Computer Science | Grinnell College

Thursday, November 2, 2017
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817)

Building your own programming language and other reasons to go to graduate school is presented by Eric Van Wyk from the University of Minnesota.

To motivate a discussion on graduate school opportunities, Van Wyk will describe some of his group's work on techniques and tools that allow programmers to construct their own programming language, either from independently-developed domain-specific language extensions or by developing language extensions from scratch. Such extensions can provide new syntax and semantic analyses that address the computational task at hand. His specific interest has been on techniques to ensure that one can pick and choose these extensions with some assurance that this collection will in fact work well together.

Research work like this is indicative of what one can do in graduate school in computer science, be it in programming languages, robotics, machine learning, systems, graphics, visualization, bioinformatics, or a plethora of other areas. One has the time and opportunity to dive deeply into an area of interest and push the boundaries of what is possible. Van Wyk will describe what graduate school is like, both generally and specifically at the University of Minnesota and, hopefully, encourage to consider graduate school as part of your future.