From jferraio at brynmawr.edu Fri Apr 13 18:57:53 2007 From: jferraio at brynmawr.edu (Ferraioli Julia Rebecca) Date: Fri Apr 13 18:57:59 2007 Subject: [Compsci] Robots and Education; Institute Grand Opening Message-ID: Bryn Mawr College Presents the Grand Opening of The Institute for Personal Robots in Education and a talk by Jane Prey, Microsoft Research, on: "You're the Future of Innovation and Technology" Tuesday, April 17, 2007 Park Science Building, near room 247 2:00 - 2:45 Tour of the IPRE facilities, refreshments 2:45 - 3:30 Robot Demonstrations 3:30 - 4:00 IPRE Grand Opening, Park Science 243 4:00 - 5:00 Keynote Address by Jane Prey Dr. Jane C. Prey is an Academic Innovation Manager at Microsoft Research. She spent 11 years as a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. In addition, Jane spent 2 years as a Program Director in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Jane is an IEEE CS representative and the chair of the FIE Steering Committee as well as a former member of the ACM SIGCSE board. Come and win a Zune! Two Microsoft music players will be given away. For more information, see http://cs.brynmawr.edu/ipre/ From dblank at brynmawr.edu Tue Apr 24 21:28:28 2007 From: dblank at brynmawr.edu (Douglas S. Blank) Date: Tue Apr 24 21:28:40 2007 Subject: [Compsci] Crossroads student magazine needs you! Message-ID: <15603.76.98.12.59.1177464508.squirrel@webmail.brynmawr.edu> [For students only: Have you read a book recently that people in computing might be interested in hearing about? Consider writing a review, or a paper about some aspect of computing that you are thinking about or working on. -Doug] Call For Articles Crossroads, the Association for Computing Machinery Student Magazine DUE DATE: Rolling admission SUBMISSION ADDRESS: http://www.acm.org/crossroads/submit/ INFORMATION: crossroads@acm.org The Crossroads editorial staff invites authors to submit articles dealing with topics drawn from several areas pertaining to the broad topic computer science. The following partial list of topics is provided to give prospective authors ideas for articles and is by no means exhaustive; other relevant topics will be considered. Papers that draw connections between two or more of these areas are especially welcome. # Bioinformatics # Computer Graphics # Gaming and Entertainment # Vision and Speech # Human-Computer Interaction # Spam # Cognitive Science # Cryptography # Computer Security # Interdisciplinary Computer Science Articles should include a basic description of the kinds of problems being worked on, the state of the art of research, the state of the art of commercial applications, open problems, or future research/commercial development trends. Interviews with researchers; reviews of related books, software, videos, or conferences; and opinion columns on related issues are also welcome. We especially encourage both undergraduate and graduate students to submit articles. However, articles written or coauthored by professionals will also be considered. Crossroads articles should be written for a broad audience. They should be easily understandable by someone who has had only the most basic computer science instruction, and yet still be interesting to the advanced computer enthusiast. Articles longer than 6000 words will generally not be considered for publication. Feature articles should be between 1500 and 6000 words; reviews should be between 800 and 2000 words; and opinion columns should be between 800 and 3000 words. Articles should be written in a magazine style rather than a research paper style. In consideration of our diverse readership, authors should try to use language that is inclusive of people regardless of their gender, race, religion, nationality, or field of study. Additional writing guidelines and submission information are available online at the Crossroads web site (http://www.acm.org/crossroads/doc/information/writing.html). Crossroads is published both online and in print. We have a print circulation of about 20,000. All back issues are available for free on our website. Authors that have an article printed in Crossroads can receive complementary copies of the issue they were published in. All submissions should be formatted in HTML or plain text format and submitted via http://www.acm.org/crossroads/submit/ The submissions deadline is on a rolling basis. They will be reviewed shortly thereafter and authors of accepted submissions will be notified within two to three weeks of the submission. Prospective authors are invited to send email to the editors of Crossroads (crossroads@acm.org) indicating their intention to submit an article. In this way we can keep everyone informed of any changes in deadlines or formats and to make sure we have a good variety of articles. General questions should also be sent to the Crossroads editors. From jferraio at brynmawr.edu Mon Apr 30 15:08:37 2007 From: jferraio at brynmawr.edu (Ferraioli Julia Rebecca) Date: Mon Apr 30 15:08:43 2007 Subject: [Compsci] Senior Theses Preentations & Picnic Message-ID: Greetings! We will have two Senior Thesis Presentations this friday starting from 2:00p. Julia Ferraioli will present first, followed by Alden Walker. Abstracts for their work are attached below. Following the presentations, starting at 4:00 join us for our yearly picnic in the sunken garden outside PSB. There will be plenty of food and fun for all. Bring friends and family and pets! Deepak. --- Abstracts: Title: A Novel Schematic for the Representation and Organization of Abstract Data Presenter: Julia Ferraioli Time: Friday May 4th 2-2:30, in room 232 Park Science Abstract This presentation will introduce an improved solution to the problem of a typical user navigating through and organizing large data sets of possibly high dimensionality. We look at how to help the user arrive at a correct organization of the data in a shorter amount of time than it would take to classify each data item manually. By combining and modifying several existing machine learning techniques, we can apply them to the problem of data classification when the user has background knowledge that can be applied to complete the task. We combine an intuitive graphical user interface with a classification tool that incorporates user feedback, that aids the user in arriving at the desired goal more quickly than any existing methods. The composite schematic is what we will describe in this presentation as well as the results of experiments testing the effectiveness of the proposed design on data set of varying degrees of difficulty. We will include a live demonstration of how one might typically interact with this program. Full thesis available at http://bubo.brynmawr.edu/~jferraio/thesis/thesis.pdf Title: Natural Language Interaction with Robots Presenter: Alden Walker Time: Friday May 4th 2:30-3:00p, in room 232 Park Science Natural language communication with robots has obvious uses in almost all areas of life. Computer-based natural language interaction is an active area of research in Computational Linguistics and AI. While there have been several NL systems built for specific computer applications, NL interaction with robots remains largely unexplored. Our research focuses on implementing a natural language interpreter for commands and queries given to a small mobile robot. Our goal is to implement a complete system for natural language understanding in this domain, and as such consists of two main parts: a system for parsing the subset of English our robot is to understand and a semantic analyzer used to extract meaning from the natural language. By using such a system we will be able to demonstrate that a mobile robot is capable of understanding NL commands and queries and responding to them appropriately. Full thesis available at: http://students.haverford.edu/awalker/CS_Ling_Thesis/Drafts/draft3-4-19.pdf -- Deepak Kumar Professor & Chair of Computer Science Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 dkumar@cs.brynmawr.edu, dkumar@acm.org http://www.cs.brynmawr.edu/~dkumar