Dr. Barry Smyth of Dublin, Ireland, an internationally recognized leader in technology development, will be the featured guest speaker for the 2013 Delta Omega Lecture at noon on Friday, Feb. 22. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at noon in the Russell House Theater and is sponsored by the Arnold School of Public. The title of Smyth’s talk is “From the Sensor Web to Big Data: How the World of the Sensor Web Is Transforming How We Live, Work, and Play.” Smyth holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science at the University College Dublin. He is the director of CLARITY: The Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, a Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre for Science and Engineering Technologies. More info

An ACM event (click me for more details):

The illustrious J.J. Shepherd will give us the skinny on software engineering.. As always, free pizza will be provided. Huzzah!

Preview what you will be doing in 490 and 492.

Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/ Hollings Room of the TCL, part of the Center for Digital Humanities’ Future Knowledge series: Google Books is a promising tool for the study of language change, and how it may relate to historical, societal, and cultural shifts. However, the standard Google Books interface to the n-grams data only provides the most rudimentary of searches, and so much more could and should be done with the massive amount of data. In this presentation, I will discuss an alternative interface for the Google Books data (googlebooks.byu.edu), which provide a much wider range of searches -- incorporating collocates, searching by part of speech, and an integrated thesaurus -- all of which provide much more insight into cultural changes than are possible with the simple, standard Google Books interface.

Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics / Brigham Young University http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/ Large, robust corpora allow us to map linguistic changes in languages, in ways that would have been considered impossible just 10-20 years ago. In this presentation, I will examine how the Corpus del Español (100 million words, 1200s-1900s) and the Corpus do Português (45 million words, 1300s-1900s) can be used to examine a wide range of linguistic changes -- lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic. I will also compare these resources with corpora that allow a much smaller range of searches, such as the CORDE from the Real Academia Española. Finally, I will look at the new googlebooks.byu.edu interface, which allows access to 45 *billion* words of Spanish from the 1500s-2000s. This improves greatly on the standard, simple Google Books interface, and it also allows for research on an extremely wide range of changes in Spanish.

Students in the CSE Capstone projects class will be showing posters and prototypes of their projects in the Swearingen lobby from 10:00 to 12:00. There are 19 projects including, computer games, apps, a Turing machine, web applications and more … Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors: Please stop by and see what the Seniors have been working on. Talk with them about their projects, courses in the curriculum, and what you have to look forward to.

Jonathan Mayhak will be talking about messaging queues. Specifically, using the pubsub design pattern to decouple metric tracking code on the web server from the database. Jonathan graduated from this department and now works as an Application Developer at ReachSmart Interactive. This talk is part of CSCE 242 but is open to all students.

Brad Dunbar will talk about Backbone.js. Brad is an alumnus of our department. He is a front-end engineer. He currently works at Pathable Inc. writing javascript (and coffeescript) and I does a lot of open source work for Backbone and Underscore. This talk is part of CSCE 242 but is open to all students.