Oberlin College Computer Science

You Can Pick Your (Best) Friends

May 3rd, 2011

Prof. David Liben-Nowell, Carleton College

David Liben-Nowell, Associate Professor of Carleton College

” You Can Pick Your (Best) Friends”
FRIDAY May 6 4:30 King 221

In this talk, he will present some results from a recent collaboration with evolutionary psychologists and computer scientists on questions of how people choose friends and prioritize among those friends. Specifically, he will describe analysis of large samples of MySpace profiles containing “Top Friends” lists, in which an individual selects a small subset of his or her friends and organizes them into a ranked order of that individual’s choice. Different classes of behavioral hypotheses give rise to very different graph-theoretic structures in the best-friend network, and we can use these ranking data to provide supporting evidence for some of these theories.

2011 Honor Student Presentations

April 29th, 2011

Tuesday May 3 King 221
4:30 Jason Kimmel -Models of Viral Marketing in Social Networks

5:00 Brendan Chambers – Towards Automatically Captcha Solving Using Biologically Inspired Algorithms.

Wed May 4 King 221
4:30 Thomas Ramfjord – Introduction to Audio Watermarking.

5:00 Kriti Godey – Recommending Healthy and Palatable Meal Plans.

2011 Denison Programming Contest

March 3rd, 2011

This past weekend 3 teams of Oberlin students competed at the 2011 Denison Spring Programming Contest. 18 teams of 3 students each from 9 nearby schools competed trying to solve 6 problems, in 4 hours, with only one computer per team!

Team Foo of Oberlin (Brendan Chambers, Thomas Ramfjord, Danny Spencer) and Team O(bees) (Veronica Colegrove, Emma Conner, Eston Schweickart) each solved 3 problems and Team Oberlin Oriented Programmers (Kaitlyn Price, Kiron Roy, Joaquin Ruales) solved 2. Much fun was had by all!

2011 Denison Spring Contest

Coordination Strategies for Multi-agent Scheduling

March 1st, 2011

James Boerkoel, Univeristy of Michigan, will present his talk “Coordination Strategies for Multi-agent Scheduling. Thursday March 3, 2011 4:30 p.m. in King 221 – Refreshments @ 4:00 p.m. in King 223 CSCI Office.

The Simple Temporal Problem (STP) is a popular representation for solving centralized scheduling and planning problems. When scheduling agents are associated with different users who need to coordinate some of their activities, however, considerations such as privacy, autonomy, and scalability suggest solving the joint STP in a more distributed manner. In this talk, I will introduce multi-agent STPs and discuss recent advances in STP algorithms that exploit loosely-coupled problem structure. Building off these advances, I will discuss our distributed approach for solving the multi-agent STP, which includes exchanging summaries of local agent problems and then choosing temporal decoupling points that allow agents to independently manage their local schedules. I will discuss the advantages of our approach as well as future extensions and applications.

MCURCSM 2010

November 23rd, 2010

This past weekend, computer science major Becky Punch presented her paper “Illustrating Computer System Architecture with DLSim3” at the 2010 Midstates Conference for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science and Mathematics (aka MCURCSM 2010).

This work was a collaborative project with CS professors John Donaldson and Rich Salter.

Becky Punch presenting at MCURCSM 2010

Grad School Info Meeting Tues Nov. 2 12:15

October 22nd, 2010

Are you considering going to grad school to study CS?  Come to our
info session on Tuesday, Nov. 2 12:15 p.m. to chat with the CS professors about
topics such as:

- What CS grad school is like -- the first two years and beyond
- What is CS research like?
- Is grad school right for me?
- Masters or PhD?
- How do you apply?
- How to choose schools/advisors?
- Getting good letters of recommendation
- Things you can do now to improve your chances of being accepted
- and any other questions you might have

Pizza will be provided. Sign up in the CSCI office King 223 or email
jackie.fortino@oberlin.edu by Monday, Nov. 1 if you plan to attend.

Software Talk: Vim

September 26th, 2010

Vim Tips and Tricks

What: A brief introduction to a number of the more advanced features of the Vim text editor

When: Wednesday, September 29 @ 4:30pm

Where: King 135 (Downstairs CS Lab)

It will be good if you’ve used vi or vim previously (at least having worked through the tutorial). I’ll try and give you a taste of many features that I find useful/interesting and try to answer any questions you might have.