Thursday Extras

From CSWiki

Fall 2008:

• September 4: John Stone, "Liberty through license: GPLv3 and other free-software licenses"
• September 11: Theocharis Ian Athanasakis 2009: "Data-intensive scalable computing."
• September 18: Kathy Iberle on differences in software engineering practices between various businesses and industries.

Here's an abstract for Mr. Athanasakis's talk:

The goal is to inspire further involvement of students and faculty in large-scale data-intensive application design and cluster computing, which is employed by organizations such as Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, last.fm, The New York Times, and Krugle. After a short presentation of the MapReduce paradigm, we will demonstrate how Apache Hadoop and Apache Pig, running on MathLAN commodity workstations, can solve within minutes some large example problems, such as finding the frequencies of words and letters in the entire Wikipedia corpus (4GB of plain text).

Other proposed topics:

• Ian Bone: the Semantic Web and/or Ruby on Rails, as they figured in his summer 2007 job.
• beamer: a utility for preparing slide presentations in LaTeX.
• The Revised⁶ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme.
• Alumni and faculty talk about careers for CS graduates.
• Henry Walker: "Games in the CS classroom: good or evil?"
• Henry Walker on the expert system that we use for placement in computer science, mathematics, and statistics.