Alumni talks and a sorting competition makes for another crazy, busy week!

There may only be 2 days left of the workweek, but there are a host of UMM CSci events coming up in that little window!

Noon, Thursday, 3 Nov: The presentations from this year’s sorting competition in CSci 3501 (Algorithms and Computability) are tomorrow at noon in the dungeon. Everyone is welcome! Also, ideas for the next year(s) sorting problems are welcome (and students currently in the class will get extra credit for good suggestions). This year’s problem is described at http://cda.morris.umn.edu/~elenam/3501fall11/psets/sorting

The Sorting Competition is a multi-lab exercise on choosing the fastest sorting algorithm for a given type of data. By “fast” we mean the actual running time and not the Big-Theta approximation. You will get description of the data and a sample input file to practice, but the final test will be done on a different file.

The presentations will include analysis of the various student submissions, as well as submissions by several people not in the course (alums and other faculty). If you want to see some pretty serious Java/sorting voodoo, grab some lunch and come down to the lab!

4pm, Thursday, 3 Nov: UMM CSci alum Chad Seibert (’11) will be presenting on writing his own OS at 4pm tomorrow in Sci 2200. There will be snacks and pop, so we hope to see lots of folks!

“How to Write Your Own OS, a First-hand Experience”

In this talk, we explore writing an operating system for the x86 architecture from scratch. We start in 16 bit mode, just after the BIOS finishes execution, and make our way to full multi-threaded processing in 32 bits. We also explore areas such as memory management, task switching, and concurrency, and show how our operating system works with programs to provide these services. In addition, we also compare and contrast our approach to these issues against existing implementations such as Windows and Linux.

3:30pm, Friday, 4 Nov: UMM CSci (both ’05) alumni Derek Desens (currently at Accenture Consulting) and Kyle Hosker (currently at Target) will give a presentation and a Q&A session in Sci 1020 on their career paths after UMM, strategies for searching for jobs (resumes, interviews, etc), and work they do at their companies. This is your chance to find out what kinds of jobs are available “out there” and what do you need to do to get them. Get your resume questions answered by people in the field who know what to look for in a resume!

Yowza! That’s a busy couple of days! These are some neat opportunities, so carve out a little time and come learn some cool stuff.

Remember, too, that CSci tea continues to happen each Wednesday from 3:30-4:30pm in the Lopez Room (the lounge between the labs). Cookies and candy abound :-)

Lastly, your reporter got behind and totally failed to post about UMM CSci student Scott Stefes’s excellent presentation on iOS development last week. Scott did a great job providing an overview of the hows and whys of iOS development. Well done!

UMM CSci team takes first at 2011 Digi-Key Collegiate Computing Competition!

We'll be hosting this beautiful trophy for another year!

UMM had another excellent outing at the annual Digi-Key Collegiate Computing Competition yesterday, with our two teams taking 1st and 6th of the 21 participating teams from 12 regional schools. Team Quantum Bogosort (Ashley Koch, Jeff Lindblom, Reed Simpson, Tim Snyder) took a very commanding first place overall, scoring over 265 total points, almost 100 points over the second place team. The four team members each received $300 gift certificates, and Digi-Key will bring a $5,000 check for our CSci program in November, along with the bronze travelling trophy, which we’ll host for another year.

Our other team, Ghost Ducks (Brandon Botzet, Phil Coler, Jay Lapham, Matt Lauer) did really well at the “Blenders” (competitions that combine speed and trivia skills), taking first on one and second on the other. They also took first in a competition to build the tallest structure out of Dots and toothpicks, collecting plenty of swag for all three competitions.

UMM teams have taken first place at Digi-Key four times in the past six years, now taking the lead for the most wins since Digi-Key started the competition in 2000. Quantum Bogosort is the 9th UMM team to place in the top three since we were first invited in 2002.

The money that comes to the CSci discipline is used to support important activities such as student travel to conferences and special purchases for the CSci labs.

Many thanks to all these students for their hard work and enthusiasm!

Our initial invitation to the Digi-Key Collegiate Computing Competition was due to the initiative of Dan Flies (’03), who heard about the competition through a friend at an internship and contacted Digi-Key to see if we could attend. We’ve subsequently had several students do internships or take full-time positions at Digi-Key.

Cool DigiQuilt video

Kristin “KK” Lamberty has a nice video that nicely shows off the key features of her DigiQuilt software. DigiQuilt was the core of her dissertation work at Georgia Tech, and continues to be the centerpiece of her research at here UMM. 9 different UMM CSci undergrads have worked with KK over the years, adding features, refactoring and extending the design and functionality, and collecting and analyzing field data.

KK actually made this video last year as part of her entry in the 2010 SIGGRAPH Learning Challenge, but I somehow gapped including the video here.

Enjoy!

P.S. Yes – I let the UMM CSci blog get a little behind. I’m going to work on trying to get caught up a bit in the next month, and hopefully we’ll be running a little more smoothly this fall.

Alumni talk Monday on work at IBM to reduce energy usage at data centers

Kevin Arhelger (on right) at the 2009 Digi-Key competition

Tomorrow, Monday, 6 Dec 2010, Kevin Arhelger (UMM CSci ’10) will give a talk about internship work he did last summer at IBM while still a UMM student. (Kevin currently works for IBM full time.) The title of his talk is “Big Blue: Green and Agile”, and he’ll describe work he did on Active Energy Manager, a tool to reduce energy consumption in data centers. His talk will describe his experiences as an intern at IBM and his role in the project’s transition to agile development.

The talk is at 6pm in Sci 2200. See you there!

Congratulations on another fine Senior Seminar conference!

Speakers from Fall, 2010, UMM CSci Senior Seminar conference. L to R: Eugene Butler, Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Stephen Adams, Justin Mullin, Brian Goslinga, Martin Powers

Yesterday’s UMM CSci Senior Seminar Conference was a great success. All six speakers did an excellent job of convening interesting and challenging material, and we had a wonderful audience of 40+ folks. Thanks to the six speakers (pictured above), the audience, and everyone who supported these folks and helped make this possible.

UMM CSci Senior Seminar conference this Saturday

Tyler Hutchison presenting at MICS 2007

This Saturday, 4 December 2010, will be the 25th UMM Computer Science Seminar II (Senior Seminar) Conference in Sci 2200 from 1:30-5pm. Come join us to hear six talks on a wide variety of cool topics. Each presentation will summarize contemporary work in an active research area in computer science. The goal is for the talks to accessible to anyone who’s had Data Structures; large parts of the talks should be accessible to most anyone, but there will be some fairly technical detail in places.

This is an important event, both for the discipline and for the participants, as it represents the senior capstone experience of six of our fine students. Come support the team, and learn some cool things in the process!

This semester’s schedule includes two presentations on designing interfaces: Using your thoughts to control a computer, and designing computer instruments to allow for highly sophisticated performance. Two talks will be on extracting important information from the huge amounts of data available on-line: How on-line stores make meaningful recommendations based on your past preferences, and how to automatically decide if a movie review is generally positive or negative. One talk will be on macros, which effectively allow one to extend a programming language with new constructs, and how to then do so in a way that doesn’t introduce new kinds of errors. The remaining talk will be on ways to extend the functionality of existing networks by overlaying new logical network architectures on the existing infrastructure.

The full schedule, with names, titles, and times, is below. The links are to PDF versions of the various papers; you can also download the full proceedings as a single document.

Time	Speaker	Title
1:30pm	Stephen Adams	An overview of brain-computer interfaces
2:00pm	Justin Mullin	Designing professional instruments for computer music performance
2:30pm	Martin Powers	Methods to improve the accuracy of recommender systems
3:00pm		30 minute break
3:30pm	Brian Goslinga	What macros are and how to write correct ones
4:00pm	Jacob Thebault-Spieker	Are distributed peer-to-peer overlay networks worth the effort?
4:30pm	Eugene Butler	Automated sentiment analysis

If you can’t come for the whole conference, you’re more than welcome to come for as many presentations as your schedule allows. The door to the room will probably be closed, but we’ll keep the trains running on time, so you should be able to wait for the applause at the end of a talk at the half hour and then sneak in between talks.

For those unfamiliar with our Senior Seminar course, the students do a substantial review of some peer-reviewed literature in some area of computer science. This review is then turned into a review article, which are collected together and published as the proceedings of the conference. In the conference the students give a 20-25 minute talk reviewing the material they studied. These talks are geared to people at roughly the data structures level or higher; many of the talks are quite accessible to a lay audience, although some will include some technical detail that may be unfamiliar to people with little computing background.

Looking for feedback on the UMM CSci program

Your chance to give *us* feedback!

The Computer Science program at the University of Minnesota, Morris, is undergoing a review as part of a campus-wide review of academic programs. Feedback from alumni and current students about their experiences in our program will be very valuable as we assess its strengths and weaknesses, so we’re running an on-line survey. We got lists of alumni and current student e-mails, and invitations went out to those lists a week or two ago.

We know, however, that there are people who spent time with us and aren’t on those lists, and we’d love to hear from as many people as possible. If you haven’t received an invitation and would like to participate, please send an e-mail to umm-csci-program-review-f10@googlegroups.com and we’ll send you an invite.

The data collected here will only be used in summary form while generating our program review report, and we’ll delete all the specific survey responses once we’ve completed that report. We’ll try to post our final report on-line when it’s finished (probably late 2010); watch the usual UMM CSci communication outlets for the announcement.

Many thanks!

A busy week for alumni visits

We’ve happy to announce that we have two cool alumni visits this week:

• Nathan Dahlberg (’09) and Shirley Zierke (’82) from Polaris on Monday
• Paula Greve (’93) from McAfee Security on Thursday

The first visit is Monday (25 Oct), when Nathan and Shirley will give a presentation on the IT work they do for Polaris and what it’s like to work there, with a Q&A session afterwards. Polaris is a pretty cool and unusual employment opportunity for CSci folks, especially if you’re an outdoorsy sort. They will also be providing free pizza, so join us at 6pm in Sci 2200.

The second visit is Thursday (28 Oct), when Paula will give a talk entitled Threats and Trends:

This will be a technical overview of emerging threats, including malware, web, email, network and applications. Hear the latest on each threat type from a front-line research team. Leave with a comprehensive view across all threat vectors. In addition, learn how we are responding to these threats to provide better enhanced protection.

This is a really hot area, and her visit is an excellent opportunity to meet with an alum working (and hiring) in this field. The talk is at 5pm in Sci 1300. Interested folks are also invited to join us for dinner immediately following the talk.

We also have several big events coming up in November:

• The ACM regional is Saturday, 6 November.
• Brent Heeringa (’99), the Latterell Distinguished Alumni speaker is in town Sunday and Monday, 7 and 8 November.
• Digi-Key will be on-campus recruiting and delivering the big bronze travelling trophy sometime in mid-November (dates TBD).

More shortly on Brent’s visit, and info on the Digi-Key visit when we have dates, etc.

Added 25 Oct
Paula just let me know that John Wagener, another UMM alum, will be joining her for the McAfee visit. John has a lot of experience with Hadoop, and will be meeting with Elena’s Parallel and Distributed Computing course to talk about how McAfee uses those tools in their work.

UMM CSci team takes first at 2010 Digi-Key Collegiate Computing Competition!

Team Reptilian Agenda poses with the Digi-Key bronze traveling trophy after taking first place at the 2010 competition. (l to r: Chad Seibert, Justin Mullin, Brian Goslinga, Nic McPhee (coach), and Eugene Butler)

UMM had another excellent outing at the annual Digi-Key Collegiate Computing Competition yesterday, with our two teams taking 1st and 6th of the 16 participating teams. Reptilian Agenda (Eugene Butler, Brian Goslinga, Justin Mullin, and Chad Seibert) took a commanding first place, scoring over 300 total points, more than 60 points over the second place team. The four team members each received $300 gift certificates, and Digi-Key will bring a $5,000 check for our CSci program in November, along with the bronze travelling trophy, which we’ll host for another year.

Team Magical Flying Carp, hard at work (l to r: Phil Coler, Jay Lapham, Stephen Adams, and Brandon Botzet)

Our other team, Magical Flying Carp (Stephen Adams, Brandon Botzet, Phil Coler, and Jay Lapham) did really well at the “Blenders” (competitions that combine speed and trivia skills), taking first on one and second on the other, collecting plenty of swag along the way.

UMM teams have taken first place at Digi-Key three times in the past five years, tying UND for the most wins since Digi-Key started the competition in 2000. Reptilian Agenda is the 8th UMM team to place in the top three since we were first invited in 2002.

The money that comes to the CSci discipline is used to support important activities such as student travel to conferences and special purchases for the CSci labs.

Many thanks to all these students for their hard work and enthusiasm!

Team Reptilian Agenda celebrates their victory! (l to r: Chad Seibert (partially obscured), Brian Goslinga, Justin Mullin, and Eugene Butler)

Our initial invitation to the Digi-Key Collegiate Computing Competition is down to the initiative of Dan Flies (’03), who heard about the competition through a friend at an internship and contacted Digi-Key to see if we could attend. We’ve subsequently had several students do internships or take full-time positions at Digi-Key.

P.S. Nic took way too many pictures at the competition and posted many of them on Flickr.

UMM CSci homecoming gathering this Saturday!

Join us for food and fun!

As part of this year’s homecoming festivities at the University of Minnesota, Morris, UMM CSci is hosting a homecoming potluck to bring together alums, current students, friends and allies. Join us Saturday, 9 October 2010, in the Science Atrium. We’ll start at 3pm, and be around until around 5pm.

As a potluck, locals (faculty, current students, etc) should bring some food to share. (It doesn’t need to be haute cuisine, and it doesn’t need to be huge.) Folks from out of town don’t need to bring anything other than your charming company :-).

We’d appreciate it if some current students can come by between 2 and 2:30 to help set up tables, etc., so we’re ready to receive dishes and the like by 2:30pm.

Come join us for some fun conversation, social networking of the face-to-face variety, and good food!