Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Tuesday, November 1 at noon, Gábor Bojár, President of the Aquincum Institute of Technology (AIT), will give a presentation on their study abroad program in Noyce 3821.

An upcoming talk will be presented on campus to encourage students to consider a great new study abroad program, Aquincum Institute of Technology BUDAPEST, for students interested in computing, design, computational biology, and IT entrepreneurship.

About AIT: The AIT program has a first-rate faculty including professors such as Erno Rubik (inventor of the Rubik's Cube and recent recipient of the U.S. Outstanding Contributions to Science Education Award), an innovative curriculum including courses such as "Computer Vision for Digital Film Post-production" taught by faculty affiliates from Colorfront Studios (recent recipients of an Academy Award for technical contributions), and a guest lecture series that brings prominent speakers to campus.

All classes are conducted in English at AIT's state-of-the-art campus on the lovely banks of the Danube River. Students live in vibrant neighborhoods of Budapest and have ample opportunities to interact with Hungarian students and explore Hungary and the region.

AIT is small and friendly, with typical class sizes of 5-15 students. Recent U.S. AIT students have come from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Harvey Mudd College, Northeastern University, Pomona College, Princeton University, RPI, Skidmore, Smith, Swarthmore and Williams Colleges. The program also includes a small number of Hungarian students. (AIT Alumni).

The AIT website and APPLICATION materials are available on-line.

This Friday at CS Table, Kim and Radhika will be leading a discussion about Online Health Communities. The readings can be found at the following link: http://foswiki.cs.grinnell.edu/foswiki/bin/view/Courses/HealthCareAndComputing/OnlineHealthCommunities

We'll meet at noon in JRC 224A. Please feel free to e-mail [raymondw] if you have any questions!

On October 27, members of the computer science department's faculty will share information on potential new major requirements and a discrete structures course.

Mathematics serves many purposes within the CS curriculum. Certainly, mathematical techniques are necessary for a wide variety of activities, including linear algebra in computer graphics, mathematical induction as a precursor to recursion, and a variety of techniques in artificial intelligence. In addition, in order to successfully analyze algorithms, an activity central to computer science, students need some mathematical sophistication, including an ability to read and write proofs.

For many years, Grinnell has relied on MAT 218, Combinatorics, to ensure that students had an appropriate background for the computer science major. However, the CS faculty have also been concerned about the effects on students of MAT 218's long prerequisite chain.

The Computer Science and Mathematics/Statistics departments are considering offering a new course entitled "Discrete Structures" that will serve many of the needs of CS majors and will approach many topics through both a mathematical and computational perspective. The new course is also likely to have prerequisites of MAT 131, Calculus I, and CSC 151, Functional Problem Solving. Dr. Stone's notes on a possible structure for that course appear here.

If this new course is offered, the Computer Science department is likely to change its requirements so that students may take either MAT 218 or this new course. Before we move forward further with these proposals, we would like to hear from our students.

We invite you to come meet with us to discuss the new course and the potential changes to the computer science curriculum. Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The presentation and discussion will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend.

This Friday, October 14, Kyle and Martin E. will be leading a discussion about Online Health Information Systems. You can find links to the papers for this week at http://foswiki.cs.grinnell.edu/foswiki/bin/view/Courses/HealthCareAndCom... As usual, we'll meet around noon in JRC 224A. Hope to see you there!

This Friday, October 14, Kyle and Martin E. will be leading a discussion about Online Health Information Systems. You can find links to the papers for this week at http://foswiki.cs.grinnell.edu/foswiki/bin/view/Courses/HealthCareAndCom... ng/OHIS As usual, we'll meet around noon in JRC 224A. Hope to see you there!

On October 13, Brady Garvin from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln will present a talk in the Thursday Extra series:

Developers are increasingly building large software in the form of highly configurable systems, systems with features that can be toggled on and off. The major risk for highly configurable systems is that some bugs, called configuration-dependent faults, only cause failures when certain features are combined, being invisible otherwise. My talk will first discuss the techniques we currently have to combat configuration-dependent faults and show that they all exploit a common idea, which we term feature locality. I will then present some newly discovered forms of feature locality and explain how they are helping us better prevent, find, mitigate, and repair configuration-dependent faults.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Mr. Garvin's talk, "Configuration-dependent faults and feature locality," will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On Thursday, October 6, Zach Butler '13 and Dugan Knoll '12, will present a talk in the "Thursday Extra" series on their summer research:

Scientists have been working in the field of text recognition, the science of automatically reading text, for over 200 years. While the problem of reading whole documents (commonly called OCR, or optical character recognition) is more or less solved, the problem of reading text from arbitrary real-world scenes (Scene Text Recognition, or STR) still presents researchers with many challenges. Yet humans have been able to read such text ever since we created language. Many have created a robust recognition programs, but some still suffer from not knowing where the text baseline is—that is, where the non-descending characters of a line of text end. In this talk, we will discuss what makes reading scene text so difficult, how we made a baseline detection algorithm to improve the results of scene text recognition systems, and how we used the scientific method to make our system as robust as possible in ten weeks.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, "A robust system for discovering text baselines in scene text images," will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend.

This Friday at CS Table, Benji and Martin E. will be leading a discussion about Certified Provider Order Entry Systems (CPOE). The readings can be found at the following link: http://foswiki.cs.grinnell.edu/foswiki/bin/view/Courses/HealthCareAndCom... We'll meet at noon in JRC 224A. Please feel free to e-mail back if you have any questions!

On Thursday, September 29, Max Kaufmann 2012, will present a talk in the "Thursday Extra" series on his summer research:

As the computational power available has grown, the field of machine translation has shifted from using rule-based approaches to statistical-based ones. In essence, many modern machine translation systems learn how to translate by "reading" lots of parallel texts (the same text translated into two languages). The usefulness of this method is largely determined by the amount of parallel texts that are available. This summer I worked at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with Dr. Jugal Kalita to create method capable of automatically generating these parallel texts for 92 language pairs.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Mr. Kaufmann's talk, "Automatically generating parallel corpora," will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend.

This Friday at CS Table, April, Benji and Hay will be leading a discussion about Safety Critical Systems in health care. The readings can be found at the following link: http://foswiki.cs.grinnell.edu/foswiki/bin/view/Courses/HealthCareAndCom... As usual, we'll meet at about noon in JRC 224A.