On Wednesday and Thursday, I was invited to attend the Amazon Web Services Summit in London’s Excel center.
Besides an exhibition area with many vendors (some of them already suppliers to my company) like NewRelic, DataDog, GitHub, Chef, Alscient, Teradici, DataPipe, Ruxit, CloudCheckr, Amazon Activate, Elastic, Redis, etc, all with their great swag (mostly t-shirts and stickers, but lots of giveaways, from drones to iWatches), the highlight was the conference sessions.
During my flight to Boston I read “Regenesis”, the interesting genomic science book by Professor George Church, which was a gift from my friend Dr. Raminderpal Singh.
On Wednesday evening I had a very interesting conversation in Boston with both of them. Neither of them needs an introduction in the genomics world, but for those of you outside the field:
Raminder is Vice-president at Eagle Genomics and Advisor at Kanteron Systems.
June 28 and 29 I attended, along with my friend John Memarian, President & CCO of my company Kanteron Systems, the Festival of Genomics Boston, as a Microsoft Genomics Group partner.
Although the show was small, it was a great opportunity to network with industry and academic experts (from Harvard Professors to Illumina executives) and learn.
From scientific posters to the latest sequencing technologies, from robotic arms to genomics experiments in space, it was great #geekfun.
For Father’s Day (we live in London, so we celebrate it today, unlike in Spain which is March 19) my wife gave me the “Ultimate Father`s Day” gift, from TechCamp UK. [Thank you, love!]
It consisted of a workshop with other father-son / father-daughter “teams”, held at the Iron Yard (The Leathermarket – London), where we built a desktop arcade machine in 5 hours (including lunch break), following the directions from Tom and Tom, using the Picade set, setting up and using the Raspberry Pi, custom OS, emulators, ROMs, loudspeakers, power supply, LCD screen, etc:
Today I was invited to attend InfoSecurity Europe, Europe`s largest Information Security industry event.
As always, it was interesting to have a chance to catch up with this rapidly moving field, and a great opportunity to chat with old friends.
Apart from gimmicks (VR everywhere, car racing and helicopter simulators, giant robots, etc), swag (all kinds of Star Wars and other Sci-Fi related giveaways, from toys to t-shirts) and junk food (from candy to icecream to chips, the booths did not have healthy alternatives, although the food vendors did), the most interesting part of these events is always the talks, specifically the hands-on demos.
Today I was invited, along with my son, who at 14 has been a videogame developer for years, to attend the Intel Buzz videogame developer workshop. It was not only a lot of fun, but WONDERFUL to attend with him!
Although a small event, it ended up being extremely interesting, with an area to try indie games and new technologies, and a long list of talks and panels, including one-on-ones.
May 27 I was invited to participate in the “Computing in Cancer Workshop” organized by Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
It was a great opportunity to network, meet with colleagues and other researchers, and especially to learn a lot.
The fascinating lectures were:
Antonio Criminisi (Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research): Machine Learning for Medical Image Analysis Jasmin Fisher (Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research): Virtual Models of Cancer Giles Maskell (President, Royal College of Radiologists): Current problems in diagnostic radiology Fiona Gilbert (Head of the Department of Radiology, University of Cambridge) Dennis Wang (Senior Bioinformatics Scientist, AstraZeneca): Predicting drug combinations and biomarkers of response: a crowd-sourced solution Florian Markowetz (University of Cambridge, CRUK Cambridge Institute): Quantifying patterns of tumour evolution Francesca Buffa (Associate Professor, Department of Oncology, University of Oxford): In-silico systems biology and functional genomics approaches to accelerate biomarker discovery Hoifung Poon (Researcher, Microsoft Research): Machine Reading for Cancer Panomics Raj Jena (Academic Consultant Clinical Oncologist, Cambridge University Hospitals): Computing for Radiation Oncology – from cell culture to the clinic Bertie Gottgens (Professor of Molecular Haematology, University of Cambridge): Defining Cell States and Regulatory Networks using Single Cell Genomics
