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We had a great time on Wednesday night having pizza and hanging out with the professors! It was a pretty self-explanatory meeting, but here’s basically what happened: the department provided pizza, soda, and chips, a lot of people and a lot of professors showed up, and we ate pizza with the professors. There was also goat cheese provided by Dr. Volkert. You are invited to the Pizza with the Professors night on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7 PM in the Math Library. Please let Sue Peti in the CS Office know whether or not you’ll be able to come have pizza with us. I hope that you can attend. Cheers, Today, Nicholas Tietz and Jimmy Baiera explained the benefits and drawbacks of functional programming, provide a brief introduction to Haskell, and provide examples of solving problems in both C++ and Haskell to highlight the differences between “traditional” programming and functional programming. If you want to try Haskell in your browser, without installing: http://tryhaskell.
This weeks meeting was a Presentation (PDF) on the repository system GIT by Nicholas Tietz. Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Branching and merging are fast and easy to do. Last nights meeting had a great turnout as we introduced our plans for a Gaming SIG. To begin the night we had a presentation by Dr. Ruttan on Reinventing Education (PDF) by using virtual worlds as a new interactive place for students to come and learn. Currently, there are faculty at Kent State in the departments of Computer Science, Theatre, and Education working with the Unity engine to create such an environment. As a result of this talk, there was a spark in debate about whether this was a good solution to education or if it would ultimately hinder human interaction skills. Following Dr. Ruttan’s talk, Mike Romeo shared his experience with the gaming industry and gave startup tutorials with the Unity and CryEngine 3 game engines. Game Engines With this project we are looking at combining with the Kent State Imagineer group. If you are interested in attending their meetings they are on Thursdays in Room 302 of Van Dusen at 2pm. The meetings usually last around 15 minutes.
On Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 7 PM, we will be hosting speaker Casey Stella in room 228, MSB. He will be giving a talk titled “Better News Through Data Science,” where he will investigate how machine learning and statistics can assist in classifying political bias in news. Along the way, he will lay bare what data science can do well and where it can fall down. Casey Stella is a senior software engineer at a medical data mining start-up in Cleveland. He has a passion for math, computer science, and cheese whiz. His talk will be recorded and will be available on this site afterwards. Check back for updates! We had another great meeting with really good turnout. I’m waiting on our Records Officer, Tim Fox, to get the official count to me, but it looked like around 30 people were at our TED Talk Night. The meeting started with general business, then we watched some TED talks, which are viewable at http://www.ted.com/. We watched talks about topics ranging from creating virtual whiteboards using Wii remotes to effective visualization of medical data, and halfway through, we had pizza and soda for refreshments. At about 9 PM, we concluded the meeting. We had a wonderful start to the semester as our first chapter meeting resulted in great turn out of new members. To start the night off, we had two representatives from Sherwin-Williams present opportunities for internships and co-ops for computer science majors. They are a very unique company and offer a wide range of options for the students who are interested. Following the presentation, Nicholas Tietz, the president, went over general business of what was to come over the next semester and asked for suggestions from attendees for future events. The officers introduced themselves to all the new and returning members. Mike Romeo, the academic officer, gave an overview of the plans for the academic activities for this year. Finally, Tim Fox, the treasurer, discussed what fundraising was being planned for the chapter. The meeting concluded with some C++ puzzles. These tested knowledge of some intricacies of the language, as well as clever thinking. For example, the first problem was “write a program in C++ which prints a string n number of times,” which seems simple — except you were only allowed to include iostream, you could not define any functions other than main, and you could not use any loops. After the puzzles were finished, the meeting was adjourned. |
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