Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Thursday, February 25, Tony Pan 2010 will talk about his internship at Microsoft's Bing team last summer, including the application process, his projects, and other summer activities.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Summer internship experience at Microsoft, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, February 11, Professor Steve Cunningham will discuss the past, present, and future of computer graphics and graphics processors:

3D computer graphics is an enormous consumer of computing resources, and the market has responded to the continuing growth in demand for high-performance graphics by creating continually more powerful graphics processors. We will trace these parallel paths from the point where 3D graphics began to replace 2D graphics to the near-future state of 3D graphics, and show how the graphics processor is leading us to having usable laptop and desktop supercomputers.

Steve Cunningham is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at California State University, Stanislaus, and a past chair and president of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. His most recent book, Graphics shaders: theory and practice (with Mike Bailey), was published last year by AK Peters.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Professor Cunningham's talk, 3D computer graphics and universal supercomputers, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

On Thursday, February 4, Professor Sam Rebelsky will lead a discussion of summer research programs in computer science, both on and off campus, that are open to our students. Other members of the department faculty will discuss the projects that they will direct this year.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The discussion will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. We encourage anyone who might be interested in summer research in computer science to attend!

On Thursday, December 3, Charles Frantz 2011 and Jeff Leep 2011 will present the results of their summer research on automatic classification of objects, conducted here under the direction of Professor Jerod Weinman.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Combining hierarchy and feature sharing for object categorization, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

On Thursday, November 19, Christopher K. Tuggle, Professor of Molecular Genetics in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program at Iowa State University, will present a talk discussing

a variety of computational problems and projects in biology that are being explored at Iowa State, including the open-source Integrated Animal Annotation and Microarray Expression Database (ANEXdb).

He will also discuss features of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Professor Tuggle's talk, Computational problems in biology, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

On Thursday, November 5, Jun Ni, Associate Professor of Radiology Informatics in the College of Medicine at the University of Iowa, will present a talk on the semantic framework for the description and classification of data derived from health records and medical imaging.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Professor Ni's talk, The ontological domain model of medical imaging informatics, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

On Thursday, October 29, Shitanshu Aggarwal 2011 and Jay Lidaka 2010 will present their summer research work, carred out under the direction of Professor Jerod Weinman.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Parallel training: speeding up machine learning using graphical processing units, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

At noon on Friday, October 9, Dr. Harold Trease of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will speak on Video analytics for indexing, summarization and searching streaming video and video archives:

Given streaming video or video archives, how does one effectively summarize, classify, and search the information contained within such a large amount of image data? In this presentation, we address these issues by describing a process for the automated generation of a table of contents and of keyword, topic-based index tables that can be used to catalogue, summarize, and search large amounts of video data. Having the ability to index and search the information contained within the videos, beyond just metadata tags, provides a mechanism to extract and identify useful content. During this presentation, we describe some of the mathematics, computer science and engineering, and applications of being able to use image and video keywords as the primary search criteria, much as Web browsers (such as Google) allow us to search text today.

Dr. Trease is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Kearney and received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in nuclear engineering. He has more than thirty years of research experience in the design, implementation, and application of high-throughput, high-performance computer software. He currently leads the P3D Code Development Project. P3D is a large-scale framework for modeling, simulation, and prediction in computational physics.

Pizza and soda will be served before the talk. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This lecture serves as this week's CS Table.

On Thursday, October 8, Alex Exarhos 2010 will present the results of his summer research on analyzing videos:

I worked with a set of video indexing and searching algorithms through a Department of Homeland Security internship. These algorithms are capable of quickly providing a summary of a video by breaking it up into sections based on the content, and this method of indexing makes it possible to instantly locate other images, frames, or video segments within the indexed library. I will also talk about the web services I created for these algorithms, and the work I did implementing a mobile interface for a Google Android phone.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Interfaces for video analytics, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821.

At noon on Friday, October 2, in Science 3821, Professor David G. Kay will give a presentation entitled Why so many?: A historical view of the early development of programming languages:

Java. Scheme. C++. Python. There are dozens of programming languages in common use today. Each has its adherents -- often highly partisan adherents. High-level programming languages have been available at least since Fortran in 1954; why haven't we agreed on a common language by now? Why is there so much heat (and so little light) when programming languages are compared? We try to answer these questions with a historical look at how and why some of the major programming languages were developed. We find that, as with many technical issues, the ultimate success of a programming language depends as much on social, economic, and historical factors as it does on the technical merits.

Professor Kay teaches in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where he holds appointments in the departments of Informatics and Computer Science and serves as Vice Chair of Informatics. He has degrees in linguistics, law, and computer science; his current academic interests include computer law, computer science education, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and the teaching of writing and other communication skills.

Pizza and soda will be served before the talk. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This talk also serves as this week's CS Table.