Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Thursday, April 10, Nediyana Daskalova 2014, Nathalie Ford 2014, Ann Hu 2014, Kyle Moorehead 2015, and Ben Wagnon 2014 will present the results of their summer and fall 2013 research with Professor Janet Davis:

We designed persuasive technology to encourage better sleep habits in college students. Using participatory workshops, we collaborated with Grinnell students to identify problems, brainstorm potential solutions, and develop low-tech prototypes. This talk will give an overview of the design process and directions for future work.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The presentation, “Designing technology to help Grinnellians sleep more,” will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This Friday at CS Table, we will consider skip lists, an interesting data structure that, like lists, makes it easy to add and remove elements, and like arrays, lets you do something like binary search to quickly find elements.

Pugh, W. “Skip lists: A probabilistic alternative to balanced trees.” Communications of the ACM 33 (1990), no. 6, p. 668.

Computer Science Table is an open weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science.

Grinnell's computer science curriculum and major are in transtion!

As discussed in past Thursday Extras, revisions to the curriculum have been motivated by faculty perspectives, alumni feedback, and recommendations by the national professional societies (ACM and IEEE-CS). New and revised offerings reflect emerging subject areas, expansion of cutting-edge pedagogy, and explicit connections with Grinnell's core values. The innovative packaging of topics ensure that majors will cover numerous core subjects within the field, while allowing students to select a range of courses that support their career and educational goals.

Final approvals for this new curriculum were completed about two weeks ago, and the full proposal will go into effect over this coming summer.

The Thursday Extra on Thursday, February 26, will look ahead to highlight new courses, consider scheduling possibilities, and suggest possible options for students with various varying interests.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The presentation, “Planning with Grinnell's New CS Curriculum and Major,” will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, February 20, the Computer Science SEPC will host a session on how to prepare for technical interviews. Third-year and fourth-year students will share tips, tricks, and advice they have gathered from their interview experiences. We will then break into small groups to work through some practice interview problems. Those who are interested will have an opportunity to sign up for the practice technical interview session planned for a future Thursday Extra.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The presentation, “Preparing for the technical interview,” will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, February 13, John Stone will describe left-leaning red-black trees, a variant of binary search trees that guarantees that the worst-case running times for search, insertion, and deletion are proportional to the logarithm of the number of elements in the tree, and is easier to understand and simpler to code than more familiar self-balancing tree structures.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, “Left-leaning red-black trees,” will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This Friday at CS Table, we will consider the classic “P vs. NP” problem.

Fortnow, Lance. “The status of the P versus NP problem.” Communications of the ACM 52 (2009), no. 9, pp. 78–86.

In this article I look at how people have tried to solve the P versus NP problem as well as how this question has shaped so much of the research in computer science and beyond. I will look at how to handle NP-complete problems and the theory that has developed from those approaches. I show how a new type of “interactive proof systems” led to limitations of approximation algorithms and consider whether quantum computing can solve NP-complete problems (short answer: not likely). And I close by describing a new long-term project that will try to separate P from NP using algebraic-geometric techniques.

This article does not try to be totally accurate or complete either technically or historically, but rather informally describes the P versus NP problem and the major directions in computer science inspired by this question over the past several decades.

Computer Science Table is an open weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science.

On Wednesday, February 5, Maijid Moujaled 2014, Colin Tremblay 2014, Lea Marold Sonnenschein 2015, and Patrick Triest 2015 will discuss the work of the AppDev Team, in developing and implementing a training program for students interested in designing and/or developing mobile applications.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, “Grinnell AppDev: Building community for mobile development,” will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, January 30, Spencer Liberto 2015 will report on the work of his summer 2013 research team:

Over the course of the summer, a group of students worked with Professor Sam Rebelsky to redesign the CSC 207 curriculum. Our goal was to create a curriculum that was a more natural successor of the first two introductory courses in the sequence, by engaging the students with motivational tools and a core theme they could relate to. We achieved that by building the curriculum around Android development, to provide students with tangible end-of-course projects to call their own, and tying it all together under an overarching theme of social justice.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, “Mobile computing for social good in CSC 207,” will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This Friday at CS Table, we will discuss the ACM Code of Ethics. Along the way, we will consider the purpose and roles of professional codes of ethics and what it means to think of yourself as a “professional.”

Computer Science Table is an open weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science.

For the first CS table of 2014, we are going to consider 3D printing. We will start with a short reading:

Young, Susan. “Cyborg parts.” MIT technology review 116 (2013), no. 5, pp. 104–106.

However, you should feel free to bring additional articles and knowledge.

Computer Science Table is an open weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science.