Colloquium and Seminar Schedule
Spring 2013This is the schedule of colloquia and seminars inthe Department of Mathematics and Computer Science for the Spring 2013 semester.
February 2013
- "Authoring Autonomous Behaviors for Computer Games and Cinematography"
Candidate's Talk
Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: Napier 101
Refreshments will be served beforehand
Abstract:
What if a movie camera could learn about cinematography while an expert human filmmaker operates the camera? Could that same movie camera, now in the hands of a novice, offer the novice filmmaker suggestions on composition and editing in the style learned from the expert?
This colloquium explores these questions by presenting a novel cinematography assistant embodied in a portable touch screen equipped with motion-sensors that is used to move and aim a camera in a computer-generated world.
The presentation will include examples of different ways students can participate in future research.
- "Thoracic Biometrics: Investigations of the Human Heartbeat as a Biometric "
Candidate's Talk
Date: Tuesday, February 26
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: Napier 101
Refreshments will be served beforehand.
Abstract:
In the futuristic film "Minority Report", the main character attempts to evade police by walking through a mall. Unfortunately, sensors abound, and he finds himself targeted not only by the police but also by advertisements. The world where sensors can read your personal traits and identify you is here. Today, face and iris images are used. Tomorrow's technology may use heartbeats.
Thoracic biometrics refers to the use of cardiac signals for identification. These signals can be measured by sensors in contact with the body, for example a stethoscope, or at a distance with the use of lasers and radars. In this talk, we will discuss the state of the art in thoracic biometrics, our human subject experiment for recording cardiac signals, our biometric identification software, and future work in thoracic biometrics.
- "Design Pattern-Based Extension of Class Hierarchies to Support Structural Invariant Testing"
Candidate's Talk
Date: Thursday, February 28
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: Eaton 110
Refreshments will be served beforehand.
Abstract:
In object-oriented programming, a class invariant is a boolean-valued predicate that characterizes an object's "legal" states, stating the constraints that must hold among an object's fields. Although it is a powerful testing tool, most mainstream languages lack native support for expressing class invariants. In such languages, a programmer must build all checks of these invariants manually, which is difficult, tedious, and prone to errors.
In this talk, I will describe the results of a project recently completed with one of my students in which we develop a method for automatically weaving structural invariant checking into a set of classes. Using variations on existing design patterns, we generate from the original source code a new set of classes that implement the interfaces of the original classes, but with the addition of user-specified class invariant checks. Our work is notable in the scarcity of assumptions made. It requires no modification of the original source code, relies only on single inheritance, and does not require that the object fields used in the checks be publicly visible. We are able to instrument a wide variety of class hierarchies, including those with pure interfaces, abstract classes and classes with type parameters.
April 2013
- "Failed Zero Forcing Sets in Graphs"
Speaker: Professor Bonnie Jacob
National Technical Institute for the Deaf
at the Rochester Insitute of Technology
Date: Tuesday, April 9
Time: 4:15
Location: Napier 201
Refreshments will be served beforehand.
Abstract:
Zero forcing, which can be considered to be a dynamic vertex labeling problem, is a helpful tool for working on minimum rank problems. This is because the zero forcing number of a graph G, which is the minimum cardinality of any zero forcing set on G, provides an upper bound for the maximum nullity of the matrix associated with G. The usefulness of zero forcing sets has led to a thorough investigation of zero forcing numbers on different families of graphs. However, there are many interesting questions about zero forcing sets in general that have not been explored.
In this talk, Proifessor Jacob will introduce zero forcing sets and zero forcing numbers together with their motivation. She will then present some open questions about zero forcing sets, along with current work on a new, related parameter: the failed zero forcing number of G.
The new results presented in this talk are joint work with RIT undergraduates Katherine Fetcie and Daniel Saavedra.
- "Student Computer Science Projects"
Speakers: Alexander Kittelberger '13 and Kieran Koehnlein '13
Date: Wednesday, April 24
Time: 4:45 PM
Location: Napier 101
Refreshments will be served beforehand.
Abstracts:
Alexander Kittelberger: "An XML Infrastructure for Math Visualization on the Web"
This project designed an "Online Virtual Math Museum" to store and present information about mathematical objects. It uses an XML language and an XML database as a framework, with Java servlets to present the information in the form of a website. The framework can easily be extended, and it can be used in many other ways to describe and present mathematical objects.
Kieran Koehnlein: "Creating a Cellular Stream Monitoring Device"
The aim of this project was to create a convenient, accurate, and cost effective stream monitor. The devices monitor turbidity, temperature, and stream depth and put the recordings into an online database. At a fraction of the cost and allowing real-time monitoring, this device is an improvement over the current commercial units employed by The Colleges.
Past Colloquia Series
Fall 2012 Spring 2012 Fall 2011 Spring 2011
Fall 2010 Spring 2010 Fall 2009 Spring 2008 Fall 2008
If you have interest in giving a talk or know of someone who does,
please contact Kevin Mitchell at mitchell@hws.edu