The events for Winter 2015 are listed here. You can also download an ICS of them.
Winter 2015 Elections
Comfy Lounge, 2015-01-15, 7:00 PM: Elections for Winter 2015 are being held! Submit a nomination and join your fellow members in choosing this term's CSC executive. (Please note the time change to 7PM.)
Tech Talk: Google Fiber Internet: The Messy Bits
MC 2065, 2015-01-15, 6:00 PM: Our speaker, Avery Pennarun, will share some not-very-secret secrets from the team creating GFiber's open source router firmware, including some discussion of wifi, marketing truthiness, the laws of physics, something about coaxial cables, embedded ARM processors, queuing theory, signal processing, hardware design, and kernel driver optimization. If you're lucky, he may also rant about poor garbage collector implementations. Also, there will be at least one slide containing one of those swooshy circle-and-arrow lifecycle diagrams, we promise. Please RSVP here: http://bit.ly/GoogleFiberTalk.
Alumni Tech Talk
MC 2017, 2015-01-21, 6:00 PM: Alex Tsay from AeroFS will talk about the high availability distributed file systems they develop. The CAP Theorem outlined the fundamental limitations of a distributed system. When designing a distributed system, one has to constantly be aware of the trade-off between consistency and availability. Most distributed systems are designed with consistency in mind. However, AeroFS has decided to build a high-availability file system instead. In this tech talk, I'll be presenting an overview of AeroFS file system, advantages and challenges of a high-availability file system, and examine the inner workings of AeroFS's core syncing algorithm.
Racket's Magical match
MC 4063, 2015-02-02, 6:00 PM: Theo Belaire, a fourth-year CS student, will be talking about Racket's match' function. Bug resistant, legible, and super powerful! Especially useful for CS 241 in writing compilers, but all-round a joy to write.
Making Robots Behave
DC 1302, 2015-02-05, 3:30 PM: Part of the Cheriton School of CS' Distinguished Lecture Series, MIT's Leslie Kaelbling will discuss robotic AI applied to the messy real world. We make a number of approximations during planning but regain robustness and effectiveness through a continuous state estimation and replanning process. This allows us to solve problems that would otherwise be intractable to solve optimally.
Code Party 0
EV3 1408, 2015-02-27, 6:00 PM: The first code party of Winter 2015, and we have something a litle different this time. We're running a Code Retreat (coderetreat.org) with Boltmade. The result of this is that you will be able to do a coding challenge, wherein you implement Rule 110 (like the Game of Life). Of course, if you want to work on whatever you can do that as well. Delicious free food, but RSVP! bit.ly/code-party-0
SAT and SMT solvers
MC 2038, 2015-03-03, 6:00 PM: Murphy Berzish explains how to programmatically determine if a program is satisfiable, and how to find a concrete counterexample if it is unsatisfiable. At the core are SAT/SMT solvers. SAT theory deals with Boolean Satisfiability solvers, while SMT theory--Satisfiability Modulo a Theory--allows SMT to be extended to common data structures. Free food!
Runtime Type Inference in Dynamic Languages - Day 1
MC 4040, 2015-03-09, 6:00 PM: Javascript is fast. In some cases, very close to compiled-language fast. How is this even possible? How do we know what types our variables have? How can we optimize it well? Kannan Vijayan will be talking about the historical advances in JIT-compilation of dynamically typed programs over two days. Of course, both of those talks will have free food.
Runtime Type Inference in Dynamic Languages - Day 2
MC 4040, 2015-03-10, 6:00 PM: Day 2 of Runtime Type Inference in Dynamic Languages with Kannan Vijayan
Constitutional GM and Code Party 1
EIT 1015, 2015-03-27, 6:00 PM: GM for the W2015 term, two main amendments to be discussed: Requiring elections to be held within two weeks of the beginning of term and adopting a club-wide code of conduct. Code Party 1 follows, we're doing timed code golf problems, T-shirts might find themselves on people who do well on code golf.
Describing and Synthesizing Microfluidics
MC 4020, 2015-04-02, 5:30 PM: Derek Rayside presents current research on the field of microfluidics. Microfluidics are currently developed mainly by trial and error. How can this be improved?