The talk will be on the historical background to Turing's work in the crisis of Hilbert's formalist project after the results of Goedel.

It will also look at the technical background in the form of other computing devices that were in manufacture in the early years of the 20th century. There will be particular emphasis on the extensive work done by the Admiralty on computers for naval gun control.

It will touch on the important philosophical differences between Turing's conception of effective computation based as it was on a machine, and Church's contemporaneous Lambda calculus.

The talk will be closely based on a joint presentation that Greg Michaelson and William Cockshott gave earlier this year to the British Mathematical Colloquium on the Turing centenary.

Bio: Alastair O'Brien is Public Services Sector Director of Amor Group, a highly successful independent Scottish company which provides business technology solutions to the energy, transport and public sectors. Amor Group is the largest independent Scottish business technology company with over 600 staff across its Glasgow, Aberdeen, Coventry, Edinburgh, Manchester, London, Dubai and Houston offices and forecast revenues of £65m for 2012/13. Alastair is an entertaining and informative speaker with extensive experience of the technical, managerial and commercial aspects of the software and IT business.

Synopsis: The session will begin with a short presentation on industry's needs for education and training of computing professionals and the roles of academia, commercial training organisations and company internal training courses in fulfilling these needs. The presentation will be followed by a discussion session with contributions from the branch membership which includes academics and experienced and younger professionals.

Synopsis: More and more IT professionals are applying for Chartered IT Professional status through BCS, and employers such as IBM and Microsoft are embedding the standard into their organisations. This event is a chance to find out more from one of our chartered assessors.

BCS assessor, Mike Hurst, will talk through an overview of achieving Chartered status and the wider benefits of professionalism in IT. In addition, you will find out more about the benefits and value of becoming Chartered, how the assessment process works and other useful hints and tips for achieving this status.

There will also be a chance to find out how BCS is harnessing the skills and experience of its chartered members through a new assessor recruitment programme.

Bio: Mike was one of the initial group of people through the "new" BCS CITP process in late 2009. He has been a volunteer Assessor for BCS CITP since early 2010, carrying out both assessment of initial applications and final stage interviews of applicants. To date he has carried out around 150 initial assessments and over 80 interviews.

Mike is also involved in BCS Branch activities in Scotland. He has been on the Edinburgh Branch Committee for many years and is currently the Honorary Secretary of BCS-in-Scotland.

Mike’s day job is in software development - in particular large scale measurement and management systems for telecommunications networks. He was a R&D Project Manager and System Architect with Hewlett Packard and Agilent Technologies. He is currently the System Architect / Design Authority with a start-up in Edinburgh that specialises in quality of service software for mobile networks

Synopsis: "We will be talking about SAP. The main focus is going to be on two SAP products that look to accelerate the Business Warehouse - SAP HANA and BWA. This is of particular importance in todays world of Business Analytics.

We will also look at how to guage what size of implementation you would likely need."

Synopsis: Since successfully show casing IBM Watson in 2011 on the US game show, Jeopardy!, IBM has been working hard on 'putting Watson to work'. This presentation describe the cognitive system that is Watson, what IBM has been doing with Watson, and going forward how it may have the power to transform how organizations think, act and operate in the future. We'll cover the science behind Watson and present examples of where Watson is being used in industry.

Title: Gathering residual data in the wild: some results, implications and applications

Abstract: Secondary markets for digital storage devices are enormous. Every day, many thousands of second hand devices are discarded, sent for recycling or sold at auction. These devices often contain a wealth of information concerning their former owners, their associates and their digital behaviour. This information can be of interest to researchers for several reasons, for example:

• It can provide insights into the extent of privacy and information security risks of residual data on second hand devices;
• It can provide insights into how people really behave with their devices, rather than how they say they behave; and
• It can provide realistic, large scale, test sets of real world data, for testing software based systems.

In this talk I will describe some of the experiments we have undertaken at Glasgow when working with residual data. I will describe the different domains and methods we have used to gather data, as well as the different uses we have put the data to. I will also discuss some of the legal ethical challenges encountered when working with residual data sets.

Biography: Tim Storer is a Lecturer in Software Engineering in the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. His research interests concern the design and testing of dependable software based systems. http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~tws

Synopsis: "Kim Dot Com 2.0

Following a talk given last year by Carol-Anne, this colourful character Kim Dot Com (MegaUpload) continues to challenge the establishment and digital intellectual property issues. Unable to leave New Zealand and appearing at SXSW via Skype he considers himself to be a victim of political repression rather than an online racketeer.

There is no doubt that this is a case worthy of a James Bond movie (and there has been chat about making a movie) with KDC as the megalomaniac genius 'baddie' inspiring awe and wonderment as opposed to fear and annihilation.

This talk picks up from the last one and follows the roller coaster ride of the MegaUpload case to the present day.

For those who did not attend the last talk, Carol-Anne will be providing a quick summary."