Computer Science | Grinnell College

Thursday, January 28, 2016
4:15 pm in Noyce 3821

Computer Science faculty will discuss summer research opportunities at Grinnell.

Refreshments at 4:00 in the CS Commons (Noyce 3817), followed by the discussion at 4:15 in Noyce 3821.

Thursday, December 10, 2015
4:15 pm in Noyce 3821

Computer Science faculty will present the department's annual discussion of summer opportunities in CS.

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., 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. Handouts will be available for those who cannot attend the talk.

Refreshments at 4:00 in the CS Commons (Noyce 3817), followed by the talk at 4:15 in Noyce 3821.

On Thursday, December 3, Giang Nguyen 2017 will describe her summer internship on bioinformatics, inferring phylogenetic relationships from protein and DNA sequences.

At 4:00 p.m., refreshments will be served in the Computer Science Commons. The talk, “Bioinformatics Research Internship at Michigan State University,” will begin at 4:15 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

Octav Chipara will present "Developing and Deploying Mobile Sensing Applications."

Thursday, November 12
4:15 pm in Science 3821
Refreshments beforehand in the CS Commons

Octav Chipara is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa and part of the Aging Mind and Brain Initiative.

Mobile sensing applications are an emerging class of mobile applications that take advantage of the increasing sensing, computational, storage, and networking capabilities of mobile devices. Chipara's research focuses on the systems, networking, and software engineering aspects of developing mobile health (mHealth) systems that continuously monitor and infer the health status of patients. His work combines the design of communication protocols, middleware, and programming tools with large-scale real-world deployments of working systems.

In this talk, Chipara will describe AudioSense – a novel mobile sensing application that allows audiologists to assess the performance of the hearing aids in the real-world. A key limitation of traditional laboratory and survey methods employed by audiologists is that they fail to predict when a hearing aid user will be dissatisfied with its performance in the real-world. In contrast with these techniques, AudioSense jointly characterizes both the user's auditory context and the performance of the hearing aid in that context. The second part of the talk will cover some of the tools his team has created to simplify the development of mobile sensing applications. The focus is one of coordinating when different hardware resources (e.g., WiFi, 3G) are turned on and off to save energy without hindering user experience. A lightweight annotation language and middleware service will be presented that can be used to build energy-efficient mobile sensing applications for Android.

November 5 at 4:15 pm in Science 3821
Refreshments served at 4:00 in the CS Commons
Everyone is welcome

Professor Henry M. Walker will present "MyroC 3.0: Update, Portability, Non-blocking, Threads, Processes, Coordination."

The MyroC project provides infrastructure and materials to allow the use of Scribbler 2 robots to support CSC 161, a course exploring imperative problem solving with C programming. The original work, now designated MyroC.1.0, was built upon a C++ package developed at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and incorporated into CSC 161 in Fall 2011. Due to issues in portability from Linux to other platforms, work started on a C-based infrastructure in Fall 2013 and was incorporated into CSC 161 in Spring 2015. Through versions MyroC.2.1-MyroC.2.4, the revised package provided several revised commands with both blocking and non-blocking options for robot movement and image display. Although written in Standard C, further refinements could improve efficiency, add functionality, and facilitate portability. This fall, a new MyroC.3.0 is being developed which will refine several previous commands, improve efficiency, and utilize different Standard-C libraries, yielding an infrastructure that will run on both Linux and Mac OS X platforms. Focusing on MyroC.3.0, this talk will highlight several new features and then focus on how concepts from operating systems and parallel processing (e.g., topics covered in CSC 213) are required to implement these new or updated features. Specific topics to be considered will include threads, processes, mutex semaphores, and synchronization via message passing.

October 29 at 4:15 pm in Science 3821
Refreshments served at 4:00 pm in the CS Commons

Join us for a talk by David Fernández-Baca from the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University. His talk is titled "Algorithms for Assembling the Tree of Life."

The Tree of Life is a reconstruction of the evolutionary history of all living species. Constructing this tree is one of the fundamental problems in science. At present, however, we are far from solving this problem. Instead, we must be content with building phylogenetic trees (that is, evolutionary trees) for relatively small families of species. Even trees of such limited scope have important uses. They help biologists to decipher the function of genes by comparing these genes to similar ones in closely related species. Ecologists use phylogenetic trees to estimate degrees of biodiversity and analyze rates of species extinction. In medicine, phylogenetic trees model disease progression. Phylogenetic trees are also used outside of biology, to understand the development of human languages and political systems.

This talk will discuss the work Fernández-Baca's group conducts in computational phylogenetics -- the field that studies the construction of phylogenetic trees. The aim of their research is to develop algorithms, mathematics, and software for phylogenetics. Much of the work addresses the computational problems that stem from the scarcity of data for building trees and the conflict among the data that is available. In addition to tackling algorithmic challenges, they also collaborate with biologists to study specific questions in biology. A recent example is applying phylogenetics to the study of legumes. This is a family of plants that are notable for their ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen -- a process that is essential for agriculture -- and that includes major food crops.

At the end of the talk, Fernández-Baca will give an overview of graduate study opportunities offered by the Computer Science Department at Iowa State University. The department has 31 faculty members covering a wide range of areas, including artificial intelligence, formal methods & verification, wireless networks and systems, robotics, software safety, software engineering, and theoretical computer science. The department participates in interdepartmental graduate programs in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Human-Computer Interaction, and Information Assurance. Almost all Ph.D. students are supported by research or teaching assistantships.

October 8
4:15 pm in Science 3821
Refreshments served at 4:00 pm in the CS Commons.

Blake Creasey '16 will present: "IBM Watson & Innovation in New York City."

This summer I went to New York City for seven weeks to learn about IBM Watson and engineering entrepreneurship at the Cooper Union. Our IBM mentor taught us about the brand of Watson, how pieces of the technology work, and current implementations of the technology. We met with our client, the New York Public Library, to understand a problem in their book recommendation system, and we set out trying to use the Watson Experience Manager to build a solution. We interviewed potential users, reviewed existing survey data, extensively discussed technological feasibility, met with current IBM Watson business partners, and finally built an iPhone book recommendation application using IBM Watson's natural language processing capabilities. My main focus in this talk will be on IBM Watson and our prototype iPhone application, Shelf. I will also briefly discuss the companies that I toured-Google, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Gamechanger, IBM Watson's Experience Center-and the meetups that I attended. Thanks to the Wilson Program, I hope to share what I learned about innovation, and I hope to discuss my general impressions on what is happening with innovation-the cool, the incredible, the scary, and the future.

Peter-Michael Osera and Charlie Curtsinger will discuss graduate programs in computer science.

October 1st
4:15 p.m.
Noyce 3821

Snacks will be available in the CS Commons at 4:00 p.m.

On Wednesday, September 23, Dr. Ursula Wolz gives a talk on two of her research projects: "Does Learning Computer Science Require a Teacher? Reflections on Automated Tutors and Learning Communities."

On Thursday, September 24, our own Samuel Rebelsky gives a short talk: "Scripting GIMP with Racket."

Both talks are in Science-3821 at 4:15 PM, preceded by refreshment in the CS Commons at 4:00.

Ursula Wolz will be teaching at Grinnell as a Noyce Visiting Professor in Spring 2016. Dr. Wolz is currently involved in two projects, one to create a very robust mechanical tutor using a sophisticated rule base, the other to create face-to-face communities of coders that remove, or at least reduce, the technology divide. She will provide a quick overview of both projects, and then invite stimulating discussion of the major technological and ethical issues involved.

Professor Rebelsky's talk is practice for an upcoming presentation at RacketCon in St. Louis. The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is an open-source alternative to Photoshop. In the early days of GIMP, the designers added a scripting language, Script-Fu, based on Scheme. Over the years, Script-Fu has been superseded by Python-Fu, although Script-Fu remains an option, albeit with a primitive IDE. Over the past few years, my students and I have built a library that allows programmers to script GIMP using Racket and the DrRacket IDE. In addition to providing the “glue” between GIMP and Racket, we also added a library of routines more amenable to novice programmers. In this talk, we will discuss the design of both the “glue” and the broader library. We will also discuss a related introductory course in CS that uses multiple models of image making as the motivating problem domain.

On Thursday, September 10, Reilly Noonan Grant 2018, Alex French 2017, Bazil Mupisiri 2018, and Logan Goldberg 2018 will present their summer 2015 work on projects for the maintenance and improvement of MathLAN:

We shall describe the various projects completed to improve the computer science department’s MathLAN systems over the summer and give an overview of the field of system administration. MathLAN’s operating system is GNU/Linux, a free software, which gives the user more control over the computer. This made the course very open-ended. As such, the projects completed are varied and relate to many different aspects of system administration. The more noticeable effects of these projects are an improvement in the MathLAN login screen, and a revision of the CS website, yet to be implemented.

At 4:00 p.m., refreshments will be served in the Computer Science Commons. The talk, “GNU/Linux System Administration Projects,” will begin at 4:15 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!