4/18/00 - Out, Out Damn Knot
Eric RawdonChatham College
You go to the closet to pull out that extension cord that has been
buried under years of memories. It is a big tangled mess that
takes you ten minutes untangle. You are the victim of random knotting.
Some knots are easier to tie and, thus, more likely to occur in
your extension cord. This is one of many ways to measure the complexity
of a knot. Another strategy is to find the position of a certain knot
that is optimal in some regard (e.g. it takes the fewest number of
"sticks" or the least amount of rope to tie). We will explore some
measures of complexity, the relationships between these measures, and
an application of optimal knots to molecular biology. We will also
discuss the role of computer simulations in measuring spatial properties
of knots.
Recognizing patterns is a major component in decision-making. For
example, a therapist learns to recognize patterns of behavior in his
patients, and a chess player learns to evaluate board configurations
and patterns of play in her opponent. Pattern recognition is a field
of study, originally part of artificial intelligence, devoted to the
question of how patterns can be analyzed and used. Modern pattern
recognition techniques attempt to extract the essence of a
decision-making problem from a set of examples, and thus can be said
to learn from experience. Hilary Holz, Class of 1984, will discuss
how pattern recognition facilitates and automates intelligent
behavior.
Before computers were machines, they were people. They were people
who were bright and hardworking, yet were not full fledged scientists or
mathematicians. Initially, they were students and wives but eventually,
they became a subclass of people who lacked the connections or resources
or social standing to aspire to a scientific career. They were often
women or Jews or African-Americans or recent immigrants. For them, the
hard work of computing was the best opportunity for them to play a part on
the public stage. This talk will look at several organized computing
groups and show how they represent the influence of industry on scientific
practice. In particular it will look at computing groups from the Paris
Observatory (1759), the American Almanac (1850), the Aberdeen Proving
Ground (1917), Iowa State University (1923) and the WPA (1938). Among the
computers discussed are Maria Mitchell, Elizabeth Webb Wilson, Mary Clemm
and Gertrude Blanch.
In 1950 Alan Turing made a conjecture that has proven to be one of
computer science's most controversial subjects -- that man could create
machine intelligence that would be indistinguishable from human
intelligence somewhere around the year 2000. Well, it's Y2K, has Turing's
prediction come true? Stephen Hildebrand, Class of 1999, will discuss the
potential of artificial intelligence and add some insight into the
challenges of creating software that can meet Turing's challenge.
The design, development, delivery and evaluation of education over the Internet is the focus of the field of "Instructional Technology." Karl Kapp, a Dickinson College alumni, will discuss the work that Bloomsburg University's Institute for Interactive Technologies (IIT) does in the area of converting traditional stand-up training to multimedia-based web training. Karl will highlight how the Institute uses Cold Fushion, SQL Server, HTML, Macromedia's Flash, Dreamweaver, and Coursebuilder to develop interactive web-pages focused on educating corporate employees at such companies as AT&T, Bell Atlantic, and CIGNA Healthcare.
The talk will begin with an overview of the features of Perl. I will then discuss scalar variables and operators, contrasting them with arrays and list operators. I will also cover some of the basic control structures of the language and dissect a few example programs to highlight some of the differences between Perl and other procedural languages. Finally, I will describe the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and show how Perl can be used to create CGI scripts that process simple HTML forms.
We illustrate the interplay between algebra, geometry, and number theory by investigating two famous number-theoretic problems:
1. Can we express a number as the sum of two squares?
Questions of this sort date back to the ancient Greek algebraist Diophantus of Alexandria, and are still being actively studied today.
Dave Richeson In this talk we will introduce the notion of a discrete dynamical system.
We will define periodic points, fixed points, itineraries and chaos. We
will then study a particular dynamical system, the Gauss map. We will show
how it is related to continued fractions and the Fibonacci sequence.
Any data (a text file, for instance) can be viewed as a sequence of
characters, and each character can be represented as a sequence of 8
bits. The idea of data compression is to use fewer than 8 bits to
encode common characters such that the overall number of bits in the
compressed data is small. Compression is necessary to save disk space
or to speed up transmission of data over communication lines.
We start this lecture by reviewing some background on representations
of characters as sequences of bits. Next we present a simple yet elegant
encoding technique for compressing data, called Huffman coding. The idea
behind Huffman coding is simply to use shorter sequences of bits for
more common characters and longer sequences of bits for less common
characters. Finally we discuss some advantages and disadvantages of
Huffman coding.
4/10/00 - Pattern Recognition: Learning from Experience
Hilary Holz, '84
AccessAbility Internet Services, Inc.
4/3/00 - Computing 1759 to February 14, 1946
David Allan Grier
Assistant Professor of Statistics and International Affairs
George Washington University
3/27/00 - The Promise and Problems of Artificial Intelligence
Stephen Hildebrand, '99
"In about fifty years' time it will be possible to program computers ...
to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator
will have no more than 70 per cent. chance of making the correct
identification after five minutes of questioning."
-Alan Turing, 1950, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
3/20/00 - The Next Killer Internet Application On-Line Education
Karl M. Kapp, '89
Assistant Director
Bloomsburg University's Institute for Interactive Technologies
"The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big that it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error."
--John Chambers, President and CEO Cisco Systems
3/6/00 - An Introduction to the Perl Programming Language
Louis Ziantz
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute
THUR: 2/10/00 11:00 - Sums of Squares and Cubes
Holly Rosson
Dartmouth University
2. Can we express a number as the sum of two cubes?
WED: 2/9/00 - Dynamical systems, continued fractions and the Fibonacci sequence
Michigan State University
2/7/00 - A simple data compression algorithm (Huffman's algorithm)
Mirela Damian-Iordache
University of Iowa
Chats from previous semesters:
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