Computer Science | Grinnell College

Thursday, December 7, 2017
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817)

A discussion of Summer Opportunities in Computer Science is presented by Professor Samuel A. Rebelsky and the other faculty of the department of computer science.

If you enjoy computer science (or at least computer programming), summer is an opportunity to explore new approaches, to develop new skills, and perhaps even to make some money. But what kinds of things can you do? While students tend to focus on a few options (e.g., internships and research with faculty), a wide variety of opportunities are available. In this session, we will discuss goals you might set for the summer and some opportunities that can help you achieve those goals. Then during winter break you can be starting applications and preparing to build your portfolios.

Note that this is *not* the presentation of summer research offered within this department; this is a broad overview of the kinds of opportunities one might pursue off-campus.

We’ll wrap up our semester with a fun topic for CS Table: Esoteric Programming Languages. These programming languages are intentionally designed to be complex, confusing, or funny, and often offer some clever commentary on the real programming languages we use.

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 12:00–1:00pm in JRC 224A (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. 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 (sign in at the JRC front desk).

Thursday, November 30, 2017
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817)

Using Computational Evolution to Understand the Origins of Biological Complexity is presented by Charles Ofria, professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University and president of the International Society for Artificial Life. His research lies at the intersection of Computer Science and Evolutionary Biology, developing a two-way flow of ideas between the fields, with the primary goal of understanding how evolution produces complex traits, behaviors, and intelligent processes.

Understanding the evolution of complex traits and behaviors in nature has long been a topic of intense interest in evolutionary biology. Similarly, constructing evolving systems that exhibit similar open-ended dynamics has been a grand challenge in the field of Evolutionary Computation, where researchers try to apply these natural dynamics toward solving real-world problems. Of course, Darwin himself recognized the difficulty of explaining the origins of traits of "extreme perfection and complication" such as the vertebrate eye, but also provided profound insights into the process. Ofria will discuss research where inspiration is taken from Darwin's ideas to study populations of digital organisms as they evolve new, complex traits in environments where they must perform mathematical functions to metabolize resources into additional CPU cycles. He will illustrate the processes by which digital evolution can be made to produce targeted complex traits, and demonstrate the power of these artificial life systems to help explain the rich diversity of life that we see in the natural world.

Ofria is also founder and deputy director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, a $50 million NSF Science and Technology Center, and he is architect of the Avida Digital Evolution Research Platform, which is downloaded over a thousand times per month for use in research and education at dozens of universities around the world.

At the November 21 CS Table, we’ll be discussing the phenomenon of the Gig Economy—an economy characterized by independent workers contracted for short-term jobs—and how recent developments in technology have supported this new economy. The most famous of these is Uber, and in particular, we’ll look more closely at how Uber uses data science and psychology in tandem with mobile technology to power its driver networks (for better or worse). Please read this pair of meaty (but intriguing!) articles:

• Nathan Heller. Is the Gig Economy Working? The New Yorker. May 15, 2017.
• Noam Scheiber. How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons. The New York Times. April 2, 2017. The online article features some excellent data visualizations of the concepts described within the article.

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 12:00–1:00pm in JRC 224A (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. 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 (sign in at the JRC front desk).

Robots are fun, but what happens when we decide to elevate them from simple tool to citizen? Granting citizenship to a robot has already been done in Saudi Arabia. Join us for CS Table to discuss the general implications and what this means for society and computational thinking as a whole.

• Maza, Cristina. “Saudi Arabia gives citizenship to a non-Muslim, English-speaking robot”, Newsweek, 26 Oct 2017.
• Wootson, Cleve R., Jr. “Saudi Arabia, which denies women equal rights, makes a robot a citizen”, The Washington Post: Innovations, 29 Oct 2017.

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 12:00–1:00pm in JRC 224A (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. 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 (sign in at the JRC front desk).

This CS table discussion will cover computer-aided gerrymandering: the ways that legislative district boundaries are drawn to favor specific parties or interests, and how computers have changed this process in recent years. The reading and listening below should give you some useful background information on what gerrymandering is, where it came from, and recent developments in the process.

• This short podcast (21 minutes) gives some useful background information and introduces the Gill v. Whitford case heard by the US Supreme Court this fall.
  • Rameswaram, Sean, narrator. "Who’s Gerry and Why Is He So Bad at Drawing Maps?” Radiolab Presents: More Perfect, season 2, episode 4, WNYC Studios, 2017.
• The following articles look at how computers can be used to place boundaries between legislative districts, both in support of gerrymandering as a potential tool to draw fair legislative districts.
  • Ellenberg, Jordan. “How Computer Turned Gerrymandering Into a Science”, The New York Times: Gray Matter, 6 Oct 2017.
  • Oberhaus, Daniel. “Algorithms Supercharged Gerrymandering. We Should Use Them to Fix it”, Vice: Motherboard, 3 Oct 2017.

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 12:00–1:00pm in JRC 224A (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. 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 (sign in at the JRC front desk).

This week in CS table we will be discussing the memo circulated by a former Google employee criticizing the company’s approach to workplace diversity. I expect this discussion to be wide-ranging: cultural issues in the tech industry, current and proposed strategies for recruiting diverse tech workers, and questions about protected speech in the workplace. We will have assistance in this discussion from several campus partners interested in culture change.

• The New York Times has a nice summary of the events surrounding the memo:
  • Wakabayashi, Daisuke. "Contentious Memo Strikes Nerve Inside Google and Out." The New York Times. 8 Aug. 2017.
• The two following articles raise interesting criticisms of the both the original memo and the way it has been covered:
  • Devlin, Hannah and Alex Hern. “Why are there so few women in tech? The truth behind the Google memo.” The Guardian. 8 Aug. 2017.
  • Friedersdorf, Conor. “The Most Common Error in Media Coverage of the Google Memo.” The Atlantic. 8 Aug. 2017.

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 12:00–1:00pm in JRC 224A (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. 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 (sign in at the JRC front desk).

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.

Interactive Toys have long been heralded as an introduction to technology. Although toys such as Hello Barbie and Feisty Pets have been heralded as the new frontier and games such as Minecraft are often viewed as educational, these toys and games present a few drawbacks. At this week's CS Table, we will discuss these toys and the pros and cons of this exposure.

There are two readings:

• Travis Andrews. Are Interactive Toys Interfering With Child Development? Mashable, 2/25/2014.
• Emily McReynolds, Sarah Hubbard, et al. Toys that Listen: A Study of Parents, Children, and Internet-Connected Toys. ACM CHI 2017.

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 12:00–1:00pm in JRC 224A (inside the Marketplace). Contact the CS faculty for the weekly reading. 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 (sign in at the JRC front desk).

Thursday, October 12, 2017
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817)

Improving the reliability and security of software with formal methods and automated reasoning is presented by Cesare Tinelli from The University of Iowa.

Producing robust, reliable software, which performs its intended function and is less prone to errors and security vulnerabilities, is becoming more and more important as software comes to control increasingly large and critical aspects of modern society. This talk makes a case for using mathematically rigorous approaches based on formal logic to specify the behavior of safety-critical software and verify its correctness. These methods can reduce automatically large classes of program analysis problems to constraint satisfaction problems in some formal logic, and then solve them with the aid of automatic reasoners for that logic. The talk will give a brief overview of this approach and discuss its recent successes and applications in industry, focusing on research done at the University of Iowa in this area.