John Lamb's week: IT visions that make your heart race

Celebrating the here and now and mulling over the future...

This year seems to be one for remembering. We've just marked anniversaries for the PC and the worldwide web. Now there's a 50th birthday bash coming up in November for LEO, the first commercial computer. LEO stands for Lyons Electronic Office, after the cafés and cake company. In 1951 Lyons decided computers would be just as good for counting up cups of tea as they were at calculating the fallout from atom bombs. So, the company decided to build one itself. Many of the people who led the LEO project will be gathering in London to relive their exploits and to promote a conference commemorating their pioneering work on 17 November. Among LEO alumni will be the project's programming leader David Caminer, Peter Hermon, who went on to run British Airways' computing and John Aris, onetime head of the National Computing Centre. This summer has seen a clutch of high profile construction projects go sour. Could the Welsh Assembly, Manchester's Commonwealth Games stadium and the London Authority lamp building have benefited from software that helped clients, architects and builders work better together? Steve Parnell, product manager at NavisWorks will be at the Institute of Directors to unveil enhancements to his company's design review software. NavisWorks is a collaboration software product for visualising and communicating extremely large designs in 3D during architecture, engineering and construction projects. Is the UK ready to embrace interactive television? It's a question that has been exercising the minds of those keen to exploit domestic TV as an electronic sales channel. So far it hasn't roused many couch potatoes from their slumbers in front of the small screen. On Wednesday, a panel of the good and the great organised by the State of the Nation discussion group will be debating how, if at all, interactive TV will catch on. You can hear the arguments at 9 Carmelite Street, London. Contact Natasha Gray at Wilson Church on 020 7072 8604. Every now and then my pulse starts to race a little faster when I think I've come across a new idea in IT. Will the concept of application mining turn out to be a blood pressure booster? It's the idea that software developers could manage their projects better if they had ready access to information about the structure of existing code. Developers need to analyse existing systems to uncover business processes and interdependencies between applications, harvest business logic and turn it into components so that it can be used in new development efforts. Software company CAST has come up with the concept of application mining, like data mining, but applied to mountains of legacy code. Development teams spend on average 35 per cent of their time searching for information about the code structure of their applications depending on where they are in their application development life cycle, claims CAST. Steve Kelly, UK managing director of the company will be briefing media and potential customers this week. "Just as data mining helps managers make better business decisions, application mining helps IT teams improve application development and maintenance by offering them knowledge of their software applications' inner structure," says CAST. Friday sees the close of a summer course organised by the Ashridge Management School on leadership skills. Budding Genghis Kahns of the IT world have spent three days practising Tai Chi - the martial art that doesn't involve hitting people - and learning the lessons that lowly members of an organisation have to teach on leadership.