Archive for martinep

February 22 – 26, 2016

February 22 – 26, 2016

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Monday, February 22

Seminar: Biology Seminar RNS 410 4:00 PM Interim Adventures!

0216 Interim adventures

MSCS Colloquium: Measuring the Shape of Data with Topology
Lori Ziegelmeier, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College
Data of various kinds is being collected at an enormous rate, and in many different forms. Often, the data is equipped with a notion of distance that reflects similarity in some sense. Using this distance measure, certain topological features–e.g. the number of connected components, loops, and trapped volumes–can be ascertained and provide insight into the structure of these complex data sets. In this talk, I will introduce a fundamental tool of topological data analysis, namely persistent homology. Then, we will explore examples of using this tool in the applications of (1) detecting chemical plumes in hyperspectral movies and (2) developing a new representation of this topological information.
3:30 – 4:30, RNS 310; the conversation with snacks and cookies starts at 3:15pm.

MSCS hosting Google visits
Ethics at Google – Google engineers, Ken Shrum and Maggie Wanek 15′.
Computing ethics is a top story in the news again, this time about a San Bernadino cell phone.  But in fact, we all provide personal data about ourselves just about any time we use networked computing.  Data in the cloud enables ever-improving services ranging from better search and social-media features to automated language translation, sound analysis, and image recognition;  it could also expose quite individual information about ourselves.  How does Google tailoring results to individuals while at the same time respecting their privacy?  And how do these issues relate to St. Olaf’s CS curriculum?
7:00 p.m., RNS 203

Tuesday, February 23

MSCS Hosting Google visit: Technical Development for Software Engineers
Google engineers, Ken Shrum and Maggie Wanek 15′.
Getting a job offer as a software engineer occurs at a specific time, but a person’s technical development for that career begins years before.  This talk will focus on steps you can take to prepare yourself for engineer positions at a company like Google, including the foundation of St. Olaf’s liberal-arts CS courses, complementing academics with internship experiences along the way, and awareness of what technical interviewers expect you to know and the kinds of questions they might ask.
7:00 p.m., RNS 203.

Wednesday, February 24

No Seminars

Thursday, February 25

No Seminars

Friday, February 26

Chemistry Seminar: Understand flavor release using this one weird trick
Maggie Jilek, M.S. Doctoral Candidate, Flavor Research & Education Center, University of Minnesota
3:00 p.m., RNS 390

February 15 – 19, 2016

Monday, February 15

MSCS Colloquium: When less is more: mathematical models explain surprisingly low parasitism rates for a Finnish wasp.
Katie Montovan,assistant professor of mathematics at Bennington College in Vermont.
Imagine you are a wasp that parasitizes butterfly eggs, and that you have found a cluster of 200 host eggs that are ready and not parasitized. Why would you choose (or evolve genetic behavior) to parasitize less than all of the eggs? This is a puzzling question, but add to it that the wasp avoids previously parasitized clusters and the motivation seems downright bizarre. In this talk, I will develop a set of plausible reasons it might be better for the wasp, Hyposoter horticola, to parasitize only a third of each host egg cluster it encounters. I will then explain how we used mathematical models and field and lab studies to test each hypothesis and rule out all but one theory in order to explain this behavior.
3:15 cookies and conversation, 3:30 Colloquium,  RNS 310

Tuesday, February 16

MSCS Research Seminar: Using mathematical modeling to understand animal behavior.
Katie Montovan,assistant professor of mathematics at Bennington College in Vermont.
Mathematical modeling, simulation, and analysis are valuable tools for answering biological questions about evolution, self-organization, and complex ecosystem interactions. For each biological question the appropriate mathematical tools must be carefully employed in order to produce meaningful results. In this talk I will present several of my recent projects to illustrate the process of taking a biological problem and making it into a mathematical one, the mathematics used to answer the question, and the biological meaning of the results. I will discuss self-organization in honeybees, evolved behaviors in parasitic wasps and potato beetles, and complex population dynamics in coral reef ecosystems.
1:30pm, RNS 206

Wednesday, February 17

Physics Seminar: Testing the Standard Model and Searching for the Dark Side Using Atomic Physics
Holger Müller, Assistant Professor of Physics, University of California, Berkeley
2:00 pm in RNS 210

MSCS Colloquium:  Stochastic Population Dynamics.
Eric Eager, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse.
Environmental and demographic stochasticity impact the dynamics of all biological populations.  Environmental stochasticity, spatiotemporal fluctuations in life history originating from variability in factors such as precipitation, temperature and nutrient availability, generally acts similarly on individuals within similar age and/or stage classes.  Demographic stochasticity, originating from the variability in demographic events such a survival, growth and reproduction, acts on similar individuals in different, unpredictable ways.  While a complete analysis of population dynamics will acknowledge both sources of variability, different mathematical tools are needed to understand the effects of these distinct forms of stochasticity.  In this talk we use various techniques from probability theory to study simple population models incorporating both environmental and demographic stochasticity.    
3:15pm cookies and conversation, 3:30pm Colloquium, RNS 310

Thursday, February 18

MSCS Research Seminar: Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of a Stochastic Population Model for a Disturbance Specialist Plant Population and its Seed Bank.
Eric Eager, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse.
Stochastic models are essential to understanding the population dynamics of plant species that use delayed reproduction to combat environmental uncertainty.  One such species is wild sunflower (Helianthus annuus), which is a disturbance specialist plant – its seeds do not germinate in the absence of soil disturbance. These soil disturbances can be modeled as a stochastic process, which gives rise to a nonlinear stochastic integral projection model for the population density of H. annuus and its seed bank. In this talk I derive and analyze this model, and show that it predicts population dynamics that converge to an invariant probability measure either completely concentrated on the extinction state or completely excluding the extinction state. I will then show through simulation studies the sensitivity of this measure to changes to the soil disturbance profile.
11:30am – 12:30pm, RNS 206

Friday, February 19

No Seminars

February 8 – 12, 2016

Monday, February 8

Please join many of the Biology faculty with CURI research positions for the summer will be presenting brief (about 5 minutes each) pitches about their research projects. Also, many  faculty will be available to talk to interested students for a bit after the seminar.
4:00 p.m., in RNS410 – to hear about these research opportunities.

Tuesday, February 9

No Seminars

Wednesday, February 10

No Seminars

Thursday, February 11

No Seminars

Friday, February 12

Chemistry Seminar  
Brooke Reaser ’12, University of Washington
Talk: Non-targeted determination of 13C-labeled metabolites using gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC-TOFMS) and principal component analysis (PCA)

3:00pm, RNS 310

December 14 – 18, 2015

Monday, Dec. 14

MSCS Colloquium: Approximating Pi Using Similar Triangles
Ryota Matsuura, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
I will present a method for approximating pi using similar triangles. The method relies on a repeated/recursive application of a geometric construction that allows us to easily inscribe regular polygons inside a unit circle with arbitrarily large number of sides. As an added bonus, I will also derive some interesting identities, including an infinite product for pi that was first discovered in the late 16th century.
3:30p.m., RNS 310

Game Night: Pi Mu Epsilon hosting this event.
Have fun before finals! Challenge your friends and maybe even a MSCS faculty to one of the many games available. Pizza and snacks will be served at 6:30pm.
6pm – 9pm, RMS 6th Floor Lounge

Tuesday, Dec. 15

No Seminars

Wednesday, Dec. 16

No Seminars

Thursday, Dec. 17

No Seminars:

Friday, Dec. 18

No Seminars

December 7 – 11, 2015

Monday, Dec. 7

MSCS and Biology Colloquium: Coping with cross-community contacts in cluster-randomized trials of infectious disease prevention
Nicole Bohme Carnegie ’05, Assistant Professor, Biostatistics, School Of Public Health at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
3:30pm, RNS 310

Tuesday, Dec. 8

No Seminars

Wednesday, Dec. 9

Lunch with Dr. Russell Holmes, Univ. of MN
Holmes is the Director of Graduate Studies for the U. of MN Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (CEMS) program. The lunch will be hosted by Prof. Brian Borovsky, Physics.
12:00 noon in BC 222

Chemisty & Physics Joint Seminar: Directing Excited State Transport in Organic Semiconductors for Enhanced Photoconversion in Solar Cells
Professor Russell Holmes; Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota 

2:00 pm, RNS 210
3:00 pm, after the talk, students are invited to chat with Dr. Holmes about the CEMS graduate program at UMN. RNS 210.

Thursday, Dec. 10

No Seminars

Friday, Dec. 11

No Seminars

Nov. 30 – Dec. 4, 2015

Monday, Nov. 30

Biology Seminar: Identification and Validation of Novel Therapeutic Targets of Osteosarcoma using Cutting Edge Technologies
Dr. Branden Moriarity ’07, Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Division of Hematology/Oncology, University of Minnesota
4:00 p.m., RNS 410

MSCS Colloquium has been canceled today.

Tuesday, Dec. 01

No seminar today

Wednesday, Dec. 02

No seminar today

Thursday, Dec. 03

No seminar today

Friday, Dec. 04

MSCS Research Seminar:
Solving Partial Differential Equations using the Unified Transform Method
Natalie Sheils, Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota
Classical methods for solving linear partial differential equations with constant coefficients rely on separation of variables and specific integral transforms.  These methods are limited to specific equations with special boundary conditions.  In my talk I will introduce the Unified Transform Method, due to Fokas, which contains the classical solutions as special cases.  This method also allows for explicit solutions of problems which cannot be solved using classical techniques.  I will provide examples of problems on the half-line and on the finite interval.
3:30pm, RNS 204

November 16 – 20, 2015

Monday, Nov. 16

Chemistry Seminar – Second Candidate
RNS 390, 3:00 pm refreshment, 3:15 seminar will begin

Seminar: OPEN TO ALL MAJORS, Environmental Studies Seminar – “Protein Production for a Starving Planet: Low Resource Fish Farming in Haiti
Bill Mebane, Director of Sustainable Aquaculture Initiative at Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA
7:00 PM Viking Theater

ES1116 Mebane lecture St Olaf 2.0-1

Tuesday, Nov. 17

No Seminar

Wednesday, Nov. 18

No Seminars

Thursday, Nov. 19

No Seminars

Friday, Nov. 20

MSCS Research Seminar: Computational Characterization of Intra-Tumor Heterogeneity in Cancer
Layla Oesper, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carleton College
Cancer is a disease resulting from somatic mutations – those that occur during the individual’s lifetime – and cause the uncontrolled growth of a collection of cells into a tumor.  As we enter the era of personalized medicine, where a patient’s treatment may be tailored to their specific genomic architecture, accurate identification of the set of mutations within each patient’s genome is increasingly important. Despite numerous recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies, many challenges still exist for measuring and interpreting genomic mutations — especially for cancer genomes.  For example, tumors often exhibit intra-tumor heterogeneity where individual cells in a single tumor contain different complements of mutations.  In this talk, I will describe several algorithms that infer the composition of heterogeneous tumors, including one algorithm that reconstructs the evolutionary history of the tumor.
3:30pm RNS 204

Nov. 9 – 13, 2015

Monday, Nov. 9

Seminar: IMPACT Program
Katie Campbell, PhD, Director of IMPACT Program
4:00 PM RNS 410

1109 IMPACT 2016 Flyer St. Olaf

MSCS Colloquium: Computer Science Undergraduate Research Projects
Presented by summer research students in CS
What is CS undergraduate research, anyway?  Seven CS students will address that question by talking about their work in Spring and Summer 2015, describing a wide range of projects:  automatically grading homework code; exploring parallel programming languages; improving WebMapReduce software for big data computations; portable Beowulf clusters built from Raspberry Pis or USB drives; and HiPerCiC custom web apps for humanities professors and others.  Come and hear your classmates talk about their work!
3:15 cookies and conversation
3:30 PM Colloquium
RNS 310

Tuesday, Nov. 10

No Seminars

Wednesday, Nov. 11

No Seminars

Thursday, Nov. 12

Psychology Seminar: Industrial Organizational Psychologist
Dr. Anna Erickson
5:00 p.m., Buntrock 144
Dr. Anna Erickson, an Industrial/Organizational Psychologist, will be coming to share how I/O Psychology and psychology is used in the workplace!

Anna_Erickson

Friday, Nov. 13

No Seminars

November 2 – 6, 2015

Monday, Nov. 02

Seminar: Climate change, seasonal rainfall and plant physiology and fitness in neotropical forests
Visiting Professor Alyson Center, St. Olaf College
RNS 410 4PM

1102 climatechangeneoforests


MSCS Colloquium
: ‘Am I a Data Scientist’?
Alyssa Frazee, PhD in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins, currently with Stripe company in San Francisco
Data science is an exciting field! Most of the job hint at an appealing blend of statistics, math, programming, art, and business. “Data science” is also an ill-defined term: is it simply a tech-world rebranding of applied statistics? Is it data-oriented software engineering? Can you be a data scientist by training in some other field? Does the term even make sense? After all, Science itself wouldn’t exist without data! “The field exploded during my graduate studies in applied statistics, so in this talk, I’ll discuss what that looked like from my perspective. In particular, I will talk about how spending a summer immersed in programming and software engineering affected my mostly-academic perspective and contributed to my struggle with identifying as a “data scientist”.
RNS 310, 3:30pm / 3:15 enjoy a snack and conversation time

Statistics Grad School Night: Three panelists who are currently/recently in graduate programs in statistics or biostatistics will provide insights and answer questions such as: what is graduate school like? How does one choose a program? How does St. Olaf prepare you? What can one do with and advanced stats degree? And, is it true they really pay you to go to grad school?
RNS 206, 6:00pm pizza; Panel discussion 6:30pm – 7:30pm

Tuesday, Nov. 3

No Seminars

Wednesday, Nov. 4

No Seminars

Thursday, Nov. 05

Chemistry Seminar Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Natural Products and the Chemistry they Inspire
Dr. Sarah Reisman, Professor of Chemistry
Caltech
The chemical synthesis of natural products provides an exciting platform from which to conduct fundamental research in chemistry and biology. Our laboratory has ongoing research programs targeting the chemical syntheses of several natural products, including members of the epidithiodiketopiperazines, the ent-kauranoids, and the acutumine alkaloids. The densely packed arrays of heteroatoms and sterogenic centers that constitute these polycyclic targets challenge the limits of current synthetic methodology. This seminar will describe our latest progress in both our methodological and target-directed synthesis endeavors.
RNS 310, 3:00 p.m. refreshments, seminar will begin at 3:15 p.m.

Math Grad School Night: Are you considering graduate school in pure or applied math?
Are you wondering how to choose a grad program or what the application process involves? Did you know that you can get paid to be a grad student? Come to a panel discussion with three current grad students to hear about their experiences in grad school and ask your questions.
6:30pm – 7:30pm, RMS 6th floor lounge. Pizza will be provided!

Friday, Nov. 06

MSCS Seminar: Topological data analysis of biological aggregation modelsitle
Prof. Chad Topaz, Professor at Macalester College.
Biological aggregations are groups such as bird flocks, fish schools, and insect swarms in which organisms interact socially. These groups are striking examples of emergent self-organization, and simultaneously, they have served as inspiration for the development of algorithms in robotics, computer science, applied mathematics, and other fields. Aggregations give rise to massive amounts of data, for instance, the position and velocity of each group member at each moment in time during an observation. Interpreting this data to characterize the group’s dynamics can be a challenge. To this end, we apply techniques of topological data analysis to the influential aggregation models of Vicsek et al. (1995) and D’Orsogna et al. (2006). We construe position and velocity data from numerical simulations as point clouds of data varying over time. Using a method called persistent homology, we identify topological features that persist over multiple spatial scales, and see that the topological analysis detects dynamical events that are invisible to more commonly used methods. This tutorial-style talk assumes no prior knowledge of topology.
3:30pm, RNS 204

October 26 – 30, 2015

It’s Quiet Week! No seminars.

Friday, Oct. 30

TWISHalloweenPicHalloween Party! Faculty and students are welcome to gather in RNS for Halloween fun between  3-4pm. Costumes encouraged.  Faculty will wander around the building with treats for students. Hot Cider and popcorn provided in the fourth floor atrium. This takes place concurrently with some student organization parties to maximize the festivities.