Fall 2023
Thursday, September 14th
Mathematics & Computer Science Welcome Back Picnic
Noon
Rector Courtyard (Rain Location: Rector Atrium)
Lunch provided. Professors will grill up hotdogs, hamburgers and veggie burgers. Come out and join us!
Tuesday, September 26th
"Where Do I Go From Here?"
Presented by Professor Dick Forrester, Professor of Mathematics and Data Analytics
and
Annie Kondas, Executive Director of the Career Center
In this chat they will discuss a wide variety of careers and opportunities for students majoring in mathematics and computer science. In addition, they will talk about graduate school options, internships, and REUs (Research Experience for Undergraduates). Specific information about our recent graduates will be provided.
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided
Tuesday, October 10th
Undergraduate Summer Research Experience Information Session
Please join us for a question-and-answer session with three mathematics and computer science majors who completed external research experiences in summer 2023. The students will discuss their own experiences and provide suggestions about how to participate in future summer research programs.
- Emily Shambaugh (math): worked at Ursinus College, proving new mathematical results in number theory
- Hailie Mitchell (CS): worked at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software and Societal Systems Department, helping to develop a new testing technique for certain neural networks
- John Chu (CS): worked at University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design, improving software techniques for designing proteins
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided
Tuesday, November 14th
"Winning the battle, but not the war: game sums can be difficult for computers"
Presented by Matthew Ferland, University of Southern California
One thing people do with board games is play multiple games simultaneously, such as Ultimate Tic Tac Toe and Bughouse (for Chess). In this talk, we will talk about a certain way that people combine games together, and about how it can turn "easy" games to solve computationally into ones that are difficult for computers.
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided
Monday, November 20th
"Principal Components Analysis: Making Data Digestible"
Presented by Flannery Currin, University of Iowa
Often, we find ourselves working with complex data with a large number of variables which need to be simplified while retaining the most important information. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is a method for reducing the dimensionality of numerical data that attempts to minimize the amount of information lost. PCA is applied in many situations: from image compression to machine learning. In this talk, she will cover the basics of PCA and how she has used a variant of this technique to develop a set of personas describing parents' attitudes toward technology aimed at 3-8 year old children.
12:30pm
Tome 115
Pizza provided
Tuesday, November 21st
"Privacy Through Randomness"
Presented by Mary Ann Smart, University of California San Diego
In this talk, she will offer an overview of differential privacy---an approach to data privacy that has been adopted by companies and government agencies such as Apple, Microsoft, and the US Census Bureau. She will explain the inherent tradeoff between privacy for individuals and accuracy of aggregate data analysis and how differential privacy handles that tradeoff. She will also discuss challenges in designing effective communication around differential privacy and explain how she has addressed these challenges in her own research.
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided