#bigoldn: London Big-O Algorithms Group

If you think there is more to the world than “functional cloud based self learning big data analytic enterprise visualization dashboards” please read on.

Those that follow me on twitter will have noticed I have recently  taken over the organization of the London Big-O Algorithms meetup. Originally founded by Zack almost (almost a year ago) it fell quiet after the first meetup as things came up and Zack eventually moved to better weather in California. I was a strong supporter of the project from the beginning and when meetup.com sent all members an email saying the group was in danger of deletion I decided to put my money where my mouth was and took over organization.

The aim of the group is to focus on the fundamental algorithms & datastructures that developers rely on every day to make things efficient, fast, and scalable. These are things that will come up in every decent job interview and its easy to forget them in day to day work or the buzzword of the week. Any application goes, be it computational fluid dynamics or high frequency trading. Just as long as the focus is on the underlying algorithms & datastructures and it is delivered in an engaging, accessible way.

Skillsmatter have been kind enough to host us and Im happy to announce we have 2 great speakers lined up for our first meetup titled Lockless Tables, NegaMax, and Numerical Optimization in Machine Learning.

Interest has been good and I really look forward to building a community and sharing ideas & knowledge. This is where you come in. Its early days and we need to get the word out and get interesting speakers & sponsors on board for future events.

To get you thinking, here are some example topics we could cover:

• The Bloom Filter explained
• Training deep neural networks
• The Fast Fourrier Transform, more useful than you think
• What you didn’t know about hashing
• The pumping lemma: Why should you care?
• How does SSH really work
• The weapon assignment problem: strategies and applications
• Constraint programming and the SAT problem
• Genome sequence aligment
• Leader election and applications to drone coordination
• Lock free data structures
• Monte carlo sampling on 1000 cores
• …

Have a think and join in with making suggestions for topics, speakers, sponsors, etc. !

See you there.

–Dirk