Possible SAS Certified Base Programmer Credential Exam

The potential exists for us to run the SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9 Credential exam in DIT for DIT students next semester. We will only do this if there is sufficient interest. Details of the Base Programmer credential are available at: http://support.sas.com/certify/creds/bp.html

This exam is only suitable for those with extensive, existing SAS programming experience and no classes or exam preparation will be available from DIT. If you would be interested in taking this exam, and have sufficient SAS programming experience (see the link above) please let me know at Brian.MacNamee@dit.ie.

Congratulations To Our New MSc Graduates

Congratulations to all of the MSc graduates who enjoyed their graduation ceremony over the weekend just passed. Great job everyone (we know some of you can't stop reading the blog)!

Temporary Position with Irish Times - Semantic Content Enrichment

The Irish Times have a temporary (8-12 weeks) role for an individual interested in the data mining/ semantic web / natural language processing/document classification space.

This will be part of a large project in which t the system that produces the newspaper and the system that produces the website will be replaced with an integrated CMS. They are also installing a Semantic Content Enrichment system called Temis into theeditorial workflow.  Temis will perform entity-extraction services over unstructured article data sets and suggest people, places, companies, organisations, stock-tickers and categories.

The role to train the Temis engine is in two parts:

1)     Load up as many dictionary terms we can find , particularly relating to Irish localisation

      e.g. Dail, Taoiseach

2)   The more involved task of training the engine to recognise Irish Times articles and

      categorise them as per an agreed Irish Times topic list e.g. Articles about the Central

      Mental Hospital in Dundurm should be categorised under Mental Health.


      Here are some links to the Content Enrichment’s website:

            http://www.temis.com/index.php?id=95&selt=1

            http://www.temis.com/index.php?id=235&selt=1

If you are interested email the project manager, Claire McMahon (claire.mcmahon@gmail.com)

Penalty For Late Registrations

The deadline for DIT registrations is October 31st. Students registering after this date will face a €200 penalty and will not be given the opportunity to pay in installments. Further details are available here: http://www.dit.ie/registration/http://www.dit.ie/registration/

If you haven't done so yet, please register now!

Would You Like To Be A Class Rep?

Each class cohort in DIT has a class rep to help represent the class to the rest of the institute. the students union have some useful information on class rep duties here: http://www.ditsu.ie/union/class-reps/

We need a class rep for each class cohort on each of our MSc streams:

• Full-time Data Analytics
• Full-time Advanced Software Development
• Part-time Data Analytics
• Part-time Advanced Software Development
• Part-time Information & Knowledge Management

If you would like to act as a class rep could you please let me know by next Tuesday (23rd October) via email (Brian.MacNamee@dit.ie) indicating your stream and class cohort. I will organise elections if required.

DIT VPN Access For School of Computing Postgraduate Students

School of Computing students are offered VPN access to allow them access local computing resources such as the application servers used in some classes fro outside the DIT campus. Details on how to make a VPN connection are given at:

http://www.dit.ie/computing/studentresources/vpnaccess/

Please pay particular attention to the points made at this website about limited access to tech support for this service.

Trinity College - Innovation and Technologies Showcase 4th October

Trinity College Dublin’s Technology Transfer Office will be hosting  the annual Innovation and Technologies Showcase in the O’Reilly Institute on Thursday 4th October 2012,  from 4-8pm

Trinity researchers will showcase innovative ideas, technologies, products and processes at different stages in the commercial pipeline and derived from a wide range of disciplines across College.

30+ projects will be showcases


http://trinityshowcase.eventbrite.ie/?goback=%2Egde_3241550_member_171297136&ebtv=C

Idiro Technologys Presentation & Jobs

Aidan Connolly, the CEO of Idiro Technologies will be be giving a presentation on Monday 15th October @18:30 in KE-4-008, for about 30 minutes

He will be giving an overview of Idiro Technologies, what Predictive Analytics work they do, the type of projects they do and some of their customers. All their work is in the are of Social Network Analysis.

Idiro are expanding and are looking to hire a number of people with skills in software development, statistics, high performance computing and databases.

Come along if you are interested (with a copy of your CV)

Knowledge Acquisition and Modelling Class Oct 8th

Class this evening will be in KA-3-005 (lab on 3rd floor) @ 18.30

Talk on Monday by Mobile Telecoms Analytics Expert

Victor Carey, customer insight manager at Three Ireland, will give a presentation in DIT on "How Three Ireland is Finding Ways to Action Segmentation Results. The presentation will take place as part of Brendan Tierney's Data Mining class on Monday the 8thof October at 18:30 in room KE-4-008 in Kevin St.

This talk should offer a valuable insight into how analytics results are put into practice in large, dynamic organizations. Please come along if interested.

Visualisation Class in KA-3-008 Today

Tonight's Visualisation class will take place in the lab in KA-3-008.

Web Application Architectures - Self Study Questions

The class is cancelled this week. Please use this opportunity to catch up with Java and
Web Development if you did not study/work in this area before. The questions asked
here are mostly technical questions. You may try to write programs to help answer
your questions.


Java Questions

What is the difference between procedural and object-oriented programs?
What are Encapsulation, Inheritance and Polymorphism?
What is the difference between Assignment and Initialization?
What are Class, Constructor and Primitive data types?
What is an Object and how do you allocate memory to it?
What is the difference between constructor and method?
What are methods and how are they defined?
What is casting?
What is method overloading and method overriding?
What is meant by Inheritance and what are its advantages?
What is the difference between this() and super()?
What is the difference between superclass and subclass?
What is an abstract class?
What is the difference between Integer and int?
What is the difference between abstract class and interface?
What is the difference between Array and vector?
What is the difference between exception and error?


Web Questions

How do you edit and debug an HTML file?
What is the difference between an HTTP GET and HTTP POST?
What is the full structure of a URL (URI)?
What is a domain name?
What is an IP address?
What is the default HTTP port and how can this port be changed from both client side
and server side?
What kind of HTTP request does the <a href="url">text</a> generate?
What are the typical tags that are used to create an HTML form?
How can you create an HTML table with 3 columns and 5 rows?
What are the common user behaviors when they are browsing a web page?
What is JavaScript and why is it used?


Database Questions

What is SQL?
What are SELECT, INSERT, and UPDATE statements?
How can you compare a part of the name rather than the entire name?
What is ERD?
What is primary key?
What is foreign key?
What are DDL and DML?
What is a database schema?
How do you execute a DDL script in MySQL?
In a typical database system for a grocery shop, how do you find out the following
information using a SELECT statement: Confectionery Brand, Unit Price, Supplier’s
Name, and Stock Level?

Web Application Architectures cancelled for Oct 2nd

The lecture for Web Application Architectures for Tuesday 2nd October is cancelled.   The class will be made up at a later date, arrangements to be confirmed by the lecturer.