Each week we will offer a special optional "exploration session" where our head TA, Eric Arendt (ejarendt), will give presentations about special topics of interest in computer science. Any CSE 142 or 143 students (or their friends) are welcome to attend these optional sessions if you would like to learn more about the topic(s) being presented. Please feel free to contact Eric if you have any questions about the sessions.
Today's exploration session is about artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a huge part of computer science, informing everything from robots to adaptive spam filters for your email. Creating machines that can "think" allow us to solve a number of very difficult problems. Specifically, we'll be discussing neural networks and how we can use them to create intelligent models.
Optional Homework: Do the following two exercises. (due: Wed 5/12/2010, 11:30 pm)
Today's CSE 142 exploration session will feature two undergrads, Gabe and Rita, who do research in computational biology. Gabe focuses more on molecular biology and using computers to analyze huge datasets, while Rita's research has more to do with mathematical modeling and simulations, specifically modeling brain tumor growth. They'll be giving a broad intro to computational biology and an overview of some of the research at UW as well as an interactive demo of "Fold-It". Fold-It is a protein folding game that uses crowd sourcing (the data they gather from players) to inform biological research. You can check the game out here: Fold-It
This week we will continue to explore computer security with a discussion of secure communication and cryptography. We'll talk about motivations for security, communication threat models, and ways of encoding messages to ensure confidentiality and integrity.
This week we will be exploring computer security and hacking. We'll talk about what security means, how to keep a computer secure and safe, how to hack a computer, how passwords work, encryption, and more!
This week we will be exploring grammars. Computer scientists are interested in grammars because we produce our own languages (like Java) and we want to understand various programming languages that we work with. We will explain how to express a grammar in a formal manner and the homework will involve writing your own grammar file for a language that you make up.
grammar.txt
. Your file must have at least 8 rules (one rule per line).
Although the terminals above can also include non-terminals.
non-terminal ::= terminal | terminal | terminal