Papers for the Fall 2012 Computer Science Senior Seminar Conference

If you’re interested in checking out the papers for this semester’s Computer Science Senior Seminar conference, they’re now available on the wiki. Any Gold Stars that are awarded will be noted there after the conference, and hopefully the speakers will share their slides there after the conference as well.

Fall 2012 Computer Science Senior Seminar conference *this Saturday*!

This is a wonderful opportunity to:

• Learn some cool things about current research in computing
• Support your fellow students
• See how senior seminar works (at least in CSci) so it’s less intimidating when it’s your turn

All talks should be generally accessible to anyone who’s had Data Structures, but as a practical matter the bulk of the talks should be understandable to most anyone with a non-trivial interest in computing.

 

We’ll have snacks and very cool topics, so join us!

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Twenty-ninth Semi-Annual

Computer Science

Senior Seminar Conference

Saturday, 1 Dec 2012 Sci 1020, 11:30-4:30 pm

11:30am: David Ruprecht
Body Area Networks and Body Sensor Networks

Noon: Gerard Van Wijk
Network Management Through BitTorrent Blocking and Bandwidth Shaping by ISPs

12:30pm: Reed Simpson
Evolutionary AI in Games

1:00-1:15pm: 15 minute break

1:15pm: Ashley Koch
Assistive Technologies for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

1:45pm: Seth Sorensen
Accuracy of Similarity Measures in Recommender Systems

2:15pm: Vincent Borchardt
Recovery-Oriented Computing in Distributed Systems

2:45-3:00pm: 15 minute break

3:00pm: Tim Snyder
Overview and Comparison of Genome Compression Algorithms

3:30pm: Scott Steffes
Modern Approaches to Gesture Recognition

4:00pm: Nicholas Cornhill
Communication Structures of Botnets with Case Studies

Kevin Arhelger (’10) to speak on performance tuning today, 4:30pm

Kevin Arhelger (UMM CSci ’10) will be giving what should be a really cool talk today on performance tuning. Kevin is an IBM Software Engineer who helps ensure that the performance of their WebSphere tool remains best-in-class, and will be talking about his experience working on performance tuning “in the real world” on a very large project. He’ll cover such topics as Java Virtual Machine tuning, non-uniform memory access, network hardware tuning, and other related topics. Most of the material should make sense to anyone in Data Structures and up.

What: System Performance Tuning: There’s more to performance than Big O

Who: Kevin Arhelger, UMM ’10

When: Monday, 8 Oct, 4:30pm

Where: Sci 2190

There will be pop and snacks, so join us!

Big Homecoming weekend for UMM CSci!

Today and tomorrow make for a big Homecoming weekend for UMM CSci, and we want to encourage you to join us for some special events:

• “Ribbon cutting” for the newly renovated Lopez Room (Sat at 3pm)
• Several alums will be at today’s CSci Tea (3pm, in the Lopez Room)
• Alum Kris Nelson will be talking in a couple of classes today

Saturday at 3pm is the “big event” of the weekend for us is the official ribbon cutting for the newly renovated Lopez Room (Sci 2630 – the space between the two CSci labs). Andy and Dian Lopez founded the Computer Science program at UMM in the 80′s, and after over 30 years of teaching and service at UMM retired in Spring of 2008. To honor their many contributions, alumni donated the money which we used to add the kitchenette to what is now being dedicated as the Lopez Room. Quite a few alums are coming back for the event, and Andy and Dian will be there to say a few words and chat. This will be a great (and somewhat rare) opportunity to network with a significant group of CSci alums from a broad range of eras, find out what their lives and careers have been like (“What can I do with this degree, anyway?”), and get hot tips. Coming Saturday is also a powerful way to say “Thank you”, both to the Lopezes for all their many vital contributions that led to our program existing, and to the alums whose generous donations have done so much to improve what was already a pretty nifty space.

We certainly hope to see many of you there.

Several UMM CSci alums will be on campus today, as well. Rumor has it that a few will be joining us for CSci Tea this afternoon (3pm in the Lopez Room), so that’s another cool opportunity to chat with alums. As always, there will be cookies :)

Lastly, Kris Nelson (UMM ’97) will be visiting CSci classes today to share his experiences. Kris is Technology Director for Thomson Reuters (that’s quite a title – let that sink in a second). From 1-2:05 in Sci 2185 he’ll be visiting KK and my CSci 3401 course to talk about how we manage the complexity of large, complex systems, and other folks are more than welcome to come join us if you’re interested. Kris has worked on and managed very large, complex systems at Thomson Reuters, systems that frequently combined automated, computerized components and human “by hand” components, so he knows a thing or two about the challenges presented by complex systems :-).

It’s an exciting weekend – hope to see you around!

CSci Tea on Fridays at 3pm this semester

CSci Tea will be moving to Fridays at 3pm this semester. All CSci folk are encouraged & welcome to join us in the Lopez Room starting this Friday (the 24th). I’m sure there will be tons of stories of summer internships, travel, & other fun stuff!

US Dep’t of Energy digging sustainability at UMM

The U.S. Department of Energy is featuring a small set of six U.S. colleges and universities that they feel are doing cool things to help us move into a more sustainable future, and the second video to be “aired” features The University of Minnesota, Morris :-)

Those of us in computing are getting involved in the campus sustainability by working with campus offices and outside vendors to build tools that will help provide community members with current (hopefully nearly real-time) information on both energy consumption and production, using both the web and mobile devices. Down the road we’re hoping to give people some predictive assistance, suggesting possible times when discretionary high-load jobs would take best advantage of things like our wind turbines.

Enjoy the video and stay tuned!

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!