Chair's Letter

A new season already, the weather seems the same now as last March, our meetings will occur in the same locations as last year namely LT4 in the Ashley Centre of Staffordshire University’s Leek Road campus for our Northern meetings and the Octagon Building of Staffordshire University’s Stafford Campus for our Southern Venue and start at 7:30 with the exception of the December meeting at Yarnfield starts at 5:30. We will continue to have the meetings on different days of the week so that members who have other commitments on a specific night will be able to attend some of the meeting. It seemed to work last year and we had a number of new faces coming to meetings so it was worth it.

Our meetings will now start at 7:30 with the exception of the December meeting at Yarnfield which will start at 5:30pm.

This year we have some really exceptional speakers between now and Christmas. In October we have Dr Mark Baldwin who is going to talk about ‘Codebreakers’ with particular emphasis on the work done at Bletchley Park. He will be bringing one of the few German Enigma machines available in the UK. Mark has been talking on this subject for a number of years including 4 lectures in Poland and a display at the Cosford Air show this year. He comes with strong recommendations from across the industry. In December we have our usual joint meeting with IET and TCN at Yarnfield, the speaker will be Prof. Phil Green from Sheffield University is talking about clinical speech problems. A strange title for a computing & electronics audience until you realize that Phil specializes in digital speech recognition and was on the radio recently explaining how among other things they can create different regional accents for a section of speech. This will be fascinating state of the art stuff. Our November meeting has yet to be finalized as our original speaker had to pull out due to pressure of work but will be held at our Stoke venue.

After Christmas we have Tony Proctor from Wolverhampton talking about “Warning, Advice and Reporting Points (WARPs) - A Community Approach To Information Security" and our February meeting is to be a joint meeting with the local branch of the CMI, the Chartered Management Institute, a number of our younger members have requested this and we are still finalizing the details. March is our student presentation evening at Stafford and in April we are trying to rearrange the speaker we hoped to have in November.

Most of you will see we are trying to organise a short autumn course again and we have been asking our members to choose from a short list of courses that Staffordshire University has available. We are still in negotiation over the price but hope to keep it the same as last year if possible. Please check your email and the web site for further details wehope to have something in place by the end of September.

Most of our communications will be by E mail, unless you have requested otherwise, so can you please go to the BCS web site, register with them and obtain access to the members pages where you will be able to check and update your details and E mail address if necessary.

Hope to see many of you at our meetings,

Yours faithfully,

Ian Sunley, Branch Chairman