Recently, I attended the SIGCSE 2010 conference in Milwaukee, WI as a student volunteer. I attended a couple pretty interesting talks, one by Microsoft and the other by Intel.
Timothy Ng from Microsoft presented "Getting Started with F#". Learn more about F# at the F# website.
Stewart Christie from Intel presented "Intel Atom Processors in Academia". In this talk, Stewart focused his talk on the Intel Embedded Development Board 1-N450, which Intel is using to attract hobbyists, researchers, educators, and the like. Pretty cool. Intel's goal is to start an open community around the N450 and similar boards. At the moment, this open "community" is no community as it's just getting started. In this talk, Christie also mentioned something called a "beagle board". It's not from Intel. What is it? It turns out that the Beagle Boards are pretty nifty development boards that can run Linux. Check 'em out (here).
I also meandered through the conference hall on more than one occasion. Encountered were various exhibitors, such as Google, LEGO, IBM, as well as Intel and Microsoft. Intel's exhibit was my favorite. They were showing a Mini-ITX cluster running on-site called LittleFe, and a Hexapod that used a servo control model learned with a Q-learning algorithm. Definitely neat.
