VIRTUAL -- UC Berkeley Cloud Meetup 018

July 29, 2020
Tuesday, September 29, 2020 - 10:00am to 11:30am
Online via Zoom

RSVP and Zoom info: https://www.meetup.com/ucberkeley_cloudmeetup/events/272990023/

The UC Berkeley Cloud Meetup is aimed at bringing together students, researchers, faculty, IT staff, and the wider local community to learn, share, and discuss our work in designing and operating services built on cloud computing architectures. This is a welcoming, inclusive community and hosts meetups that are open to everyone with curiosity in the topic - no need to have any technical knowledge or experience to join! 

AGENDA:

5:00 Host welcome and announcements

5:10: Speakers: Luisa Caldas (Professor, Department of Architecture, Director XR Lab - Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory(link is external), Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) & Elnaz Tafrihi (PhD Student in Architecture, Building Science and Technology. Research Focus: Design and Simulation in Immersive Environments) Luisa and Elnaz will present about their platform that enables multiple users to collaborate on design ideas using virtual, augmented and mixed reality, significantly extending the capabilities of digital technologies in remote learning. Their project uses cloud computing, running Unity's 3D cloud based development platform.

5:40 SkyDeck Startup Showcase Speaker: Shirley Pan (Founder/CEO: Fibulas). Shirley will talk about her company's vision of becoming the Github for the life sciences, and about how their product, MetaLocker™ BioFlash Drive™ uses cloud computing today.

5:50 Speaker: Poorvi Acharya from the UC Berkeley Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies will present an app she developed that uses the Google Vision API for multilanguage text recognition of images. It also creates a convenient wrapper to capture an image on screen to bridge the gap between less technical users and google vision services. She will demo the app and also discuss how it is relevant for the research community.

6:30 pm - End/ "Doors" close.

About the format of the talks-- presenters have been invited to share their experience with a short story framed around 3 questions:

1) WHY - Start with Why & the business value/value to mission. Why did you need cloud computing? Describe the big vision, business problem and/or academic challenge (not technical!) that you were trying to solve. (For example, teaching thousands of Berkeley students data science and making it come alive, or enabling citizen scientists around the world to crowdsource bird migration data to ascertain patterns...)

2) HOW - How did you end up using cloud computing to solve the challenge? How did you architect, build, design, etc. How do the pieces fit together and how does it work?

3) WHAT - What was the result? What did you learn? Share your war stories, lessons learned, insights, gotchas etc.