The events for Fall 2014 are listed here. You can also download an ICS of them.
Talk: Building a Mobile Platform for Android and iOS
MC 4021, 2014-09-18, 6:00 PM: Come listen to a Google software engineer give a talk on building a mobile platform for Android and iOS! Wesley Tarle has been leading development at Google in Kitchener and Mountain View, and building stuff for third-party developers on Android and iOS. He's contributed to Google Play services since its inception and continues to produce APIs and SDKs focused on mobile startups. RSVP at http://goo.gl/Pwc3m4.
Talk: In Pursuit of the Travelling Salesman
MC 4041, 2014-10-22, 5:00 PM: The Travelling Salesman Problem is easy to state: given a number of cities along with the cost of travel between each pair, find the cheapest way to visit all of the cities and return to your starting point. However, TSP is very difficult to solve. In this talk, Professor Bill Cook will discuss the history, applications, and computation of this fascinating problem.
Unix 101
MC 3003, 2014-10-24, 5:00 PM: Interested in Unix, but don't know where to start? Then Come learn some basic topics with us including interaction with the shell, motivation for using it, some simple commands, and more.
Code Party 0
MC Comfy, 2014-10-24, 6:00 PM: 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.
'Hackers' Screening
MC Comfy, 2014-11-07, 7:00 PM: Women in Computer Science (WiCS) and the Computer Science Club (CSC) will meet up in the Comfy Lounge to watch a favourite cult classic: Hackers. Join us as we relive our 90s teenage hacking fantasies and stuff our faces with popcorn and junk food. Hackers of the world, unite!
Talk: From Zero to Kernel
RCH 205, 2014-11-10, 5:30: 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.
Talk: Machine Learning at Bloomberg
EIT 1015, 2014-11-12, 5:30 PM: Kang, our guest speaker from Bloomberg, will illustrate some examples and difficulties associated with working on some of the most fascinating technical challenges in business and finance. He will also show some of the machine learning applications at Bloomberg that are useful in this environment. Please show up early to ensure a spot (and dinner).
Talk: Why Pattern Recognition is Hard, and Why Deep Neural Networks Help
QNC 1502, 2014-11-17, 6:00 PM: 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/.
Code Party 1/SE Hack Day #13
M3 1006, 2014-11-21, 6:00 PM: Why sleep when you could be hacking on $SIDE_PROJECT, or working on $THE_NEXT_BIG_THING with some cool CSC/SE people? Come when you want, hack on something cool, demo before you leave. If you don't have a project, don't worry - we have a list of ideas, and a lot of people will be looking for an extra helping hand on their projects. NOTE: Dinner and snacks will only be served to those working on projects during the event.
Talk: C++ ABI
MC 4041, 2014-11-25, 5:30 PM: 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.
Talk: Heroic Android HTTP
MC 4020, 2014-11-27, 6:00 PM: The network is unreliable. 3G networking is slow. Using WiFi drains your battery. The NSA is spying on you. Different versions of HttpURLConnection have different bugs. Jesse Wilson, a software developer at Square, will be talking about OkHttp, a library that he maintains, and how to use it to make your app's networking work even when conditions aren't ideal. He will talk about how to configure caching to improve behavior and save resources. He will talk about crypto, and he will give advice on which libraries to use to make good networking easy. Please RSVP here: https://www.ticketfi.com/event/77/heroic-android-http.