Penguins love Vim and Emacs!

Vim and Emacs tutorial night — this Thursday, October 11 at 9pm in the downstairs lab (King 137)

Have you ever been programming in one of the CS labs and happen to see that the person next to you is coding in some kind of mysterious black window with wonderful, brightly coloured text everywhere? Do you admire how quickly and effortlessly they seem to be editing their files? Well, that mysterious and beautiful program is probably either Vim or Emacs! And you too could be dazzled with pretty colours and divided windows. You too could experience the joy of macros, meta keys and modes.

You’ll learn the basics of either Vim or Emacs — your choice.  We’ll walk you through a tutorial, give tips and pointers, and give you some exercises to complete at the end of the night.

Presented by the CSMC – now with cookies!

Unleash the power of computing!

There will be a student run Intro to Unix session on Thursday, February 23 at 9pm in the downstairs lab (King 135). Learn how to use the command line, copy files from your laptop, and other tricks to help you get your CS labs done faster.

Cookies might be provided.

Kuperman’s Vim Tips

Vim Rocks!

What: An introduction to some of the features of Vim that I find particularly useful

When: Thursday, December 15 @ 9pm

Where: King 135

It’ll be useful if you are comfortable using Vim (or vi) as an editor — at least have gone through the tutorial.  I’ll introduce you to a number of useful features and concepts that will make Vim more useful for you.  I’ll also try to answer any questions about Vim that I can.

GNU Emacs!

The CSMC proudly presents…

Emacs Night!

On Thursday, December 8th the Computer Science Majors Committee will be holding Emacs Night at 9pm in the downstairs lab. This will be a hands-on presentation intended to introduce you to GNU Emacs, along with some tips and tricks.  This event could be especially helpful to those who are planning a computer science-related winter term, but aren’t sure what tool to use.  All are welcome!

Monday October 10, King 221 4:30 p.m.

An operating system is the software that provides the connection between application software and the underlying hardware.  As such, its development is challenging and its correctness is critical.  Linux is an open source operating system, developed by programmers around the world, who have a widely varying degree of expertise.  These factors have implied that the introduction of bugs is continuous, and indeed seems inevitable.  Adequate tools are thus needed to help programmers find these bugs in their code. Such tools furthermore need to be suited to the expertise and working style of the programmers that should use them.

In recent work, we have developed the program matching and transformation tool Coccinelle.  Coccinelle makes it possible to match and transform code according to specifications that looks like the processed code itself.  Concretely, Coccinelle provides the notion of a “semantic patch”, which is like the patch (diff) familiar to Linux developers, but is more general, allowing a single specification to match code found all over the Linux
kernel.  In this talk, we will introduce Coccinelle and present a number of bugs recently found in Linux code by using this tool.
Joint work with Gilles Muller, INRIA

Sponsored by the Computer Science Department, College Leading Edge Fund, and the Alumni Office ASOC Program

Unix Night

Want to be as cool as these guys? The CSMC will be hosting Unix Night on Thursday, September 15th, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the downstairs computer lab (King 135). There will be a scavenger hunt to get familiar with common Unix commands, plus brief introductions to the Emacs and Vim editors and some tips to make working in the shell easier and more productive. Pizza (vegetarian and vegan options) will be provided. Feel free to contact isaac.mccreery@oberlin.edu with questions. We hope to see you there!

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie - Inventors of Unix!!!

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.

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.

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.

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