On Thursday, November 10th, 2011, the Computer Science Department formally opened its new student laboratory/lounge which replaced the terminal room known as the “Berry Patch”. Our students no longer needed as many department supplied workstations, but prefer to work on their own laptops. Envisioned by Prof. Jim Storer after visiting CS departments around the country, we proposed fundraising to combine Classroom 105 with Masters office 104 into a large airy space with several windows, a glass front to the Volen Lobby, and modern furniture including Aeron chairs, rolling conference tables for small group meetings, and soft chairs with laptop trays.
In 2005, Professor Mitch Cherniack co-founded a company, Vertica, with colleagues from MIT and Brown to commercialize a column-based Database technology called C-store, and the company gifted a number of stock shares to the University. Vertica grew to be a leader in “Big Data” and in 2011, Hewlett Packard acquired Vertica, which turned the stock into an actual gift.
With the gift in hand, during the summer, we engaged with University Facilities and its external contractors to realize Jim Storer’s vision for the new space, which is heavily used by both our undergraduate and masters students every day. Photos (by Johann Larusson) from the opening reception follow the break. Continue reading →
Entrepreneur Magazine did a story on Studyegg.com, a startup by three Brandeis CS students which has developed a mobile app for electronic flashcards. The students previously took CS 235 with Prof. Colon-Osorio and an independent study with Professor Hickey.
Professors Jim Storer and Antonella Di Lillo received a one year grant from Google entitled “Navigation in Urban Spaces with Applications to Assistance for the Visually Impaired”.
Professor Jordan Pollack gave a Keynote address at the European Conference on Artificial Life on August 11th in Paris. The title was “Prospects for Machine Embryogenesis” and covered the DEMO lab’s history of work on co-evolving robot bodies and brains.
The CS department is sponsoring a series of lectures on Mobile Applications and Game Design as part of the Justice Brandeis Semester program of the same name being offered this summer. All of the lectures are being taped and the videos posted to youtube. You can also attend in person on Mondays from 1-2 in Lemberg 55. Here is a link to the series with links to the videos and info about future talks this summer: https://sites.google.com/site/jbs2011mobile/info-pages/classroom-work/speakers These lectures are open to all, please come if you are in the neighborhood! We will have two alumni speaking in the series: Rob Lindeman ’85 (Assoc Prof of CS at WPI) who spoke last week and Haggai Goldfarb ’85, CEO of LIquidBits, Inc. who will be speaking on 7/11. Here is a link to a video of Prof. Lindeman’s talk:
VIDEO: Rob Lindeman ’85 on “Virtual and Augmented Reality”
Professor Olga Papaemmanouil presented a research paper at ACM SIGMOD conference in Athens Greece on June 14th. The title was “Performance Prediction for Concurrent Database Workloads.”
Professor James Pustejovsky gave the keynote address at the Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop in Taiwan on May 3rd. The title of his talk was “Mechanisms of Coercion in a General Theory of Selection.”
Brandeis is one of the co-organizers of the third annual New England Undergraduate Computing Symposium which will be held on Saturday April 9th at Tufts University. This symposium is designed to build community among undergraduate Computer Science majors in New England and also to increase the diversity of our undergraduate majors by actively reaching out to under-represented groups and encouraging them to participate. Students register online at https://sites.google.com/site/neucs11/ by completing a simple form describing the project they plan to demo or present as a poster. We expect to have 60-80 students projects and around 150 students and faculty attending the symposium. If you are an undergrad that has written an interesting mobile app, or completed a creative project in one of your classes, or are working in a research lab on an exciting problem involving computation, please visit the site and register to present your project and/or demo your code.
Tim Hickey will be teaching a new course this semester, CS177 Introduction to Scientific Computing. The course meets MWT 9-10 and has no prerequisites. The first part of the course will be an introduction to the lingua franca of the Scientific programming community Matlab/Octave. The second part of the course will cover the use of Matlab/Octave to solve a variety of scientific problems using various techniques including statistical analysis, curve fitting, optimization, ordinary and partial differential equation solving, image processing, SVD and other matrix factorizations, 2d and 3d plotting. Students will also learn to use a number of tools for collaboration and dissemination of scientific results including LaTeX for scientific papers, GIT for source code sharing, google docs for shared editing and google sites for dissemination of results. For more info see the course website
James Pustejovsky has received a 3-year NSF grant from the Robust Intelligence Program within the IIS Division, entitled ”Interpreting Linguistic Spatiotemporal Relations in Static and Dynamic Contexts”
