Events

Date: February 3-5, 2012

Location: AcceleratorYYC, 200, 1212 9th Ave SE

Startup Weekend is an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile application which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skillsets - primarily software developers, graphics designers and business people - to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.

For more information, or to register, visit the Startup site.

Date: February 3, 2012

Shogi is one of the major variants of chess. The material balance is less important and the branching factor is greater than in Western chess. Because of these properties, creating a decent computer shogi player was a difficult challenge.

In this talk, two main features of the computer shogi program Bonanza, one of the strongest shogi programs, will be presented. One main feature is the optimization method used to train the full evaluation function with more than ten million parameters. The other is a game tree search method which is more brute-force and less selective than other popular approaches. We close with some comparisons of the algorithmic differences between chess programs and Bonanza.

For more information, click here.

Date: February 8, 2012

Time: 7:00 pm

Place: Citadel Theatre, Zeidler Hall

As the Internet came to be, we were all excited by the awesome possibilities that would be realized once this free-flowing, open network allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Remixing, collaboration, and new innovations would be the result. But while there have been great examples of open source projects (like Wikipedia) fueled by the wisdom of crowds, there are many examples where open source culture has fostered nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. Have we glorified open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity? Or is open source culture here to stay?

For more information or to register, click here.

Date: February 24, 2012

You have a business idea, but don’t necessarily have the business training to launch your company. The more you brainstorm about transforming your vision into a venture, the more questions you have. What are the legal issues with creating a company? Where is the financing going to come from? Am I targeting the right market? Find out by participating in the TEC VenturePrize business plan competition.

For more information, click here.

Date: February 28, 2012

Time: 4:00 PM - 6:30 PM

Place: Sutton Place Hotel, 10235 - 101 Street, Edmonton, AB

This networking event is an opportunity to interact with over 300 local entrepreneurs, innovators and business people and browse displays from a few of Edmonton's leading technology companies.

Click here for more information.