Author: Wen Qixiang

Asia’s largest FLOSS conference COSCUP 2017 kicks off this weekend

Taipei, TAIWAN – From ethereum (blockchain) protocols to Pokémon GO calculators, you could expect everything to happen in this annual open source fest, and meet with farmers, anthropologists, architects, and even cabinet members from all across Asia.

COSCUP – Conference for Open Source Coders, Users, and Promoters – now celebrates its 12th annual conference from August 5 to 6, taking place in Taipei at College of Social Sciences, National Taiwan University.

Deeply rooted in local communities, it has since attracted technophiles across Asia, hosting a wide range of 20+ different topics, including Open Farm Innovation, DevOps, Civil Tech, Open Web Technologies, and even a dedicated section on community building.

Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), former Premier and acting Executive Director of Taiwan Mobile Foundation Simon Chang (張善政) are invited to share their visions on open source and collaboration on the opening ceremony. The Document Foundation Founder Italo Vignoli, Rust Core Team member Alex Crichton & Brian Anderson, Taipei Department of IT Commissioner Lee Wei-bin (李維斌) are one of the notable speakers this year.

The free-to-register event will bring nearly 2,000 attendees, speakers, and staffs from 16 countries. It is held by Open Culture Foundation (OCF), a supporting organization formed by volunteers across local communities. Several long-time supporters helped sponsored the event, including 17Media, Carousell, Rayark, KKBOX, Gandi, Yahoo (Oath), MySQL, and are reachable right at the booth.

Take a peek at conference schedule on COSCUP’s website, or join Telegram channel @coscupchat / Freenode IRC #coscup to be notified when live streaming is available.

Event information:

Conference for Open Source Coders, Users, and Promoters (COSCUP) 2017
Date: August 5 – 6
Time: 8:30am – 5pm
Venue: College of Social Sciences, National Taiwan University

GNOME.Asia Summit 2017 Call for Papers is now open

GNOME.Asia Summit 2017 invites proposals for presentations at the conference. GNOME.Asia Summit is the featured annual GNOME Conference in Asia. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, but also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss the present technology and future developments.

The conference will be held in Chongqing University, Chongqing, China from 2017-10-14  until 2017-10-16. We welcome proposals by newcomers and experienced speakers alike.

 

Coinciding with the 10 years anniversary of GNOME.Asia, 20 years since GNOME was born and the 20 years anniversary of Chongqing’s promotion as a province-level municipality, GNOME.Asia Summit 2017 arrives at the mountain city of Chongqing this year, which have an extraordinary significance.

Please submit yours at: http://cn.mikecrm.com/nhrytIP

Possible topics include, but not limited to:

Contributing to GNOME

  • Latest Developments in GNOME
  • Writing Applications for GNOME 3
  • GNOME UI Design
  • QA and testing in GNOME
  • GNOME Accessibility
  • GNOME Human Interface Engineering (Icons and Graphic
  • Design)
  • GNOME Marketing/Engagement
  • Asia success stories / Local GNOME Projects
  • GNOME and Education
  • FOSS Outreach Program
  • Developing GNOME on mobile devices (smart phones, tablets)
  • Developing GNOME on embedded systems or open source hardware
  • Google Summer of Code

Contributing to Linux and Open Source

  • Linux Kernel and Development
  • The development and promotion of open-source operating systems
  • About Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and other distributions
  • The development and promotion of other open-source projects

Open Source Enlightenment and Related Story

  • The Knowledge and Spirit of Open Source
  • Open Source stories of your own
  • How to optimize the process and  improve efficiency with the help of open-source tools
  • How to engage non-technical clightning talksontributors in Open Source Projects
  • How to engage more female contributors in Open Source Projects

Emerging Technologies

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Deep Learning
  • AR & VR
  • Big Data
  • Distributed Systems
  • Open Source DevOps
  • DevOps with AI
  • Other Emerging Technologies

Other topics could include any topic related to Free and Open Source Software not listed above.

We are about to launch program to fund part of the speakers to cover their travel expense. Please fill in the related blank in the application form and follow the latest news at: https://linuxstory.org/tag/gnome . GNOME foundation members are encouraged to apply to GNOME Travel Committee for travel allowance.

A standard session will be scheduled for 45 mins (35 mins talk + 10 mins Q&A). The session could be a technical talk, panel discussion, or BOF. If you need more time or additional resources, feel free to get in touch with the organizing team.

For participants who would like to participate, but are not sure they’d like to do a full talk proposal, we have shorter lightning talks. These are a 10 minutes presentation to demonstrate your work or promote an interesting topic. These talks will be grouped together in a single session.

Please provide a short abstract of your proposal (under 150 words). Include your name, biographical information, a photo suitable for the web, a title, and a description of your presentation. The reviewing team will evaluate the entries based on the submitted abstracts and available time by following the schedule.

*Submission deadline: 2017-08-15
*Confirmation of paper acceptance: 2017-08-20 until 2017-08-25

All interested contributors are highly encouraged to send in talks.

The GNOME.Asia 2017 Team

*More information about GNOME Asia Summit 2017 is available at: https://2017.gnome.asia/

Formal Verification Might be Built-in Linux Kernel in the Future, Message from Linux Foundation

LC3 conference with the attendance of LinuxCon, ContainerCon and CloudOpen, which is the top open source conference in the world, was held in Beijing on June, 19, with a two-day session. It was its first presence to China after it had been held in North America, Europe and Japan in the past few years. Linux 4.12-rc6 was released on the same day, and voice from Linux Foundation shows us a few prospective new features will be considered in Linux kernel development at the conference.

Jim Zemblin, the Executive Director of Linux Foundation as well as the chair of the conference, told the reporter of Linux Story in the Chinese Media exclusive interview at the news conference that Formal Verification (Wikipedia) would be built-in Linux kernel for the purpose of more security. He said, the improved security credibility of Linux kernel was helpful in supporting more new features in Linux as well as the long-term development. However, it will be a hard work. We think the feature of Formal Verification will be implemented in some independent core modules first.

It is learnt that the definition of Formal Verification is to use formal methods of mathematics to prove or disprove the correctness of a certain or some formal specifications or properties. Meanwhile, Logical Formal Verification is a systematic verification process, which uses formal methods of mathematics to verify that if the design is implemented thoroughly. Today, the main Formal Verification software programs include Coq, Isabelle , Metamath ,TLA+ and so on.

The process of Formal Verification can be used to prove that there is no certain bug in one system or the system respects to some specifications. The limitation of traditional software testing methods is that limited test cases cannot cover almost infinite state space, and without considering the exception condition of test environment often leads to a loss by hidden danger in the production environment. We cannot promise a none-bug-system even if with more test cases. And in the other hand, we eagerly expect a system without bugs in some key application scenarios. NO BUG is a concept difficult to strictly define so that trying to exclude SPECIFIC TYPE of BUGs is more practicable. The Formal Verification method can prove that if a system respects to a certain design specification, if it does not contain unknown type of bugs and it can satisfy certain functions or properties with formal methods of mathematics to business logic or code logic.

The method of Formal Verification has a history of more than 30 years. Nowadays, Formal Verification is applied in the fields of chip design(1), cloud computing(2), operation system(3), compiler(4) and Blockchain(5).

If what Jim said in his plan could be implemented successfully, the security level of lightweight isolation such as Docker would be comparable to traditional virtualization, to which the improvement of Linux kernel security would not only benefit the development of cloud computing and container of Linux, but also Docker. This might be part of the future development direction of Linux. But Jim also said that there were many difficulties ahead and there was still no detailed schedule on Formal Verification at present.

Finally, we welcome any guys who are interested in Formal Verification to join our exchange group, our service account of WeChat Media Platform is bootingman, we also expect your brief introduction before your join.

GNOME.Asia Summit 2017 to be hosted in Chongqing China

The GNOME.Asia Committee is proud to announce that the upcoming GNOME.Asia Summit 2017 will be hosted  in Chongqing, China on Oct 14-Oct 16.

The GNOME.Asia committee has decided on the city of Chongqing because it uniquely represents an important theme: open source without any restriction of time, space, or location. Chongqing is located in the southwest of Mainland China and is surrounded by mountains and rivers and used to be difficult to reach in ancient China.  Nowadays, however, Chongqing is a modern city well known for its IT industry as well as its leadership in the development of Western China which attracts more and more great minds and talents. Just as Chinese ancient poetry mentioned “No matter how high the mountain is, one can always ascend to its top”, there are a great many students and people interested in open source software and devote themselves in open source program no matter what difficulty they meet.

The Chongqing City, image licensed use by Sushiyico

The venue for this year’s GNOME.Asia Summit is Chongqing University, which is a key national university and a member of the “Excellence League”, located in Chongqing, Southwest China, cultivating tens of thousands of leading minds in the field of Technology. Chongqing University always welcomes open and free minds.

The image comes from Chongqing University

Organization of GNOME.Asia Summit 2017 will be carried out by Chongqing LUG (https://chongqinglug.org) and Linux Story (https://linuxstory.org)  and School of Software Engineering of Chongqing University(http://www.cse.cqu.edu.cn), Chongqing LUG is a very committed local team which has over 10 years of significant experience in organizing over 20 successful events.

GNOME.Asia Summit will provide great opportunities to learn and exchange ideas about free and open technologies as well as to meet and talk with other contributors and users face to face. GNOME.Asia Summit 2017 welcomes everyone to participate, have fun, and enjoy the event!

For more information about GNOME.Asia Summit 2017, please visit  https://2017.gnome.asia/

For news contact, sponsorship or other further opportunities to cooperate, please contact

Anna Yin: anna.yin@chongqinglug.org (English)
Qixiang Wen: bootingman@chongqinglug.org (Chinese)