UKUUG & O’Reilly are pleased to announce details of the following forthcoming events:

Intermediate Perl – 15th & 16th February 2011

Advanced Perl  -  17th & 18th February 2011

http://www.ukuug.org/events/perl2011/

Venue: Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB

2 day Intermediate Perl (including practical session)
NOTE:  All delegates will need to bring a laptop with a recent version of Perl installed.

Description: This course is aimed at people who have done a little Perl programming and who want to add another dimension to their Perl knowledge. This is the knowledge that separates real “Perl programmers” from people who simply “use Perl”.

Course Outline:
* Types of variable
* Strict and warnings
* References
* Sorting
* Reusable code
* Object orientation
* Testing
* Dates & times
* Templates
* Databases
* Further information

2 day Advanced Perl (including practical session)
NOTE:  All delegates will need to bring a laptop with a recent version of Perl installed.

Description: This course is aimed at people who have a lot of experience with Perl. It teaches many of the latest and most powerful techniques being used by Perl programmers. The exact contents of this course will change as new techniques are introduced.

Course Outline:
* Perl 5.10 & 5.12
* Advanced testing
*DBIx::Class
* Handling exceptions
* Profiling & benchmarking
* Catalyst
* Object Oriented programming with Moose
* Web development with Plack

Tutor: Dave Cross is the owner of Magnum Solutions Ltd, an Open Source consultancy company based in London. In 1998 he started london.pm which has grown to be one of the largest Perl Mongers groups in the world. He nominally led the group until September 2001. Between August 2002 and June 2006 he was the Perl Mongers User Groups Co-ordinator for the Perl Foundation. Dave is a regular speaker at Perl and Open Source conferences and is often invited to present tutorials alongside the main conference. He is the author of “Data Munging with Perl” (Manning, 2001) and a co-author of “Perl Template Toolkit” (O’Reilly, 2003). Dave lives in SW London. The rumours about gold-plated cats were never true.

Visit the UKUUG web site at:  http://www.ukuug.org/events/perl2011/ for delegate costs and on-line booking form.

***PLACES ARE LIMITED – EARLY BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL***

Early-bird rates available until Friday 28th January

Benefits of Free/Libre Open Source Software
in Health Care (FLOSS-HC)

Special track on FLOSS-HC projects and initiatives at Med-e-Tel 2011

Next years Med-e-Tel are organizing the 2nd FLOSS in health care track
Please feel free to have a look at last years program. Most of the presentations are also available online at MedFLOSS.org

Call for participation

After the success of its first edition at Med-e-Tel 2010 (23 speakers, 1 keynote presentation, 1 panel discussion), the Free/Libre Open Source Software in Health Care (FLOSS-HC) track 2011 aims to create the leading European summit bringing together FLOSS-HC developers, service providers and users from all over the world to cross-fertilize Open technological, business and social initiatives to shape the future of open health care systems.

Co-organized by the European Federation for Medical Informatics Free/Libre Open Source Working Group (EFMI LIFOSS WG), the International Medical Informatics Association Open Source Working Group (IMIA OS WG) and the International Society for Telemedicine & eHealth (ISfTeH), it offers a new platform for collaboration establishment, experience exchange and a unique opportunity to foster prospective thinking towards open, collaboratively developed systems in health care.

Submissions from all areas of health care are welcome that deal with free/libre open source software. Topics of interest for this track cover various aspects of FLOSS in health informatics, including but not limited to:

• collaborative care across the Internet
• interoperability between different FLOSS-HC systems
• free access to shared medical knowledge and Evidence Based Medicine (EBM)
• second opinion and support for training
• software solutions for low resource settings
• FLOSS-HC as a strategy for software development supported by welfare organizations
• systems for public health
• cross-fertilization with the Humanitarian FOSS (H-FOSS) community
• analysis of cultural differences which could require adapted software solutions
• reuse of modular software components
• FLOSS-HC in education

We also want to especially encourage open source software companies to provide some insights in their open source based business model, offered services and products. Potential subjects could be:

• successful business models for FLOSS in health care
• certification process: fulfillment of legal requirements as service
• successful co-existance of a community maintained main-project and a vendor extended sub-project
• license considerations: which license to choose to allow also commercial reuse in own products
• success stories: transformation from an originally closed to an open source development approach
• user acceptance: has “open source” already become a marketing argument?

Submission

Four types of submissions are welcome:
1. Paper
2. Poster
3. Software demos
4. Position paper

Authors that would like to submit a paper or poster should use the online abstract submission form and provide the keyword “FLOSS-HC” in their list of keywords.

For software demo and position paper submissions, authors should send their abstract (max. 1 page) to the FLOSS-HC track chair, Thomas Karopka, at tkaropka@googlemail.com.

Deadline for papers and posters: 10 December 2010
Deadline for demos and position papers: 14 January 2011

Registration

Click here to register for the Med-e-Tel conference (incl. access to the FLOSS-HC track).

Venue

Luxexpo
10 circuit de la Foire Internationale
1347 Luxembourg
Luxembourg
Click here for a local area map.

Hotels

For hotel information and reservation form, click here.

Questions, suggestions and expressions of interest to participate are welcome at:

tkaropka@googlemail.com
info@medetel.eu

This one day Health Informatics conference hosted and organized by the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) and oshi-uk.com (http://www.oshi-uk.com/) will be held on Wednesday 27th October 2010 from around 1000 to 1700 hours at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf)

This bookable event is free and open to all with buffet and refreshments. To book a place please contact Mark Elkins via mark_elkins@bcs.org

The focus of this conference will be around the place that Open Source software should have in UK healthcare and how a coherent community might be established around it. For example would: An NHS version of OpenOffice be a practical proposition?; Could the skillsets that exist within UK healthcare be utilised to create sustainable implementations of Open Source software?; How would the requirements for this be gathered?; Is standardisation via Open Source software a viable aim across the UK healthcare sector?

Presentation details:

Matthew Barker, Canonical Ltd and Zahid Malik, Fry-IT discuss a case study at Great Ormond Street Hospital about using Ubuntu Linux Server Edition and OpenVZ virtualization software http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies/ucl-institute-of-child-health

John Chelsom and Raju Aluwhalia – Open Health Informatics – A Fresh Approach to NHS IT

The NHS is just emerging from a decade of wasted opportunity in the development of clinical information systems, particularly Electronic Health Records.

The National Programme for IT was a centralised approach to information sharing that has failed on a number of levels. This has delayed the introduction of new systems, weakened the commercial supplier base and disheartened many IT professionals in the service. The NHS needs a new approach to clinical IT.

Some have called for the use of more open source software, and it is true that open source and open standards can go some way towards providing long term solutions for the NHS.

But just introducing open source software risks repeating many of the mistakes that have dogged the National Programme – lack of involvement of practitioners, protection of the vested interests of product vendors, reliance on large-scale service providers and over-complicated solutions to immediate and very practical problems.

Open Health Informatics introduces two new dimensions to the open standards / open source landscape. Firstly, the use of open interfaces so that every component of a solution can be plugged in and out at will, enabling a ‘best of breed’ approach to open source and eliminating once and for all the product-centric culture that has held back the NHS.

Secondly, the use of open development processes – agile development that involves users and other stakeholders at every step of the way. Agile, open processes also eliminate the pretence that users know exactly what they want at the start of development, or that the solution provider knows exactly how to deliver it.

This presentation outlines the key concepts of Open Health Informatics, its potential benefits and drawbacks, and provides feedback on initial studies and practical implementation undertaken at City University, London.

John Chelsom is a Professor at the Centre for Health Informatics, City University, London and Managing Partner at Eleven Informatics LLP. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD for work on the application of knowledge-based systems in critical care medicine. For fifteen years he headed a software company which developed some of first web-based health records systems in the NHS and played a major part in designing and implementing systems for the National Programme for IT. He accepted the award for ‘SME of the Year’ from the BCS in 2007. At City University he heads a research programme investigating, evaluating and promoting the use of Open Health Informatics for the development of clinical information systems.

Denise Downs, Department of Health Informatics Directorate will talk about a Connecting For Health (CFH) research project with York University on establishing an open source ecosystem in UK for health informatics

Mark Elkins, Chair, OSSG will introduce and chair the conference.

Les Hatton – FOSS systems: why do we not use them more ?

We do not have a very good record in deploying successful large systems in the UK. The health sector is arguably the largest absorber of funding for such systems and as such has come in for a justifiable share of the opprobrium, with numerous difficulties being reported in various systems, notably the flagship Connecting for Health program.

What is the role of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) in all this ? It is usually greeted by suspicion and yet much of the world’s IT infrastructure depends on it.

This talk highlights some of the less obvious benefits of open source. Yes its free, but consider the following:

• Many of its significant projects are astonishingly reliable when compared with their commercial equivalents. The Linux kernel is now by a number of measures the most reliable complex application the human race has managed to construct so far.
• Its evolutionary aspects are much more suited to the shifting sands of requirements inherent
  in the successful deployment of major systems.
• The unusually high quality of its amateur researchers has solved many of the world’s knottier IT problems, for example, FOSS contributors in Bayesian and other forms of filtering have effectively conquered spam. If you get spam its because of the ignorance of
  your ISP and not because of the lack of a sophisticated solution.
• Its informal support is in my experience far better than support from big suppliers. How many levels of telephone menu can you take ?

I will give a number of examples to support these and other points including a comparative assessment of the Welsh equivalent of the Connecting for Health program.

The bottom line is that its relatively straight-forward to build high-quality scalable systems at a modest price. All you have to do is to heed important historical lessons about engineering, most of which have evolved naturally in FOSS systems.

Les Hatton MA, MSc, LLM, PhD, C.Eng is managing director of Oakwood Computing Associates Ltd. and holds the Chair of Forensic Software Engineering at the Kingston University, London. He received a number of international prizes for geophysics in the 1970s and 1980s before becoming interested in software reliability and switching careers in the 1990s. Although he has spent most of his working life in industry, he was formerly a Professor of Geophysics at the University of Delft, the Netherlands and prior to that an Industrial Fellow in Geophysics at Wolfson College Oxford.
He has published many technical papers and his 1995 book “Safer C” helped promote the use of safer language subsets in embedded control systems and paved the way for the automotive industry’s widely­used MISRA C standard. He has designed, implemented and/or managed the production of successful government and commercial IT systems, from 50,000 source lines up to the world’s first portable seismic data processing package, SKS, eventually comprising some 2,000,000 source lines.

His primary interests in computing science are forensic engineering, information security, legal liability and the theory of large systems evolution.  In mathematics, he is active in signal processing, medical image processing, sports biomechanics and modelling the effects of high frequency sound on marine mammals.

He is the guitarist and harmonica player with the Juniper Hill Blues Band.

Didier Leibovici and Suchith Anand – Open Source and Open Standards in Health Mapping

Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham

Open source geospatial software tools offer new opportunities for developers to create health mapping applications more quickly and at lower cost. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration. The foundation’s projects are all freely available and usable under an OSI certified open source licence.  The development of standards for geospatial domain has been spearheaded by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) – a group of over 400 private, public and academic organisations. The OGC aims to facilitate interoperability between geospatial technologies through education, standards and other initiatives.

This presentation will cover the key concepts of Open Source and Open Standards in Health mapping and epidemiological studies based on initial research undertaken at Centre for Geospatial Science at the University of Nottingham. The presentation will also cover (i) different user perspectives, e.g. public and community, research, health professionals and (ii) different interaction levels, e.g. simple data “mashups” (overlay), use of web processing services (WPS) etc.

Didier G. Leibovici, is a Research Fellow in geospatial modelling and analysis, with previous posts as statistician in epidemiological/medical imaging research and as geomatician for landscape changes in agro- ecology. Research Interests include interoperability and conflation models for cross-scales for integrated modelling applications within an interoperable framework chaining web services.

Suchith Anand is Ordnance Survey Research Fellow at the Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham. He is founder and co-Chair of both the ICA working group on Open Source

Geospatial Technologies and the Open Source GIS UK conference series. His research interests are in Open Source GIS, optimization techniques, data conflation and automated generalization.

More details at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~lgzwww/contacts/staffPages/SuchithAnand/Suchith%20Anand.htm

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton – gnumed importing HL7 v3 lab data

Malcolm Newbury, Guildfoss Limited – Case Study: An open source IHE XDS clinical document repository. This talk will include covering XDS and its open source componentry covering where to use openesb and muralon.

Malcolm is an experienced programme and consulting manager with an extensive track record of delivery in open source healthcare integration and collaboration services. At Sun Microsytem’s he managed integration services to over 100 NHS accounts including Spine, delivered Sun ‘s implementation of Choose and Book at key London Trusts and went on to devise and promote Sun’s open source strategy for healthcare worldwide. At PA Consulting he delivered some key phases of some important data sharing initiatives such as GP2GP and the NHS Data Dictionary. He is also supplier co-chair of IHE-UK.

Paul Richardson on scene setting with general vision and practical steps. Paul has recently created http://www.oshi-uk.com/ which is an expression/discussion focal point on the adoption of Open Source by the NHS.

Eckhard Schwarzat – Open Source solutions for the front line

• NHS provider organisations current status and capacity for change
• Macro level: Reorganisation of the NHS, cuts, cuts, cuts
• Meta level: Change and inertia
• Micro level: Open Source message is received by what type of organisation exactly?
• Dental Open ERP
• The intended primary user group: Salaried Dental Services
• The needs and requirements
• Agile development
• Business Analysis and End-User involvement
• Open Standards
• The benefits
• Thoughts on support of Open Source on the macro level

Eckhard is an experienced project and programme manager who has worked for one of the ‘big four’ as a consulting manager. He has worked mainly on Business Intelligence and Performance Management projects and programmes throughout Europe. A postgraduate degree in Public Management and Administration as well as a Master of Research in Informatics from the University of Constance, Germany and the University of Manchester in addition with a special interest in Decision Analysis are his academic foundation.Promoting, using and implementing Open Source solutions since the last five years in various sectors, Eckhard is also a trained Paramedic (Nothing to be concerned about, the last ambulance shift was more than ten years ago).

Ben Tebbs, Pentaho – Case Study: An open source Business Intelligence suite for NHS Islington. A graduate of Sheffield and Coventry Universities, Ben joined Pentaho in October 2009 to drive forward the UK & Ireland business. With 17 years in the enterprise software business with ITSM, BPM and BI players Metastorm and Datawatch, amongst others, Ben manages key UK Pentaho NHS customers such as Islington PCT and the NHS Information Centre as well as being responsible for new business. He brings a strong track record in BI to bear alongside a deep knowledge of the NHS marketplace.