The (in)famous Damian Conway has gave us the honour of not just one, but two FREE talks at the end of August 2002. The talks were on Tuesday and Thursday the 27th/29th August, and took place at the aptly named Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, London. The nearest tube station is Holborn, with Chancery Lane and Russell Square also nearby. There's transport information along with a map on the Conway Hall's transport page.
Dr. Damian Conway: Biography:
Damian Conway is known as the "Mad Scientist of Perl". He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
A popular speaker and trainer, he is also the author of several infamous modules including: Parse::RecDescent (parsing without lexing), Lingua::EN::Inflect (English transformations without a dictionary), Lingua::Romana::Perligata (Perl programming without English), Class::Multimethods (polymorphism without objects), Quantum::Superpositions (quantum computing without tears), and Coy (error messages without karma). A three-time winner of the Perl Conference's Larry Wall Award, Damian is now banned from future competition and instead has the conference's Best Technical Paper named after him.He is a member of the technical committee for the Perl Conference, the convener of the annual Perl haiku contest, a columnist for The Perl Journal, and author of the book Object Oriented Perl.
Damian is closely involved in the design of Perl 6, where his job is to tempt Larry with evil ideas (such as properties, switches, currying, superpositions) and to explain Larry's apocalyptic visions.
He lists his technical interests as: programming language design, teaching programming, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing.
He lists his personal interests as: reading, fitness, cinema, and Total World Domination.
In his spare time, he travels barefoot across the U.S. -- teaching, playing his flute, having alopecic flashbacks, preaching pacifist philosophy, and generally beating the tar out of bad guys with his deadly kung-fu skills.