POSSCON

Last Thursday (24th) I attended POSSCON.  I rode up with Tony to keep him company, but ended up sleeping the whole way >.>


The building that POSSCON was being hosted in was spectacular.  I loved how open it was, and felt that the organization of the event was nice.  Before attending any of the lectures, I grabbed a muffin and stopped stopped by a few of the interesting booths including Oracle, HSSC, MakerBot, and Linode.  At each of the booths, I engaged in conversation with the representatives.  The 3d printer, MakerBot, was pretty fascinating, although I had heard of them prior to POSSCON.  The plastic models were cruder than I expected them to be, but I see it's value for prototyping.


The rest of the day, I bounced back and forth between the Education and Healthcare sessions.


First, I attended Education seminar by Allen Tucker about FOSS projects and using them for educational purposes.


For the 2nd session, I attended Healthcare to learn about models in Healthcare Information Systems, but was disappointed when the spokesperson didn't show.  Instead they ended up holding a panel of individuals who discussed opensource in healthcare and were available to answer questions.


During lunch I was introduced to Ian Sanderson, the head organizer of the Healthcare sessions.  We talked about HSSC (Health Sciences of SC) and Bioinformedical Informatic Services.  I explained my interest in data mining, machine learning algorithms, and my past experience doing research at the Department of Bioinformatics, Biostatisticics and Epidemiology over at MUSC.  He seemed to be impressed, and introduced me to a man named Randall Alexander.


I then spoke to Randal Alexander, who is the Program Manager at MUSC in Biomedical Informatics Services.  I mentioned that I was considering grad school in the future, and he asked me to send him an e-mail with my resume for a potential internship opportunity.


After lunch, I attended Walter Bender's presentation on Sugar Labs and was very impressed.  I have always been interested in his work, and it was really nice to hear him talk about his goals and ideas firsthand.  I really wanted to talk with him after the lecture about future educational methods (since progressive education is one of my interests), but he was swarmed with people, and I thought it best to try him another time.


The next session I went to was on Education by Corey Donohoe.  I found what he had to say about higher education and open source interesting.  At this point, I remember feeling appreciative that we have an open source program in our cs path at CofC.


After that I went to the Healthcare lecture by Dr. Dan Russler.  To be honest, I wasn't too interested in this lecture, and zoned out hardcore.


I ended up leaving a little early with Carlynn and Alex.  To my dismay, upon returning to Charleston, I found out that my name had been called at the raffle to win a book on iPad Programming.  I was disappointed because not only do I never win ANYTHING, but also I've been looking to get into mobile app development. qq.


Overall, POSSCON was a great experience, and I'm glad that we were 'forced' to attend.