Speakers
Aleksander Franiczek
Femke Kocken
Femke Kocken is a design researcher, that aims to create meaningful interactions within communities by creating designs that feel innate in technologically augmented worlds. With a background in Industrial Design at the Technological University of Eindhoven, her work centres around conducting research, design making, and creating insights from and with people.
Gregory Nacu
Gregory Naçu is the creator of C64 OS and the founder of OpCoders Inc. A lifelong Commodore enthusiast, he began programming after discovering a broken VIC-20 at age five and receiving a Commodore 64 at age nine. In the late 1990s he became active in the Commodore community, attending Commodore Expos and developing software for the SuperCPU and the WiNGs operating system. After returning to the scene years later, he set out to bring a modern, mouse-driven computing environment to the Commodore 64, leading to the creation of C64 OS—a powerful operating system enhancement written in 6502 assembly language and developed on a Commodore 128.
Supercharge your C64 with C64 OS
Martin Robillard
Martin Robillard is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. His research is in software engineering, with an emphasis on the human aspects of software development and code quality. A passionate Java programmer for 30 years, he is the author of the book “Introduction to Software Design with Java” and the maintainer of the JetUML software modeling tool and the codesample.info website.
Leo Binkowski
Leo Binkowski is a software developer and one of the original programmers behind the NABU computer network, an early online home-computer system developed in Canada in the early 1980s. He joined the NABU software team shortly after high school and worked from 1982 to 1986 developing arcade-style games and software for the platform. Over the years, his original source code, development materials, and software archives have played a major role in preserving the history of the NABU system. More recently, Leo has helped lead modern efforts to restore and document the NABU platform through the NABU RetroNET preservation project, where he has shared original code, hardware, and historical insight with the retro-computing community. He has also presented at major vintage-computing events such as the Vintage Computer Festival East, where he speaks about the development of early online computing and his experience working on the NABU network at the beginning of the home-computer era.
Leo Binkowski is visiting Concordia to demonstrate The NABU Network, the only Family oriented computer invented entirely in Canada. Discovery of a large cache of brand new computers never distributioned has sparked a worldwide adventure to recover and restore the software, as well as to connect it to the modern age
Giuseppe Destefanis
Giuseppe Destefanis is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), where he is part of the Financial Computing and Analytics group, and Co-Head of the London SmartBridgeLab. His research covers Empirical Software Engineering, Mining Software Repositories, Large Language Models, and Blockchain technologies. He focuses on improving software quality and the developer experience, and on examining how new AI tools can support software engineering and be integrated into organisational practice.
Frédérick Maheux
Frédérick Maheux is a multimedia artist whose main interests are emergent subcultures of the digital age, eschatological futurology, and speculative realism. Besides his work in experimental and documentary cinema, he creates noisy video games, produces industrial music under Un Regard Froid, and practices the art of analogic collages. He is currently a doctoral student at the communication department of UQAM, working on video game creation as a research methodology to study noise.