Our booth can be found at booth 44, which is directly outside the N2 building in the North Spine, near the NS2-2 lift block.

Here, we will be recruiting new members for the NTU Open Source Society. Please do visit out booth if you are interested in registering for the Open Source Society for the new academic year and don't forget to bring your other interested friends!

Members from the previous academic years are also invited to come re-register at our booth for the upcoming year, especially those interested in joining our main committee.

Also available at our booth are Ubuntu CDs and a customized CD of Windows-based open source productivity utilities including GIMP, Firefox, Banshee, Libreoffice, and many others, which are free for taking if you wish to register!

Prof Frank Schweitzer, Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich will be delivering a talk in NTU. Please see details below and register if interested.

Please e-mail Ms Goy Hsu Ann < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it > to register. Registration is free and NTU students are welcome.

Title

Open source software as a complex network

Abstract

Open source software (OSS) can be seen as a evolving complex network. On the structural level the nodes are given by software modules (such as classes), whereas the links between nodes may describe the type of connection (such as usage or inheritance). This network is highly dynamic because of the addition/deletion of nodes or links and the propagation of changes. Understanding the development of OSS puts a challenge on different sciences: physics, to reveal the structural features and the abstract dynamics of the network; computer science, to elucidate the software engineering principles underlying OSS; economics/management sciences, to understand the social interaction of developers and users. In this talk, using a highly data driven approach, we analyse the community dynamics in more than 100 projects, the dependency structure and the change records of 35 Java projects and the evolution of the dependency network. Our investigations show remarkable regularities in the structure and dynamics of OSS which can be reproduced by simple models, this way challenging established paradigms in software engineering.

About the Speaker

Frank Schweitzer is Professor and Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich since 2004. He is also associated member of the Department of Physics at the ETH Zurich. Frank Schweitzer received his first Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) in theoretical physics and his second Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) in philosophy of science. He is Editor-in-Chief of the "European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems" (EPJB) with responsibility for the section "Complex Systems" and Editor-in-Chief of "Advances in Complex Systems" (ACS).

The recent focus of the chair of Frank Schweitzer is on applications of complex systems theory to the dynamics of social and economic organizations. Frank Schweitzer is a founding member of the ETH Risk center, http://www.riskcenter.ethz.ch/, and co-organizer of various international conferences. A list of recent publications, talks, funded projects and other scientific activities can be found on his website: http://www.sg.ethz.ch/