007 - UC Berkeley Cloud Computing Meetup 007 (September 24, 2019)
Channel: UC Berkeley CTO Bill Allison
Date: 01/11/2019

The UC Berkeley Cloud Community of Practice will be holding our 7th meetup in the Berkeley SkyDeck Penthouse. We have some excellent guests and topics and hope to see you there. This month we will be featuring three speakers: Kari Robertson from UC Santa Cruz who will be speaking about their roadmap and lessons learned moving services onto to AWS, a fascinating startup that uses AI to help enhance your organization's culture, and the Data Science Division's (and one of our regular hosts) Anthony Suen who will talk about the exciting new CloudBank initiative involving UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and the National Science Foundation.

Everyone is welcome - this is a really inclusive group! You don't have to be an expert, or already know about cloud technologies; we get together so people can learn from each other. The Berkeley SkyDeck is at 2150 Shattuck, on the top floor (press "PH" in the elevator.)

The plan for the meetup's format is to have speakers talk about their work. There will be soft drinks, salad(!) and pizza from Sliver.

AGENDA:
Networking & info sharing / people arrive and food arrives
0:01: Host welcome and announcements

Elin.ai - Anton Arapetyan, Chief Product Officer and co-founder, Richard Lu (Resident Data Scientist) and thanks to Oksana Zavoyko (co-founder and CEO).  Elin.ai is in collaboration with Stanford’s and Berkeley’s Computational Culture Lab, running research on decoding corporate culture, measuring culture health, discovering how culture influences business performance and outlining what aspects of the company culture have the biggest impact. Their service plugs into tools like Slack to make an impact on your company's culture.

Anthony Suen - Anthony is Director of Programs at the Division of Data Science and Information. He will provide an overview of the new NSF-funded CloudBank, a suite of managed services to simplify public cloud access for data science research and education run jointly by UC San Diego, University of Washington, and UC Berkeley.

Kari Robertson - Kari is the Technical Program Manager for Security and Cloud services at UC Santa Cruz. She will be talking about UC Santa Cruz's massive push to Infrastructure-as-a-service, and how they tackled the program and what they learned along the way.

Note: in order to make the event as inclusive as possible please know it is OK to bring kids - the SkyDeck is a child (and baby)-friendly venue. If you can't make it at this time, we do film all the talks and post them on YouTube.

About the format of the talks-- presenters have been invited to share their experience with a ~15 minute 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.