Computer Science | Grinnell College

Catie Baker from the University of Washington will talk about increasing access to STEM for blind students.

Thursday, May 5, 2016
4:15 pm in Science-3821
Snacks at 4 in the CS Commons.

This talk will focus on two of Baker's research projects. Tactile Graphics with a Voice (TGV) proposes an alternative to Braille labels on tactile graphics. Many people who are blind do not know Braille, and Braille is often too large to fit on the graphic anyway, so Baker's team proposes using QR codes instead, which can be read aloud by smartphones. They created a smartphone app which can provide guidance to a blind user to help them scan the QR codes. Baker will also present StructJumper, an Eclipse plugin which creates a hierarchical tree based on the nesting structure of a Java class. As screen readers are linear in nature, it can be difficult for a blind programmer to quickly skim or move around in the code. StructJumper presents a new way for blind programmers to navigate the code using its structure.

We'll explore how our notion of property and ownership is changing in the presence of digital media through three separate topics.

• As the World of Warcraft evolved, private instances have sprung up attempting to reproduce the original game before the introduction of new features that alienated some gamers. The most famous of these, Nostalrius, was issued a cease and desist order by Blizzard Entertainment. Announcements from the Nostalrius team and Blizzard; a Change.org petition.
• After Keurig's K-cup patents expired in 2012, third parties developed coffee packets to fit Keurig machines. Keurig's updated system featured a DRM scheme so only packets manufactured by Keurig would be accepted by their latest machines. Read about the technology and the pushback from customers in 2015.
• A recent CACM article by Jason Schultz opines on the decline of ownership in the advent of the digital age, in particular, the internet of things.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

Recent events in the JavaScript ecosystem have raised serious questions about the appropriate models for code sharing and reuse. In case you missed it, the sequence of events was: (1) JavaScript developer writes many modules, including one called "left-pad" that provides a function to add spaces to the left side of a string, (2) this developer loses control of a different module that used a copyrighted name, (3) developer deletes all of his modules, and (4) thousands of JavaScript applications that depend on left-pad fail.

While this sequence of events was amusing to watch as an outsider, it leads to serious questions about the appropriate size of a shareable unit of code and the practices of centralized software package management services. This topic will also give us an opportunity to discuss the difference in typing disciplines across languages and the role of type systems in building modular, reusable software components.

If you aren't familiar with JavaScript development, the node ecosystem, or the node package manager (npm), the following documentation should give you a sense of how dependencies work in JavaScript. nmp Documentation: What is npm? and npm Documentation: Using a 'package.json.'

There are several short readings for this week:

• An overview of the situation: NPM & left-pad: Have We Forgotten How To Program? David Haney. March 23, 2016.
• A response from kik, the company that controls the copyright for one of the deleted modules: A discussion about the breaking of the Internet. Mike Roberts. March 23, 2016.
• A response from npm: kik, left-pad, and npm. The npm Blog. March 23, 2016.
• And of course, because sarcasm reigns on the internet, this appeared later the same day: left-pad.io
• In case you're wondering why left-pad isn't part of JavaScript already, this brilliant article by James Mickens should give you a sense of the horror running inside your web browser: logout: To Wash It All Away. James Mickens, USENIX ;login:, March 2014

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

We'll look at three readings to tackle the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Daniel Victor and Karen Workman. "U.C. Davis Learns Downside of Trying to Scrub Search Results". The New York Times, April 2016. Recently, it came to light that UC Davis paid multiple PR firms to suppress negative search results about the university and its chancellor after the Occupy protest pepper spray incident that occurred in 2011. Was this wasted money? To what degree can we control what search engines say about us?
• SEOMoz Inc. The Beginners Guide to SEO. One front we'll discuss is how we can manipulate search engines for our benefit, the practice of search engine optimization. In particular, The Beginners Guide to SEO is a nice practical introduction to the subject that reads quickly even though it seems long.
• Alan Travis and Charles Arthur. "EU court backs 'right to be forgotten': Google must amend results on request". The Guardian, May 2014. The other front is the Right to be Forgotten, the idea that the Internet should not act as an eternal record of an individual, especially if that record is slanderous or wrong. Is the Right to be Forgotten a good right to pursue? Is it technologically possible to pursue given the nature of search engines and the industry as a whole?

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

Join us for a discussion of the role of data science in elections. The four articles below discuss the novel use of data in President Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, the Cruz campaign's approach this election cycle, and two retrospectives on Nate Silver's predictions from the 2012 election.

• Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win. Michael Scherer, Time Magazine, 11/07/2012.
• Cruz campaign credits psychological data and analytics for its rising success. Tom Hamburger, The Washington Post, 12/13/2015.
• In Defense of Nate Silver, Election Pollsters, and Statistical Predictions. Zeynep Tufekci, Wired, 11/02/2012.
• Numbers nerd Nate Silver's forecasts prove all right on election night. Luke Harding, The Guardian, 11/07/2012.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

This week's topic is End-to-end Verifiable Internet Voting (E2E-VIV), and we'll consider the following questions:

1. Why do we care about Internet voting?
2. What do we require of an Internet voting system?
3. How does end-to-end verified internet voting systems address these issues?

We'll discuss the US Vote Foundations recent technical report on E2E-VIV. For Tuesday, please read:

• the executive summary
• Chapter 2 (Remote Voting) and Chapter 4 (Required Properties of E2E Systems) from the report for non-technical audiences
• If you are interested in electronic voting, I highly recommend reading through the full technical report as well.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

In light of the recent announcement of Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman as the winners of the annual ACM Turing Award, we will be discussing their contribution to encryption. We'll also discuss the RSA encryption algorithm, which introduced asymmetric public key cryptography shortly after Diffie–Hellman. The "assigned" readings are the original academic papers on both subjects, which are surprisingly approachable for non-experts. Do your best to work through the technical details, and we'll spend much of the discussion Tuesday making sense of the rest, as well as the implications for this work. Printed copies of these two papers are on the bench outside Curtsinger's office.

• Whitfield Diffie, and Martin E. Hellman. "New directions in cryptography."Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on 22.6 (1976): 644-654.
• Ronald LRivest., Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman. "A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems." Communications of the ACM 21.2 (1978): 120-126.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

We'll be discussing the controversy behind the FBI's court order to Apple for assistance in recovering data from the phone of the San Bernadino gunmen. Below are some readings for this week. Reading packets are also outside of Sam/Charlie's office on the 3rd floor of Science.

• Apple's "Message to Our Customers"
• A description of what the court order asks for
• Technical details behind the request
• Apple's formal legal response to vacate the request
• You are encouraged to bring other relevant bits of information to the discussion table.
• I will also add in one additional reading for your consideration, an open letter to the White House by a number of industrial and academic leaders earlier last year about the issues raised by this incident.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

Join the discussion on February 23, 2016. The broad reach and ambiguity of many software patents has had a significant effect on computer-related industry and academia. Many argue that this process stifles innovation, while others see this as a natural extension of the patent mechanism: to reward innovation and promote openness. Instead of readings, you are encouraged to listen to the two *excellent* This American Life episodes on software patents:

• When Patents Attack! This American Life, July 22, 2011. Part 1 audio or Part 1 transcript.
• When Patents Attack... Part Two! This American Life, May 31, 2013. Part 2 audio or Part 2 transcript.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

In honor of Hillary Mason '00 giving convocation this Thursday at 11 am (go!), we will be talking about Data Science in table this week. In particular, we'll be answering the basic questions about data sciences—"what?" and "how?".

• Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century. Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil. Harvard Business Review, October 2012.
• A Taxonomy of Data Science. Hilary Mason and Chris Wiggins. Dataists, September, 2010.

If you are curious about the field, I recommend checking out these two optional readings as well:

• What is Data Science? Mike Loukides. O'Reilly blog, June 2010.
• Data Science Workflow: Overview and Challenges. Phillip Guo. Blog@CACM, October 2013.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.