Computer Science | Grinnell College

The end of the semester is busy, so we are taking a fun detour from our usual readings. For the final CS Table of the year, we will look at comics about technical topics, political issues, and the downfall of society. If you have any comics you would like to include, send them to Professor Osera or Curtsinger. (If you don't send some, they will resort to showing Marmaduke and Dinosaur comics!)

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 224B. 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.

On Thursday, May 11, students from this semester's “Analysis of Algorithms” will describe and analyze two algorithms with real-world applications.

Two problems will be addressed: “Worst Case Performance Analysis of Machine Learning Robustness” (Anna Blinderman and Reilly Grant), and “Formalizing Mimble-Wimble: Scaling Bitcoin” (three presenters who wish to remain anonymous). Both of these problems pose interesting design questions when considered from a theoretical rather than implementation standpoint. The presenters will describe their work in progress and encourage formative assessment from the audience.

At 4:00 p.m., refreshments will be served in the Computer Science Commons, Noyce 3817. The presentation, “Exploring Algorithms with Design and Analysis Techniques,” will follow at 4:15 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

Who: CS students, CS faculty, and guest speakers
What: Discussion of inclusion in CS
Where: Science 2022
When: 4:15 p.m., Thursday, May 4, 2017 (Refreshments served beforehand in the same room)
Why: To address important issues
Direct questions or comments to Professor Rebelsky.

This week we will consider a more technical issue: How does/might one generate random numbers. We will consider two articles:

• John David Stone (1996). A portable random-number generator. (Internet archive)
  A call to the random-maker procedure presented here yields a dynamically constructed procedure that acts as a random-number generator. When the dynamically constructed procedure is invoked with no arguments, it returns a pseudo-random real value evenly distributed in the range [0.0, 1.0); when it is invoked with one argument (which should be a positive integer n), it returns a pseudo-random integer value evenly distributed in the range [0, n); when it is invoked with two arguments, the first of which should be a positive integer and the second the symbol reset, it changes the seed of the random-number generator to the value of the first argument.
• Greg Taylor and George Cox (2011). Behind Intel's New Random-Number Generator.
  [I]n 2008 Intel set out to make a random-number generator that uses only digital hardware. Intel researchers based in Hillsboro, Ore., and at the company's Bangalore Design Lab in India started by tackling a key part of the problem—how to make a random source of bits without using analog circuitry.

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 224B. 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.

Thursday, April 27, 2017
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817).
Everyone is welcome to attend!

Project Gadfly: Students and Alums Coding for Social Good

Over spring break, six mentors and eight Grinnell students created Project Gadfly, a system designed to help U.S. residents contact their elected representatives. With Gadfly, users can create sample call scripts and share them with friends using QR codes. Anyone who sees these codes can scan them with the app and have the script and a button to call their representatives at their fingertips. The students created a web client, two native app clients, a database, a server, an API, and an Iowa non-profit in 12 days, balancing security and design decisions with rapid development. Students who worked on Project Gadfly will discuss both the design of the system and what it was like to work with mentors on a rapid-learning, rapid-development project.

Algorithms are essential to computer science, and increasingly they are essential to modern decision making on all levels. But are they unbiased? The emerging field of ‘Algorithm Accountability’ is beginning to identify cases in which inherent bias is imbedded in the inference structure of algorithms. The articles for this week’s CS Table run the gamut from popular press to general audience special interest to technical position papers to ACM recommendations for basic principles. The question is no longer ‘are algorithms biased’, but how to determine whether they are, and if so how to prevent them from being so.

Linda Oyolu, Ruth Wu, and Ursula Wolz will be leading our discussion on April 25, 2017. The following readings will give you a good sense of the area; please do your best to read at least some subset of these articles before our CS Table discussion:

• This NY Times overview is a good place to start: Make Algorithms Accountable (01-Aug-2016)
• An MIT Press summary of the emerging field: How to Hold Algorithms Accountable (17-Nov-2016)
• An ACM statement about principles for creating accountable algorithms: (PDF) Statement on Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability (12-Jan-2017)
• One of the seminal articles - a good place to get into the serious study: (PDF) Algorithmic Accountability, Journalistic investigation of computational power structures (07-Nov-2016)

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 224B. 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.

Thursday, April 20, 2017
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821

• Do you want to know how to talk about your 151 final project on your résumé?
• Do you want to know how to write about your upcoming summer experience on your résumé?
• Does your 3-year-old résumé need some pizzazz?

This Thursday Extra will be a résumé peer-review session. Students of all years are welcome to share feedback with one another about their résumés. We have also asked some CS professors and alumni to join in and share their wisdom during the session. Please bring 5 copies of your résumé to share if you want respectful and meaningful feedback from other participants.

One of the alums who will be joining us wrote a great article targeted at seniors and recent grads that might be helpful to some of you: Your Career is a Startup: What every recent grad needs to know.

In the CS Table on April 18, 2017, we will discuss the role of technology in the workforce, specifically at benefits and downsides of automation. There is one reading for this week:

• Claire Cain Miller. The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It's Automation. The New York Times, Upshot. December 21, 2016.

For a little context, here is a twitter feed that regularly features impressive manufacturing robots. These videos are fascinating to watch and can give you a sense of just how disruptive technology can be, particularly in fields that involve significant manual labor.

Philippe Chabot. HumanVsMachine Twitter Feed.

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 224B. 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.

Thursday, April 13, 2017
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817).
Everyone is welcome to attend!

Computer Science Outreach in Grinnell and Central Iowa
Ursula Wolz, Noyce Visiting Professor

Please come and learn how YOU can volunteer to bring computer science into the K-12 curriculum during the remainder of the semester and in the coming years. Through the Noyce Professorship, the College has established good relations with Grinnell's public library, middle school, and high school, for both the curriculum and after school activities. Community leaders and Grinnell College students have encouraged collaboration for years, but developing and sustaining this relationship has been challenging. Come and learn how you can contribute to both short-term needs and long-term goals.

This week in CS table we will take a critical look towards the technical interview process employed in the software industry. Like the industry itself, our expectations about how interviews are conducted have rapidly changed over the last decade. Our readings, spaced 10 years apart, showcase what were some of the concerns back then versus the concerns now:

• Joel Spolsky. The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0). Joel on Software. October 25, 2006.
• Jeff Atwood. Why Can’t Programmers.. Program?. Coding Horror. February 26, 2007.
• Aline Lerner. You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview. Intervieiwng.io blog. November 2, 2016.
• Shivan Kaul Sahib. ‘Clean your desk’: My Amazon interview experience. Pistachio Musings?. December 7, 2016.

In addition to the readings, I encourage you to reflect on your own experiences interviewing for internships or jobs and bring them to share.

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 224B. 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.