Events Archive: Fall 2014

C++ is an interesting study because it supports a large number of powerful, abstract concepts, yet it operates very close to the hardware compared to many modern programming languages. There are also many implementations of C++ which must be made interoperable. I will discuss some aspects of the Itanium 64 Application Binary Interface (ABI) for C++, which is now the de facto standard across Unix-like platforms of all architectures. In particular, I will cover a number of aspects of the class system fundamental to C++: data layout, polymorphic types, construction and destruction, and dynamic casting.

In the last few years, there has been breakthrough progress in pattern recognition -- problems like computer vision and voice recognition. This sudden progress has come from a powerful class of models called deep neural networks.

This talk will explore what it means to do pattern recognition, why it is a hard problem, and why deep neural networks are so effective. We will also look at exciting and strange recent results, such as state of the art object recognition in images, neural nets playing video games, neural nets proving theorems, and neural nets learning to run python programs!

Our speaker, Christopher Olah, is a math-obsessed and Haskell-loving research intern from Google's Deep Learning group. He has a blog about his research here: http://colah.github.io/.

From the massive supercomputer, to your laptop, to a Raspberry Pi: all computing systems run on an operating system powered by a kernel. The kernel is the most fundamental software running on your computer, enabling developers and users to interact with its hardware at a higher level.

This talk will explore the process of writing a minimal kernel from scratch, common kernel responsibilities, and explore of the challenges of kernel development.

Immediately after UNIX 101, we will be having our first annual code party. Enjoy a free dinner, relax, and share ideas with your friends about your favourite topics in computer science. Feel free to show up with or without personal projects to work on, we've got lots of ideas to get started with.

The Travelling Salesman Problem is easy to state: given a number of cities along with the cost of travel between each pair of them, find the cheapest way to visit them all and return to your starting point. Easy to state, but difficult to solve. Despite decades of research, in general it is not known how to significantly improve upon simple brute-force checking. It is a real possibility that there may never exist an efficient method that is guaranteed to solve every instance of the problem. This is a deep mathematical question: Is there an efficient solution method or not? The topic goes to the core of complexity theory concerning the limits of feasible computation and we may be far from seeing its resolution. This is not to say, however, that the research community has thus far come away empty-handed. Indeed, the problem has led to a large number of results and conjectures that are both beautiful and deep, and on the practical side solution methods are used to compute optimal or near-optimal tours for a host of applied problems on a daily basis, from genome sequencing to arranging music on iPods. In this talk we discuss the history, applications, and computation of this fascinating problem.