Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Thursday, November 13, Professor Gianfranco Ciardo, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University, will speak on extensions of binary decision diagrams:

Binary decision diagrams (BDDs) have had enormous success since Bryant showed how to use them for the efficient verification of boolean hardware designs and Clarke and McMillan employed for symbolic model checking. In this talk, we take BDDs as a starting point and explore various extension of decision diagrams, we apply them to problems beyond temporal logic verification, and we discuss several challenging research problems related to decision diagrams.

Before the talk, Professor Ciardo will meet informally with students considering the possibility of graduate study at Iowa State. This meeting will be in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817), beginning at 3:45 p.m.

At 4:15 p.m., refreshments will be served in the Computer Science Commons. Professor Ciardo's talk, “Beyond BDDs: advanced decision diagrams and their applications,” will begin 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.

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!