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November 2009
November
9
End Date
CRCS Lunch Seminar
Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area
Internet Companions: technical and Social Issues, Yorick Wilks, Oxford Internet Institute
November
11
End Date
Veterans' Day
Veteran's Day Holiday
November
12
End Date
Kavita Bala, Cornell
Maxwell Dworkin G125
When is a rendered image good enough? Perceptually-Based Realistic Rendering
November
13
End Date
Jim Williams, Hewlett's Remarkable Sine Wave Oscillator
Maxwell Dworkin G125
In 1938 a pair of young engineers named Hewlett and Packard began work (in their proverbial “garage”) on a commercial product, based on a novel variant of the Wien bridge sinewave oscillator that Hewlett devised as part of his graduate thesis at Stanford, in which he made use of new concepts and ideas by Nyquist,
Black, and Meacham. On Jan 1, 1939, they formalized their partnership, deciding the company’s name with a flip of a coin. As the saying goes, “the rest is history.”
How does this invention look, with the hindsight of contemporary electronics? In a word, stunning. Hewlett possessed an uncanny knack for combining diverse ideas to achieve a result on a higher plane. The oscillator is a beautiful example of lateral thinking: the whole problem was considered in an inter disciplinary spirit,
and not just from the standpoint of traditional circuit design. This is the signature of superior problem solving, and admirable engineering. Although the theoretics and technology now look quaint, the quality of Hewlett’s thinking remains rare, and singularly human. No computer-driven “expert system” could emulate such lateral thinking, advertising copy to the contrary notwithstanding. The talk will conclude with contemporary adaptations of Hewlett’s guidance.
Handouts: Hewlett’s thesis, a detailed production schematic of the oscillator, and contemporary versions
of the circuit.
Door prize: Jim's hand-built ``Oliver Network Study''
November
18
End Date
November
18
End Date
A Model of Computation for MapReduce, Sergei Vassilvitskii, Yahoo Research
Maxwell Dworkin 319
In recent years the MapReduce framework has emerged as one of the most
widely used parallel computing platforms for processing data on the
terabyte and petabyte scales. Used daily at companies such Yahoo!, Google,
Amazon, and Facebook and adopted more recently by several universities, it
allows for easy parallelization of data intensive computations over many
machines. One key feature of MapReduce that differentiates it from
previous models of parallel computation is that it interleaves sequential
and parallel computation. We propose a model of efficient computation using
the MapReduce paradigm. Our model allows each machine to perform
sequential computations in time polynomial in the size of the input that
machine receives. Moreover, since MapReduce is designed for computations
over massive data sets, our model limits the number of machines and the
memory per machine to be (substantially) sublinear in the size of the input.
We compare MapReduce to the PRAM model of computation. We prove a
simulation lemma showing that a large class of PRAM algorithms can be
efficiently simulated via MapReduce. The strength of MapReduce, however,
lies in the fact that it uses both sequential and parallel computation. We
show how algorithms can take advantage of this fact to compute an MST of a
dense graph in only two rounds, as opposed to $O(\log(n))$ rounds needed by a
standard PRAM. We also show to evaluate a wide class of functions using
the MapReduce framework. We conclude by applying this result to show how
to compute many basic algorithmic problems such as undirected connectivity
in the MapReduce framework.
Upcoming TOC seminars and related talks:
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Mon 11/23 4:15pm: Eddie Farhi physics colloquium
12/2: Emanuele Viola, Northeastern University
November
18
End Date
Wyss Seminar Series
Hugh Herr, MIT
November
19
End Date
Edo Airoldi, Harvard
Maxwell Dworkin G125
November
23
End Date
Media Cloud and Quantitative News Media Analysis, Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman (Harvard Berkman Center)
Maxwell Dworkin 119
The rapid rise of participatory media technologies – weblogs, social networks, microblogging, video sharing sites – are transforming the news media landscape, reshaping how ideas are spread. Much of the early research on the influence of participatory media on existing institutions focuses on specific, successful cases where media frames developed online influenced offline media. Our project seeks to complement this work with tools to facilitate quantitative analysis of the relationship between media sources. We will present our prototype system to retrieve, tag, cluster and analyze blog and newspaper data, and discuss how the Media Cloud platform will be used in our future experiments, and can be used by other researchers to analyze patterns of influence in news media.
November
26
End Date
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Holiday
November
26
End Date
Thanksgiving Recess
Thanksgiving recess for students
December 2009
December
2
End Date
December
2
End Date
December
3
End Date
December
3
End Date
Matt Welsh, SEAS
Maxwell Dworkin G125
December
4
End Date
Fall Reading Period
Fall Reading Period is from December 4 - December 11
December
8
End Date
CS 50 Fair
Northwest Science Labs at 52 Oxford St
WHAT: The CS 50 Fair
WHEN: Tuesday December 8, 11:00am – 4:30pm (may start at 1pm instead)
WHERE: Northwest Science Labs at 52 Oxford St
December
10
End Date
December
12
End Date
Fall Term Final Examinations Begin
Fall Term Final Examinations are from December 12 - December 21
December
14
End Date
December
16
End Date
December
22
End Date
Winter Recess
Winter Recess at Harvard (University is closed from Dec 22-Jan 3)
December
22
End Date
Winter Recess
Winter Recess is from December 22 - January 3
January 2010
January
18
End Date
First Day Spring Classes
First Day of Spring Classes and Registration Begins
January
18
End Date
Martin Luther King Day
Martin Luther King Day Holiday
January
29
End Date
Study Card Day
Study cards are due
February 2010
February
15
End Date
President's Day
President's Day Holiday
March 2010
March
13
End Date
Spring Recess
Spring Recess is from March 13 - March 21
April 2010
April
28
End Date
April
29
End Date
Spring Reading Period
Spring Reading Period is from April 29 - May 6
May 2010
May
7
End Date
Sping Term Final Examinations
Spring Term Final Examinations take place from May 7 - May 15
May
27
End Date
May
31
End Date
Memorial Day
Memorial Day Holiday