MCS
Blog for Gustavus Mathematics and Computer Science Department
Pi Day 2013
The Gustavus Mathematics and Computer Science Department hosted its annual celebration of Pi Day on March 14. As usual, the mention of free pie brought students, faculty, and others running to the 3rd floor Olin lobby. Professor Mike Hvidsten showcased his pie baking skills with a home-made blueberry pie while MCS Club co-President Helen Wauck [...]
If Electronic Pollbooks are the Answer, What is the Question?
I had hoped to spend today at the annual conference of the Election Verification Network (EVN) and in particular taking part in a panel on electronic pollbooks. Alas, I was unable to travel and the panel was canceled. However, one of of the other panelists blogged about what he would have said. I’ll post a [...]
Cool Music App from a Gustie
Hans Anderson, a class of 2001 Computer Science major, is the lead developer behind iFretless Bass, one supercool app for making music. I can’t hope to describe it; go to their web site and view one or more of their videos, in which you’ll see and hear Hans demonstrating its responsive musicality. When not running [...]
Dan O’Keefe wins the third annual Gustavus StarCraft 2 Tournament
The tournament winners receive the certificates and prizes. (Left-to-right: Prof. Choong-Soo Lee, David Buckley (’13), Joshua Wolanyk (’15), Dan O’Keefe (’15) Derek Evenson (’13)) This past J-Term the StarCraft Club hosted the third StarCraft II tournament. Unlike the first two tournaments, this year’s tournament took place in two phases: the group stage and elimination bracket. [...]
Mathematical Representations of Ciliate Genome Decryption
When: Thursday, February 28 @ 11:30am Where: Olin Hall Room 320 Presenter: Helen Wauck, Junior Mathematics & Computer Science Major Ciliates are unique unicellular organisms that each contain a scrambled version of their own DNA which must be unscrambled for proper gene expression. Ciliates have developed three DNA operations for this purpose: reversals, block interchanges, and [...]
A student blogs from Vienna
The MCS Department currently has students studying in Vienna, Budapest, Hirakata, and Galway. [Correction: one also continues in Seville.] We hope to share reports from all of them to inspire others considering study away. Today we share a blog from Tim Krippner, who is in Vienna.
Characteristics of Chinese Online Social Networks
When: Monday, February 18, 2013 @ 1:30PM Where: Olin Hall Room 320 Presenter: Dr. Louis Yu, Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Pomona College In recent years, social media services and its subscribers have multiplied at a phenomenal rate. This immense growth has been witnessed globally with millions of users creating and sharing content on [...]
MCS Seminar
Speaker: Ananya Das, Lake Forest College Candidate for MCS faculty position Talk: Efficient Data Encoding In computer science we often encode and store data files in their binary representation. When the data files are very descriptive, such as audio or video files, the binary representations may be inefficiently large. In this talk I will discuss [...]
Calculated Clustering–An Application to Childhood Growth Trajectories
When: Thursday, November 29, 2012 @ 3:30PM Where: Olin Hall Room 321 Presenter: Brianna Heggeseth, University of California, Berkeley Through the integration of technology into practically every aspect of our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly possible to collect massive amounts of data on individuals over time. My work revolves around finding meaning and structure in [...]
Urn Problems and the Election
Anyone who has studied discrete probability has run into urns containing balls of varying colors, which are withdrawn according to seemingly arbitrary rules, always ending in the same big question that Jakob Bernoulli’s own students surely posed: Why do we even care? For example, suppose three urns are filled with the following balls. Urn 1: [...]