Computer Science | Grinnell College

On Thursday, February 17, Aaron Todd 2011 will discuss the use of the Scala programming language, and in particular its support for parallelism, in the construction of simulation frameworks for multi-agent systems.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Mr. Todd's talk, Multi-agent system simulation in Scala, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, February 10, Jerod Weinman will discuss some aspects of his recent work on text recognition:

Is your smart phone smarter than a fifth grader? Not yet. Accurately translating a photograph of text into an intrinsically textual representation has been confounding computational scientists for over a century. Humans (even fifth graders) still outperform computers at reading. In this talk, I review why the problem is difficult and present a model for robustly recognizing small amounts of text in images.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). Mr. Weinman's talk, “Robust text recognition,” will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, February 3, faculty in the Department of Computer Science will discuss summer research opportunities, both on and off campus, that are open to our students, including the projects that our faculty 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!

At 4:15 on Thursday, December 9, in Noyce 3821, students from CSC 325 (Databases and Web application design) will present their class project, GCal:

GCal is an open calendar: Anyone on campus can view, add, and comment on events. In addition to demonstrating GCal, the students will discuss the technologies that are used in the calendar, the processes and problems involved in the project, and recommendations for others collaboratively building medium-scale Web applications.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, GCal: a community calendar for the rest of us, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

This Friday, Jordan and Alex will lead a discussion on approaches to bringing network resources to education in rural communities. Please read the following:

• R. Wang, et al., Digital network going postal and a tale of three schools, Winter 2005.
• M. Trucano, Mobile Phones and Literacy in Rural Communities, World Bank EduTech blog, April 23, 2010.

If you want to learn more, the CSC 295 site links to the research articles these stories report on. As usual, we meet a little after noon in JRC 224A. Hope to see you there!

At 4:15 on Thursday, December 2, in Noyce 3821, Jordan Shkolnick 2011 will describe her internship experience from last summer:

I will discuss my summer internship as a Software Development Engineer in Test with Microsoft Office. I will discuss the work I did during this internship and present an overview of Microsoft Internships, including the application process and the three job roles.

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

This Friday at CS Table, Isaac and Josh will be leading a discussion on community wireless networks. These articles will form the basis of our discussion:

• Terry Schmidt and Anthony Townsend, Why wi-fi wants to be free, CACM 46(5):47-52, May 2003.
• Tomas Krag and Sebastian Büettrich, Wireless mesh networking, O'Reilly Wireless DevCenter, Jan 22, 2004.
You may also be interested in browsing the following:
• Wireless Mesh Network, Wikipedia.
• AODV Description (UCSB CS)
• Community wireless solutions: The Urbana Project
As usual, we meet in JRC 224A a little after noon. See you there!

The Thursday Extra talk originally scheduled for 4:15 p.m. today has been cancelled. Instead, the Department of Computer Science invites you to come and partake of the usual refreshments in our commons, Noyce 3817, and to stay for informal conversation.

This Friday at CS Table/CSC 295, Max and Martin will be leading a discussion on onion routing and its applications to anonymity. Several readings are suggested:

• Clark Boyd, WikiLeaks tech challenges 'top secret' security,  Discovery News, July 27, 2010.
• Paul Marks, How Wikileaks became a whistleblower's haven, New Scientist, July 2010.
• David Goldschlag, Michael Reed, and Paul Syverson. Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections, Communications of the ACM, vol. 42, num. 2, February 1999.
• Tor: overview, Who uses Tor? (torproject.com)

As usual, we'll be meeting at noon on Friday in JRC 224A. Hope to see you there!

On Thursday, November 11, in Noyce 3821, Andrew Hirakawa 2012 and Russel Steinbach 2012 will discuss the software development project that they worked on last summer, under the direction of Professor Henry Walker:

We developed a system to place incoming students in classes based on high school transcripts. Development included an coding an inference engine in PHP that queries a MySQL database and produces a letter created in L^AT_EX, as well as an online interface for prospective students.

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