Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Thursday, December 3, Charles Frantz 2011 and Jeff Leep 2011 will present the results of their summer research on automatic classification of objects, conducted here under the direction of Professor Jerod Weinman.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Combining hierarchy and feature sharing for object categorization, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

On Thursday, November 19, Christopher K. Tuggle, Professor of Molecular Genetics in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program at Iowa State University, will present a talk discussing

a variety of computational problems and projects in biology that are being explored at Iowa State, including the open-source Integrated Animal Annotation and Microarray Expression Database (ANEXdb).

He will also discuss features of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Professor Tuggle's talk, Computational problems in biology, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

At CS Table on Friday, 13 November 2009, we will consider economics of Open-Source software. Our primary reading will be a short piece from Joel on Software and an optional piece by Bruce Perens. However, participants are welcome to bring other pertinent readings.

Spolsky, Joel (2002, June 12). Strategy Letter V. Joel on Software. Web page at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

Perens, Bruce (2005). The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source Software. Web page at https://www.ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1470/1385.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

Every computer science major should read at least a little bit of Knuth before he or she graduates. This Friday for CS Table, we consider one of Knuth's lighter pieces, "The Complexity of Songs".

Knuth, D. E. 1984. The complexity of songs. Commun. ACM 27, 4 (Apr. 1984), 344-346. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=358027.358042

At Mr. Stone's recommendation, we will also consider a song that accompanied that article.

Quux, The Great. 1984. THE TELNET SONG: ("Control-Uparrow Q."). Commun. ACM 27, 4 (Apr. 1984), 347-348. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=358027.1035691

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

On Thursday, November 5, Jun Ni, Associate Professor of Radiology Informatics in the College of Medicine at the University of Iowa, will present a talk on the semantic framework for the description and classification of data derived from health records and medical imaging.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Professor Ni's talk, The ontological domain model of medical imaging informatics, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

It's the week after break. We think that you're up to something a bit deeper and a bit more challenging. Hence, we're going to read the first major paper on RAID (not the bug spray, but the disk technology). Copies are available outside Professor Rebelsky's office.

Patterson, D. A., Gibson, G., and Katz, R. H. 1988. A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID). In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD international Conference on Management of Data (Chicago, Illinois, United States, June 01 - 03, 1988). H. Boral and P. Larson, Eds. SIGMOD '88. ACM, New York, NY, 109-116. DOI=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=50202.50214.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

On Thursday, October 29, Shitanshu Aggarwal 2011 and Jay Lidaka 2010 will present their summer research work, carred out under the direction of Professor Jerod Weinman.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Parallel training: speeding up machine learning using graphical processing units, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

It's the day before break. We know that people won't be up for a deep discussion. Hence, CS Table this coming Friday, we are going to consider a classic bit of language humor: "How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot" (in your favorite programming language). Because it's a classic bit of CS humor, it has spawned many extensions and variants since its original publication in 1991. We'll work with a fairly nice extension (described below), but you can also search for other versions.

Stepney, Susan (ed). (n.d.). How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot. Web resource at http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/foot.htm. One of the more extensive of the many variants of an article from the December 1991 issue of Developer's Insight.

Grinnell College's CS Table is a weekly gathering of folks on campus (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to talk about issues relating to computer science. CS Table meets each Friday at noon in JRC 224A, the Day Public Dining Room (PDR) in the Joe Rosenfeld '25 Center (JRC). All are welcome, although computer science students and faculty are particularly encouraged to attend.

On Thursday, October 15, Steven Muschler 2011 will describe his summer experience in an outdoor leadership program:

The National Outdoor Leadership School runs various wilderness education trips throughout the world. I went on a thirty-day heavy backpacking trip in the Absaroka range in Northwestern Wyoming this past June. Such a trip brought a much needed change of pace for a Grinnell College computer scientist, as it was unusual not to have access to a computer for an extended period of time. Instead my experiences dealt with cooking from scratch, not being eaten by bears, and not getting lost. I will also talk about the basics of how a GPS system works, as it was the only thing with a circuit in it that I touched for thirty days.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, NOLS: The National Outdoor Leadership School, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

At noon on Friday, October 9, Dr. Harold Trease of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will speak on Video analytics for indexing, summarization and searching streaming video and video archives:

Given streaming video or video archives, how does one effectively summarize, classify, and search the information contained within such a large amount of image data? In this presentation, we address these issues by describing a process for the automated generation of a table of contents and of keyword, topic-based index tables that can be used to catalogue, summarize, and search large amounts of video data. Having the ability to index and search the information contained within the videos, beyond just metadata tags, provides a mechanism to extract and identify useful content. During this presentation, we describe some of the mathematics, computer science and engineering, and applications of being able to use image and video keywords as the primary search criteria, much as Web browsers (such as Google) allow us to search text today.

Dr. Trease is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Kearney and received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in nuclear engineering. He has more than thirty years of research experience in the design, implementation, and application of high-throughput, high-performance computer software. He currently leads the P3D Code Development Project. P3D is a large-scale framework for modeling, simulation, and prediction in computational physics.

Pizza and soda will be served before the talk. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This lecture serves as this week's CS Table.