Please join Brian Keating of UC, San Diego during his joint physics and astronomy public lecture on Friday, September 14th at 8PM in Wege Auditorium.
A book selling/signing will immediately follow with Williams Bookstore. Book info: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA.

Thursday 9/20 @ 7:30pm, TCL 123. Rich Ward '89, will give a talk titled "Don’t Forget Division I, or Why that Liberal Arts Degree is Valuable in the Tech World." CS majors will receive colloquium credit.

Professor Gonen Ashkenasy from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev will be presenting a Chemistry Class of 1960 Scholars Colloquium: "Self-Synthesizing Peptide-based Materials" in TCL 202 at 1:10 p.m.

Join us for Dr. Singh's talk "The promise of human genetics in uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders and mental illnesses" at 1:10pm in Wege Auditorium. All are welcome, light refreshments will be available.

Friday, 9/21 @ 2:35pm, TCL 123; Dan Goldstein, Microsoft, will give a talk titled, "To Put That in Perspective: Generating Analogies That Make Numbers More Easily Understood by Laypeople."

Set, Cap Sets, Arithmetic Progressions, Polynomials by Prof. Jordan Ellenberg, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Math/Stats Kick-Off Colloquium
Supported by the Class of 1960s Scholars Fund and the John and Louise Finnerty Class of 1971 Fund, Wednesday, September 26, 1-1:45 pm, Wege Auditorium

This talk will survey the field of quantum computing from the perspective of a quantum computer programmer, describing the progress of the field so far, the current challenges, and a potential roadmap for the future of this technology.

The fall BIMO Class of 1960 Scholar is Dr. Tannishtha Reya '91 from UC - San Diego will be giving her talk titled "The promise of human genetics in uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders and mental illnesses” at 1:10 today in Wege Auditorium. All are welcome.

Friday, September 28, 2018
2:35 pm in TCL 123, Wege Auditorium
“What I Did Last Summer,” Part II
Short presentations by your fellow CS students, about summer research at Williams.

Marek Demianski, visiting professor of astronomy at Williams College, will present “Gravitational Waves: A New Window on the Universe” for the college’s autumn Sigma Xi lecture.

Friday, October 26 @ 2:35pm in Wege Auditorium (TCL 123)
Computer Science Colloquium - Danny Huang '11 will give a talk titled "Tracking Bitcoins in Criminal Operations."

Friday, November 9 @ 2:35pm in TCL 123. Steve Oney, University of Michigan gives a talk titled "Designing Tools for More Effective Remote Communication."

Friday, February 01@ 2:35pm in TCL 123
Computer Science seniors Ari Ball-Burack, Miranda Chaiken, and Nam Nguyen present their thesis proposals. Snacks provided and colloquium credit offered!

On Rank-One Transformations in Finite and Infinite Measure and Examples Related to Chacon's Transformation by Prof. Cesar Silva, Friday February 8, 1-1:45 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206

Friday, February 08 @ 2:35pm, TCL 123 - Wege
Phillipa Gill, UMass Amherst, will give a talk titled, "Developing a Science of Internet Censorship Resistance: Opportunities and Challenges for Network Measurement."

From Fisheries to Disease Outbreaks: Managing Ecosystems Under Multiple Administrative Jurisdictions by Prof. Julie Blackwood, Friday, February 22, Mathematics Faculty Seminar, 1 - 1:45 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206

"Bimetallic Catalysts and Chain Shuttling Agents: Controlled Access to Isotactic Poly (propylene oxide)" Poly (propylene oxide) (PPO) accounts for 5% of polymer production worldwide with 14 million tons produced in 2011. Although commercially successful for the synthesis of polyurethane foams, the vast majority of PPO manufactured is low molecular weight and atactic. A wide range of polymer properties could potentially…

Friday, February 22 @ 2:35pm in Wege (TCL 123)
Hal Daumé III, Microsoft, will give a talk titled, "Learning Language Through Interaction."

Perfect Test Ideals by Prof. Andrew Bydlon, Friday, March 1, Mathematics Faculty Seminar, Friday, March 1, 1 - 1:45 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206

"Organometallic Chemistry of Iron-Sulfur Clusters" Iron-sulfur enzymes are among Nature’s most ancient metallocofactors. They catalyze myriad processes including electron-transfer, radical rearrangements, and small-molecule redox reactions, and in doing so play prominent roles in energy, environmental, and health sciences. My research group studies both biological and abiological iron-sulfur clusters in order to gain molecular-level insights into how these complex metallocofactors function.…

Trace Ideals and the Classification of Commutative Rings by Prof. Haydee Lindo, Friday, March 8, 1 - 1:45 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206, Mathematics Faculty Seminar

Computer Science Colloquium - Q + A with Class of '60s speaker James Mickens, Harvard.
Friday, 3/08 @ 2:35pm in Wege (TCL 123)

"Nitrogen Oxides at the Soil-Air Interface: Mechanisms and Processes Affecting Atmospheric Composition" Heterogeneous chemistry of atmospheric reactive nitrogen species (NOy, which includes HONO and N2O5) at soil surfaces represents a pathway by which reactive nitrogen can be incorporated into soil organic matter.  One reaction of potential importance for biospheric nitrogen cycling is that of soil organic matter with N2O5.  The…

Lines and Circles: Factoring and Rotations: Sequences and Miracles by Prof. Thomas Garrity, Friday, March 15, 1 - 1:45 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206, Mathematics Faculty Seminar

"The Challenge of Moving Protons" The controlled movement of charges is essential to many redox processes in chemistry, including the harnessing of solar energy. The conversion of solar to chemical energy is key for environmental sustainability and national security. Our group uses a class of compounds called photoacids to investigate the coupling between light energy and movement of protons. Photoacids…

Set-valued Young Tableaux in Algebraic and Tropical Geometry by Prof. Nathan Pflueger, Amherst College, Class of 1960s Speaker, Friday, April 12, Mathematics Faculty Seminar, 1:00 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206

Professor Ashleigh Theberge '06, University of Washington "Studying Cell Signaling in Complex Environments Using Open Microfluidic Models" Small molecule and protein signals provide a rich vocabulary for cellular communication. To better understand signaling processes in both normal and disease states, there is a growing need for cell culture platforms that interface with analytical chemistry tools and recreate key features of…

Visibility in N^k by Santiago Estupinan Salamanca, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, Class of 1960s Speaker, Friday, April 19, Mathematics Faculty Seminar

Fixed Subpolytopes of the Permutahedron by Andrés R. Vindas Meléndez, University of Kentucky, Class of 1960s Speaker, Friday, April 26, 1-1:45 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206

Bryon Weckworth, Deputy Director, Snow Leopard Program & Conservation Genetics Coordinator will be today's speaker at 1:10pm in Wege. All are welcome.

"Tracking Atmospheric Organic Carbon in the Field and in the Lab" Organic species in the Earth’s atmosphere play a central role in many processes important to human health, ecosystem health, and global climate: they can have impacts on human and ecosystem health, they influence atmospheric oxidant levels, and their oxidation products include secondary pollutants such as ozone and secondary organic…

The Mathematical Journey of RNA Molecules Along Cellular Roads by Veronica Ciocanel, Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Ohio State University, Class of 1960s Speaker, Friday, May 3, 1 - 1:45 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206

Biology Student Thesis Presentations!! Starting in Wege at 1:00pm with a short, one-minute presentation about their work to a general audience, followed by a poster session on the second floor of the new South Science Center building.

Chemistry Senior Thesis Presentations

Navigating the Spectrum of Dynamics in High Dimensional Systems by Prof. Stewart Johnson, Mathematics Faculty Seminar, Friday, May 10, 1 - 1:45 pm, Thompson Chemistry 206

Making Models that Matter: Computation, Gerrymandering, and the Search for Fairness, by Class of 1960s Speaker, Prof. Moon Duchin, Tufts University, Joint Math/Stat Kick Off Colloquium, Wednesday, September 11

"Peering inside: Understanding aerosol chemistry through bulk-phase reactions" The reaction between an a-dicabonyl and an amine is a model system for the production of light-absorbing compounds in secondary organic aerosol (SOAs). In the atmosphere, SOA-producing reactions can be perturbed by the myriad airborne chemicals that can enter the particle phase. These compounds can also play a role in mediating (or…

Friday, September 13 @ 2:35pm in TCL 123 (Wege Auditorium). April Shen '13 will give a talk titled, "Thinking Outside the Box: Non-Geometric Perspectives on Semantic Similarity." Snacks will be served and CS colloquium credit offered.

Light Activated Metal Complexes for Sensing, Studying and Inhibiting Amyloid-Beta Aggregation Protein misfolding and aggregation mark the onset of a variety of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). For AD in particular, different stages in the misfolding and aggregation of Amyloid-beta (Ab) has been related to the development of this disease. Amyloid-beta is a relatively unstructured…

Chemistry seniors will be presenting their thesis projects.  Projects to be discussed on two Fridays in October depending on Mountain Day (10/4, 10/11, 10/18).

Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland (A Chemist's Exploration of Cold Physics) Join a physical chemist on a journey tracking the evolution of a dense gas of diatomic molecules to ultracold plasma—an exotic neutral state of matter with liquid and even crystalline properties. Having these kinds of laboratory plasmas help us to better understand the interiors of large planets and white dwarf…

Friday, November 1
2:35pm @ TCL 123 (Wege Auditorium)

Jeff Huang, Brown University will give a talk titled, "Personalized Behavior-Powered Systems." Students can earn CS colloquium credit for attending and snacks will be served.

Computer Science presents Katherine Keith, UMass Amherst will give a talk titled, "Methodological Challenges in Computational Text Analysis." Snacks will be served and CS colloquium credit offered for attendance.

Computer Science alum, Kathi Fisler '91, Brown University will give a talk titled, "In Defense of Little Code."

Computer Science welcomes back Melanie Subbiah '17 to give a talk titled, "AI Research at OpenAI: Language Models and Unsupervised Learning." Friday, January 10 at 2:35pm in Wege (TCL 123).

Friday, February 07 @ 2:35pm in Wege Auditorium (TCL 123). Computer Science Faculty will present their current research and discuss student research opportunities. Receive colloquium credit for attending and enjoy light snacks!

Friday, February 21 @2:35pm in TCL 202*

*Please note location change for this week.

Class of 2020 students Phoebe Huang, Yo Akiyama, and Emmie Hine will present their thesis proposals.

Chemistry Colloquium

Laboratory Studies of the Atmospheric Oxidation of Reactive Organic Carbon Organic compounds in the Earth’s atmosphere play a central role in health and climate: they can have impacts on human and ecosystem health, they influence atmospheric oxidant levels, and their oxidation products include secondary pollutants such as ozone and secondary organic aerosol. However our ability to predict these effects is…

Nate Derbinsky will give a talk titled, "Adventures in Hybrid Architectures for Intelligent Systems." CS colloquium credit offered for attendance.

The Zarankiewicz Problem By Professor Larry Guth, MIT, The Class of 1960 Scholars Program, Monday September 11, 1:00 – 1:50PM, Wege Auditorium, Thompson Chemistry Labs 123

An Introduction to Distributed Hash Tables The familiar hash table is a staple data structure, but how can we scale it up? Can we provide a useful, fast key:value store with arbitrarily large capacity and that can withstand even hardware failure? The answer is yes. Let's find out how." Jeff Epstein is a Visiting Instructor at Wesleyan University. He's previously…

Joel Sommers, Colgate, will give a talk titled, "Internet Research Needs Better Simulation Tools."

Jelani Nelson of Harvard will give a talk titled, "Heavy Hitters via Cluster-Preserving Clustering."

"Ubiquitous Write Optimization" The B-tree was introduced some 45 years ago as a dictionary data structure for data that is too big to fit in memory. As an out-of-core replacement for a binary search tree, the B-tree has played a central role in indexed storage systems, such as databases and file systems. B-trees have optimal I/O performance on searches but…

Friday, May 4th @ 2:35pm; Wege Auditorium "WhatÕs PageRank and How do I Spam it?" PageRank is an example of a graph ranking function. Some functions can be link spammed, which means that the rank of a node can be boosted by the manipulation of the link structure of the edges in the graph. In this talk, we will examine…

Friday, April 27 @ 2:35pm, Wege Auditorium "New Algorithms for Matrix Multiplication " It is widely believed that there is an algorithm for multiplying n-by-n matrices that runs in time roughly n^2. However, the best algorithms we know for this problem run in time n^{2.373}, and there is reason to believe that the prevailing approach cannot do much better. In…

Fast and Accurate Indoor Localization based on Spatially Hierarchical Classification Location fingerprinting is a common approach to indoor localization. For good accuracy, the training set of sample fingerprints should be sufficiently large to be well-representative of the environment in terms of both spatial coverage and temporal coverage. As such, the computation required during the positioning phase can be expensive because…

Join CS faculty for a panel discussion and Q&A session to learn about introductory courses and milestones for achieving a CS major.

On Cryptocurrencies and Distributed Ledger Tech Billions of dollars have poured in to Bitcoin, Ethereum, "initial coin offerings" and other "blockchain-based" ideas. I will describe what they are, and will explain why I think most of them are ill-conceived and over-hyped. I will also give a very brief overview of some academic work being done on distributed ledger technologies, and…

ÒCryptography and Bug Bounties: Building a Secure ApplicationÓ Elissa Shevinsky Ô01 is a successful serial entrepreneur, and the editor of ÒLean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Startup Culture.Ó Shevinsky is best known for her work launching security startups, notably Glimpse and Brave. She was on the early teams at Geekcorps (acquired) and Everyday Health (IPO.) Shevinsky…

Treating the Brain with Electronics and Code: A Computational Neuroscience Perspective The use of electrical stimulation to treat the brain has become more prevalent in recent decades, with FDA-approved devices like deep brain stimulators being used to treat a range of disorders such as Parkinson's disease. These devices have proven their effectiveness, but there are still many improvements that can…

Dan Evangelakos '15 and Hilary Hutchinson '97 will give talks about their current work at Google.

Short presentations by your fellow CS students on summer research, jobs, and internships, including places like Facebook and Google.

Computer Science Thesis Students Jamie Lesser, Melanie Subbiah and Alexander Majercik will present their theses.

"Computational Models are Critical to Understanding Circadian Clock Networks" Circadian rhythms, such as sleeping at night and waking in the morning, are critical to the health of mammals, including humans. To correct circadian malfunction and to help people more quickly recover from jetlag, we want to understand rhythm generation and control. To better understand how human rhythms are controlled, we…

Thursday, April 26 @ 8:00pm; Wege Auditorium (TCL 123) "Algorithmic Magic: Behind the Scenes of Modern Computer Science" Algorithmic advances have been responsible for some of the most remarkable applications of computation today, from search engines to machine learning to error-correcting codes, cryptography and scientific computing. Yet, even now, some of the most basic algorithmic questions remain unanswered, and among…

Interactive Exploration of Time Series Powered by Time Warped Distances Modern applications in this digital age collect a staggering amount of data from diverse domains ranging from astronomy, finance, and e-commerce to genome sequencing, a significant percentage of which is in the form of time series. To make sense of it, analysts interactively sift through these collections in search of…

Join CS seniors as they present their thesis proposals. Matheus Cruz Correia de Carvalho Souza, James Marcus Hughes, Joseph Oh, and Michael Zuo will speak.

Friday, February 2nd @ 2:35pm in Wege Auditorium, TCL 123; Computer Science faculty members will give short presentations on their research and students can learn about opportunities to become research assistants through the Summer Science Research program.

Students will give short presentations about their summer work, research, or internships. Presenters: Victoria Jasuta Matheus Cruz Correia de Carvalho Souza Miranda Chaiken Benjamin Solis-Cohen Zander Majercik Ben Drews Julia Goldman

Friday, 4/6 @ 2:35pm; Wege Auditorium, TCL 123 Serverless Computing with Functions Apache OpenWhisk is an open-source, state-of-the-art, serverless computing platform. It was developed by my group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. It now powers IBM Cloud Functions and the Adobe I/O Runtime. It is also integrated with Red Hat's OpenShift and deployed on-prem in several organizations worldwide.…

Friday, 2/23; Wege (TCL 123) @ 4:00pm. Colloquium will feature a presentation by students nominated for the 2018 Rich Ward Prize for Best Student Project in Computer Science. "Paraphrase: a concurrent, robust, language-agnostic macro processor in Rust." - Jason Hansel "Going Postal: a framework for email-based social networks." - Gary Chen, Jason Hansel "RASAN Call Routing" - Carl Rustad, Kevin…

Short presentations by your fellow CS students, on summer research at Williams, plus experiences at Twitter, Valt, Dropbox and more.

A presentation by students nominated for the 2017 Rich Ward Prize for Best Student Project in Computer Science.

"Photo Forensics" From the tabloid magazines to main-stream media outlets, political campaigns, courtrooms, and the photo hoaxes that land in our email, doctored photographs are appearing with a growing frequency and sophistication. The resulting lack of trust is impacting law enforcement, national security, the media, e-commerce, and more. The field of photo forensics has emerged to help return some trust…

Sam Blackshear '10, of Facebook, will give a talk titled, "Moving Fast With Static Program Analysis."

Friday @ 2:30pm in TPL 205 Join the Departments of Physics and Computer Science in welcoming Larry Ruzzo, University of Washington. Larry will give a talk titled "Bias in RNA Sequencing and What to do About it."

Kevin Webb of Swarthmore College will give a talk titled, "Outsourcing Complexity to the Cloud."

In population genetics, the factors that shape variation often leave signatures that are difficult to disentangle. This makes joint inference both necessary and challenging, especially in the case of demographic history (population size changes) and natural selection. This talk will focus on a novel deep learning algorithm, evoNet, that can jointly estimate population genetic parameters. Deep learning automatically teases out…