Computer Science | Grinnell College

Thursday, October 18, 2018
4:15 p.m. in Science 3821
Refreshments at 4:00 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Science 3817)

Myra B. Cohen, Lanh and Oanh Nguyen Endowed Chair of Software Engineering at Iowa State University, presents this Thursday Extra.

Software testing researchers have developed many sophisticated techniques to model and test complex and highly configurable systems. These techniques need to be automated and scalable to work on modern software applications, which has led researchers to use bio-inspired approaches that mimic nature, such as evolutionary algorithms. While this research continues to advance the state of the art in software testing, there is a bigger opportunity to leverage what has been learned outside of the boundaries of software testing.

Cohen will discuss some of her research on software testing and then show how they have used techniques built for software testing on living systems. Her recent work flips the nature-inspired paradigm for assurance and prediction of both natural and synthetically engineered biological organisms.

This week in Algorithmic Arts / CS Table, we will read a piece by James Clayson on “radical bricolage.” The preferred version is

Clayson, James (2008). Radical Bricolage: Building Coherence in the Liberal Arts Using Art, Modelling, and Language. International Journal of Education Through Art, 4 (2). doi=10.1386/eta.4.2.141/1.

This article is an expanded version of a conference paper that is available online (with color images):

Clayson, James (2007). Radical Bricolage: Making the Liberal Arts Coherent. From Proceedings of Eurologo 2007. http://www.di.unito.it/~barbara/MicRobot/AttiEuroLogo2007/proceedings/PP-Clayson.pdf.

Participants are encouraged to read the 2008 version and skim the 2007 version.

Here's the abstract of the 2008 version:

Because of the very broad and fragmented nature of undergraduate general education requirements there is a need to help students find unity in diversity. The search for coherence has led my institution, the American University in Paris, to introduce a series of freshmen courses called First Bridge that deliberately pair professors from different disciplines to develop and teach a common course that explores the linkages between their areas of special interest. This article describes my own experience of teaching a First Bridge course called ‘Visual Thinking and Artful Seeing’, in which I represented the mathematics and computer science department while my co-teacher, a painter, came from the art department. It was our intention to explore how different ways of seeing, the very act of seeing and the art of talking about seeing could help each of us begin to discover the commonalities that lie behind seemingly different disciplines and their methodologies. My part of the bargain requires using Imagine Logo to gain access to different levels of seeing by building computer models to examine a range of visual artifacts and their inherent structures.