September 14th, 2010
New to the CS labs? Want to learn more about Unix and the lab machines? Want to meet more people in CS while eating pizza and having fun?
If so, join the CSMC on Thursday (9/16) for Unix/Games night!
We’ll be meeting in the downstairs CS lab (King 135) at 8pm.
Unix/Games night!
September 3rd, 2010
Sundae!
We invite all Computer Science and Math Majors to an Ice Cream Social
Wed. September 8, 4:30 pm in the Rice/King Courtyard
Rain location – King 2nd floor
September 1st, 2010
There are pictures and movies from the 25th anniversary celebration available at OCCS 25th Anniversary and on the new OCCS FaceBook page.
July 30th, 2010
On July 23, 2010, three CS students (along with their research advisors) travelled down to Ohio Wesleyan University to present their summer research as part of the 2010 Five Colleges of Ohio Summer Science Research Symposium.
L to R in front are the student presenters Garrett Robinson, Jason Kimmel, and Becky Punch. Back row has the faculty advisors Ben Kuperman, Rich Salter, and John Donaldson.
May 19th, 2010
CSMS has designed tshirts that will be yellow with hunter green print
OCCS 2009 – 2010will be centered on the front
on the back it will read:
You know you’re a CS major if…
You think flip-flops belong in DLSim not on feet.
You’ve written 15 programs to calculate the Fibonacci numbers.
You consider recursion an alternative lifestyle.
You know more languages than an UN employee.
You sometimes write “the downstairs lab” as a permanent address.
Divide and conquer doesn’t sound like a military strategy.
O(n^3) and O(135n^3 + 3000n+ 1828537) look identical
*int {} (*float) is clearly a pointer to a function taking a float pointer and returning a pointer to an array of intergers.
You close your eyes and see public static void man ( String args { } )
Scheme is just another word for a lot of parens
The cost will be $8.00
To order email Jackie.Fortino@oberlin.edu with your size by Friday 5/21/2010.
The shirts should be in by May 28 , if you are gone by then they can be picked up in the Fall.
May 10th, 2010
Hunter McCurry will be giving a lecture on the making of Semi-Conducted, my quartet and video piece. A very short video excerpt of the piece is posted here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCT4wpvXmmc
The lecture will be *Tuesday May 11* at 5:15 in TIMARA Studio 2. I will be pairing up with fellow TIMARA major Gabe Stewart who will be talking about his project visualizing and sonifying GPI (General Progress Indicator) data for Northeast Ohio. Each of our lectures will be under 30 minutes.
(This) Tuesday, May 11th
5:15 pm – 6:15 pm
TIMARA Studio 2
Beyond simply a description of the piece, the lecture should also
serve as an introduction to a new open-source piece of software called
Field, a coding environment for making digital art. This software is a hybrid of several paradigms: coding (it is written in Python), visual programming (like Max/MSP), and drawing (like Photoshop, Flash). Even if you can’t make it to the lecture, I strongly encourage you to check it out! It has great potential:
April 8th, 2010
Tom Bressoud, Denison University
Monday April 12, 2010
Computer Science will host Professor Tom Bressoud from Denison University.
The Talk will be held in King 221 at 4:30 Refreshments will be served at 4:00 in King 223.
Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems: Can we Scale to Cloud Computing?
Distributed systems is a subfield of computer science wherein an application or service is modeled as a collection of independently executing processes, cooperating toward a common goal and communicating with each other across some medium (i.e. a network or shared memory). Fault-tolerance is an area of study that recognizes that computer hardware and software fail and, for many application domains, the failure of a component resulting in a failure of the entire system is simply unacceptable. So the goal of fault-tolerant systems is to continue to provide correct operation despite the occurrence of component failures.
When we look at the intersection of fault tolerance and distributed systems, the problem becomes even more difficult. The distribution of processes increases uncertainty, including basic questions such as “knowing” that a component has failed. And as we scale our distributed systems, we, by definition, increase the number of independent components, and thus can linearly increase the arrival rate of failures.
This talk will explore these issues and look at the scalability issue of fault tolerance in cluster systems and will compare the traditional fault tolerance technique of checkpointing with some newly popular models for cluster-parallel applications — MapReduce, used by Google, and Dryad by Microsoft — each vying for dominance in the currently “hot” area of Cloud Computing.
April 5th, 2010
Interested in Becoming A Computer Science Major. Attend our informational meeting on Wed April 7 4:30-5:30 inKing 223. If you are unable to attend feel free to contact any Computer Science Professor for additional details.
Refreshments will be served.
March 14th, 2010
On February 27th, two OCCS programming teams participated in Denison University’s spring programming contest, along with 9 other teams from 6 other schools (Denison, Albion, Baldwin-Wallace, Muskingum, Ohio Wesleyan, and U of Akron).
Congratulations to our teams for placing second and sixth! Joaquin Ruales, Michael Stevenson, Zach Levine and Joe Kramer-Miller of the O(bees) solved 4 of the 6 problems, and Brendan Chambers, Thomas Ramfjord, Emma Conner and Siyang Wu of Foo of Oberlin solved 3 problems.
If you are interested getting involved in programming contests, get in touch with either Professor Donaldson or Wexler (the coaches) or check out the Competitive Programming Exco!
See more photos in the gallery:
2010 Denison Programming Contest
March 9th, 2010
Our 25th Anniversary Symposium will be held April 23-25, 2010. We’re inviting all our CS alumni and other interested folks to join us. You’ll have a chance to meet with the current faculty and students and catch up with your old friends. All events will take place on the Oberlin College campus.
If you’re thinking of joining us, please register by filling out the following form: OCCS 25th Anniversary Registration.
To celebrate our 25th anniversary, the Department is establishing an endowed fund to support Oberlin student / faculty research, and to fund visits by outside speakers to campus.
If you’d like to contribute to our departmental development fund, you can submit a pledge here, or just view the pledges so far.