Presenter: Josh Bonner
Location: Dat's Cajun Place (notes: no beer :-( )
Description: [to be filled in]
References: Quantum Computer Science by N. David Mermin
7/13/09: Cryptography
Presenter: Nate Skiba
Location: Nick's
Description: A brief history of cryptography and the issues that lead up to the development of such highly useful public key/private key systems as RSA, along with a clear description of just exactly why RSA can do what it does.
References: RSA Link I RSA Link II ICSA Guide to Cryptography, by Randall K. Nichols
7/20/09: Image Compression Algorithms
Presenter: Matt Zurschmeide
Location: Runciple Spoon
Description: Image compression is a specialized form of data compression. This Monday, Matt will be giving a talk on how we can make certain assumptions about image data which allow for specific compression techniques to be used. Among the topics covered will be the TGA,PNG, and JPEG image formats.
References: PNG, JPEG
7/27/09: The Watchman Problem
Presenter: Christine Task
Location: Sushi Bar
Description: Imagine you
have a graph, and on that graph are a set of watchmen, and a thief. Time is discrete.
In each time increment, the thief and every watchman can move from the vertex they are on
to a neighboring vertex. If some watchman 'sees' a thief (lands on a vertex that's
neighboring the thief's location), then the thief is caught. For a given graph, how many
watchmen does it take to guarantee the thief gets caught? How quickly can they do it?
(for instance, every complete graph (edges between every pair of vertices) is watchable
by one watchman)
References: On the Paranoid Watchman Problem (the flawed masters thesis)
8/3/09: The Matching Problem (Applied)
Presenter: Andy Keep
Location: Trojan Horse
Description: The stable matching problem, sometimes phrased as the stable marriage problem, is a way to take two, or sometimes more, populations and match
individuals from population A and population B into stable matches. A
matching between two groups is considered stable if there's no two people
who would prefer to be with each other than their assigned partners.
At Teach For America, we used this algorithm to match corp members
with teaching positions we needed to fill.
References: Basic Wikipedia Pages: 1 2 3 4, Journal Articles: 1 2 3 4, and That French Book by Knuth.
8/10/09: Volumetric Graphics
Presenter: Dave Bender
Location: Irish Lion (notes: loud music)
Description: I'll be talking about representing objects as solids using octrees (comprised of voxels). I'll cover orthographic rendering of these structures
and discuss some of their benefits and limitations compared to polygonal methods.
References: Efficient Synthetic Image Generation of Arbitrary 3-D Objects, Geometric Modeling Using Octree Encoding
8/17/09: The 3n+1 Problem
Presenter: Brenton Bostick
Location: BuffaLouis
ent)Description: The 3n+1 problem is a problem that was first stated in the 1930's and is currently open.It asks if for any positive integer n, does this program always terminate:
while (n != 1) {
if (odd(n)) {
n = 3n+1;
} else {
n = n/2; }
}
Even though the problem is easily stated and appears simple, it is a source of complex
behavior. In my talk, I will discuss the origin, milestones, and state-of-the-art of
approaches to solving the 3n+1 problem.
References: Jeff Lagarias:
The 3x+1 problem and its generalizations (Nice survey about the problem), 3x+1 Problem Annotated Bibliography (1963-1999), (2000-)
Eric Roosendaal:
On the 3x+1 problem (Statistics and data about the problem)
Terence Tao:
Moser's entropy compression argument. (Introduction of fundamentally new kind of termination argument)
8/24/09: Traffic Analysis (cars, not packets)
Presenter: Josh Bonner
Location: Runciple Spoon (notes: call to reserve room next time)
Description: [to be filled in]
References: [to be filled in]