27 Apr 2010 crhodes   » (Master)

Many people will have heard that Nick Levine's health has meant that he had to withdraw from giving a talk at the upcoming European Lisp Symposium; I wish him a speedy and comfortable recovery.

I'm very glad to be able to announce that Jason Cornez of RavenPack International has agreed, at very short notice, to give a talk at the Symposium: Reading the News with Common Lisp. The abstract for his talk is:

The financial industry thrives on data: oceans of historical archives and rivers of low-latency, real-time feeds. If you can know more, know sooner, or know differently, then there is the opportunity to exploit this knowledge and make money. Today's automated trading systems consume this data and make unassisted decisions to do just that. But even though almost every trader will tell you that news is an important input into their trading decisions, most automated systems today are completely unaware of the news – some data is missing. What technology is being used to change all this and make news available as analytic data to meet the aggressive demands of the financial industry?

For around seven years now, RavenPack has been using Common Lisp as the core technology to solve problems and create opportunities for the financial industry. We have a revenue-generating business model where we sell News Analytics – factual and sentiment data extracted from unstructured, textual news. In this talk, I'll describe the RavenPack software architecture with special focus on how Lisp plays a critical role in our technology platform, and hopefully in our success. I hope to touch on why we at RavenPack love Lisp, some challenges we face when using Lisp, and perhaps even some principles of successful software engineering.

Many thanks to Jans Aasman and Craig Norvell of Franz Inc., as well as to Jason and RavenPack, for making this possible.

ELS2010 Call for Participation

May 6-7, 2010, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal

Registration for the 3rd European Lisp Symposium (ELS 2010) is open at the Symposium website.

Scope and Programme Highlights

The purpose of the European Lisp Symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion of all aspects of the design, implementation and application of any of the Lisp dialects. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.

As well as presentations of the accepted technical papers and tutorials, the programme features the following highlights:

  • Kent Pitman of HyperMeta Inc. will offer reflections on Lisp Past, Present and Future;
  • Jason Cornez of RavenPack International will talk on the use of Lisp to read and analyse news sources;
  • Pascal Costanza will lead a tutorial session on Parallel Programming in Common Lisp;
  • Matthias Felleisen of PLT will talk about languages for creating programming languages;
  • A TI Explorer Lisp Machine, having been unplugged for the best part of two decades, will be demonstrated;
  • there will be opportunities for attendees to give lightning talks and demos of late-breaking work.

Social events

  • Symposium banquet (included with registration)

  • Excursion to Sintra (optional, Saturday May 8): for six centuries the favourite Summer residence of the Kings of Portugal, who were attracted by cool climates and the beauty of the town's setting.

Registration

Registration is open at http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/ and costs €200 (€120 for students).

Registration includes a copy of the proceedings, coffee breaks, and the symposium banquet. Accommodation is not included.

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