Abstract

Skills Talk: Everything you wanted to know about revision control but never dared to ask, David Cottingham

I’ll give a brief overview of what revision control is and why it’s useful, then go through the basics of using a repository (in particular SVN , which is used in the DTG ), before exploring how you can get yourself into a tangle with branching and merging (and ways of sorting out [pruning?] the mess). Finally, I’ll introduce distributed revision control systems, with a focus on Mercurial, and try to convince you that you should use that instead of CVS or SVN .

Research Talk: Selecting the optimal 8PSK mapping scheme using EXIT charts, William Carson

Abstract: We consider a classification scheme that reduces the number of unique mappings to 86 for the 8PSK constellation. Under this scheme, we select the optimal scheme for our system using extrinsic information (EXIT) charts. We compare the performance of this mapping to previously proposed schemes. Finally, we investigate the tightness of the binary erasure channel (BEC) to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel as the a-priori channel required by EXIT charts.