at the elections and talk---mark your calendars! ^_^
-- Elana Hashman Vice-President, Winter 2012 Computer Science Club University of Waterloo ehashman@uwaterloo.ca