Computer Science | Grinnell College

At 11:00 on Wednesday, December 3, 2014, students in section 1 of CSC 207 will present their work on developing software that creates competition schedules for college athletic teams. Presentations will be in Science 3813.

At first glance, scheduling seems easy. In the standard form, each team must play every other team twice, once home and once away. But real scheduling is much more complicated. For example, some schools may be on a quarter system while others are on a semester system, so not every team can play on the same set of dates. Many teams also have severe restrictions on how far they can travel during weekdays. And when teams play multiple games on a weekend, they typically do all of those games at home or all of those games away. With enough of these kinds of restrictions, forming a schedule that meets all of the restrictions is impossible.

In a sequence of lightning presentations, student project teams will discuss their creative approaches to solving a concrete version of this problem and in generalizing those approaches.

Refreshments will be provided.

This semester, we are using Ushahidi as a platform in section one of CSC 207. Ushahidi is an open-source crowdmapping program that was originally designed for monitoring election violence in Kenya. Its design allows anonymous posting of geolocated events (with optional pictures), using Web, SMS, and more. Since its original design, Ushahidi has been used for a wide range of things, from mapping potholes in LA to burger joints in Germany to emergency response needs during some recent floods in Canada. We've even started a few soon-to-be-announced projects on campus using Ushahidi.

The folks at Ushahidi want to make sure that it's available to anyone. And so they are working on making sure that translations of the platform are available in most languages. Information on the translation project is available at https://wiki.ushahidi.com/display/WIKI/Localization+and+Translation+-+How+to. The list of languages and their status can be found at https://www.transifex.com/explore/languages/.

Grinnell College CS has a strong commitment to free and open source software (FOSS), and we encourage our students to help with FOSS projects as they are able. If you have the knowledge to contribute to this translation project, please consider doing so.