Previous Events
Big Data is Sexy! Florian Sabou
4:30pm • Tuesday, March 20th, 2012 • Lubrano
Come join the Brown CS Dug in our first talk discussing recent uses of large datasets in the the sciences and engineering. Florian Sabou will be discussing how he uses climate data to understand and visualize weather patterns in physically meaningful ways with an emphasis on computational and mathematical methods.
Pizza will be served!
Codecademy Tech Talk Ryan Bubinski, co-founder and CTO of Codecademy
3pm • Monday, March 19th, 2012 • Motorola auditorium (CIT 165)
Technology is playing a growing role in connecting people with high-quality educational services that would have otherwise remained inaccessible. Codecademy is a new online platform that provides interactive tutorials to help users learn how to write code. Ryan Bubinski, Co-Founder and CTO of Codecademy, will be delivering a talk at 3pm on Monday, March 19, in the Motorola auditorium. Come hear about the origins of one of the hottest online education start-ups and how the platform enables novice programmers to become creators, rather than simply consumers, of knowledge.
Pizza will be served!
HTML5, Native Apps, and the Holy Grail of Great Design Adam Kenney '04, pMD
6pm • Monday, March 5th, 2012 • CIT 368
Adam Kenney '04 discusses the two dominant ways of making mobile software,HTML5 and native apps. How good can the user experience be with HTML5? What kinds of apps are well-suited to it, and what apps need the extra oomph of native code? How healthy is the dream of "write once, run everywhere"?
To provide context for these questions, Adam will describe his experiences at pMD, a company that obsesses about creating love-worthy mobile software for doctors.
Hackers and Painters
8pm • Thursday, Februrary 2nd, 2012 • RISD Met Upper Floors, 55 Angell St.
A forum to encourage creative collaboration between RISD and Brown CS students.
Come check out others' work, demo your own work, meet new people, and eat cookies!
Meet in the CIT at 7:45 to walk over.
Zynga Tech Talk Zach Shubert, Farheed Behmaram-Mosavat, and Craig Lancaster
6pm - 7:30pm • Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 • CIT 368
Brown Alumni, Zach Shubert and Farheed Behmaram-Mosavat, will be on campus with Zarchitect, Craig Lancaster, Thursday, February 2nd @ 6:00pm to talk about Zynga technology coming out of our Boston studio. We'll take a look into the creation of BRO, our in-house optimized rendering system that allows us to squeeze high performance graphics out of flash. BRO was developed to support Adventure World and was since adopted by our shared technology group for use in other games.
Join us to learn more about the technical challenges Zynga engineers face when building games for 25 million daily active users who spend 2 BILLION minutes with our service. It's our job to keep them interested and we want to share our findings with you.
Iron Wok will be served.
A talk on RSI: Your wrists hurt? You must be a programmer Guillaume Marceau
Noon • Monday, January 30th, 2012 • Lubrano
RSI is a serious problem within the Brown CS dept. and among programmers in general. Guillaume Marceau, a former Brown CS grad-student, will give a talk on the prevention and treatment of RSI.
Pizza will be served.
From Finance to Tech Startup Brent Grinna, Founder and CEO of EverTrue
6pm • Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 • Lubrano
Brent Grinna, Founder & CEO of EverTrue, will be sharing his story about transitioning from Brown to the world of finance to launching a tech startup. He will also speak about his experience in TechStars.
Kabob and Curry will be served.
Shriram's Grad School Talk Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi
4pm • Monday, December 5th, 2011 • Lubrano
Have you ever found yourself wondering:
- Why should I go to grad school?
- What should I look for in a grad school?
- Should I go right after I graduate from Brown?
- Do I want a Master's degree or a PhD?
- How should I go about applying?
- Who should I ask for letters of recommendation?
Shriram Krishnamurthi will answer all these questions and more in his talk on applying to grad school!
Catching Online Poker Cheaters Noah Stephens-Davidowitz '08
4pm • Thursday, November 17, 2011 • Lubrano
The complex, strange, and booming world of online poker grew from almost nothing eight years ago. It now moves billions of dollars annually, provides thousands of new (and mostly young) professional poker players with a legitimate get-rich-quick scheme, and sustains multiple nine-figure-per-year companies. Government regulation and the poker sites' own security measures have not kept up. The businesses are quasi-regulated by a variety of rubber-stamp government agencies in tax havens. They exist across a spectrum of legality, and many of them know almost nothing about basic computer security, let alone the nuance of online poker security. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost to thieves, cheaters, and hackers.
Noah Stephens-Davidowitz ('08) is a former professional poker player, a die-hard member of the online poker community, and well... a bit of a vigilante in this world. Using basic math and computer science, he's worked with and against (mostly against) the online poker sites to expose security vulnerabilities, catch cheaters, and design security methodology to make this strange world safe.
In this talk, Noah will tell a cautionary tale of computer security done wrong and describe his own efforts to clean up the online poker world.
Securing Modern Web Applications Neal Poole
4:30pm • Wednesday, November 9, 2011 • Lubrano
The web's ubiquity and growth have made online security an ever-expanding issue. Join Neal Poole as he outlines common vulnerabilities present on the web, and demonstrates these exploits in action on sites such as Facebook, Google, and Mozilla.
Microsoft Tech Talk Harry Shum, Corporate VP of Search at Microsoft
4:30pm • Thursday, November 3, 2011 • CIT 368
The decade-old Internet search outcomes, manifested in the form of "ten blue links," are no longer sufficient for Internet users. Many studies have shown that when users are ushered off the conventional search result pages through blue links, their needs are often partially met at best in a "hit-or-miss" fashion. To tackle this challenge, we have designed Bing, Microsoft's decision engine, to not just navigate users to a landing page through a blue link but to continue engaging with users to clarify intent and facilitate task completion. Underlying this new paradigm is the Bing Dialog Model that consists of three building blocks: an indexing system that comprehensively collects information from the web and systematically harvests knowledge, an intent model that statistically infers user intent and predicts next action based on the harvested knowledge and query contexts (such as user location and search history), and an interaction model that elicits user intent through mathematically optimized presentations of web information and domain knowledge that matches user needs. In this talk, I'll describe Bing Dialog Model in details and demonstrate it in action through some innovative features, in particular applying explicit and implicit location-aware intent understanding techniques for user task completion.
TripAdvisor Tech Talk Series: Web Performance: Strategies for Speed Amy Winter, Senior Software Engineer
4:30pm • Thursday, October 27, 2011 • Lubrano
TripAdvisor is the world's most visited travel website. Staying on top means delivering a rich user experience fast. Page load time is key when bounce rate, conversions, and ranking matter. What do performance metrics and waterfall charts reveal about your website? Join TripAdvisor engineers to learn about strategies for speed. During this talk we will go over some of the main tools and techniques that we use with a focus on how these can be applied to your school and personal projects as well as how these scale up to a top-tier commercial website.
Computational Physics: Riding the Tiger Professor Brad Marston
4pm • Thursday, October 27, 2011 • CIT 165 (Motorola Room)
You're alone deep in the Amazon. Frightened, confused, how did you end up there? You hear rustling in the bushes and realize it's coming right for you. With a blur of orange and black, you meet an untimely demise...*
Don't let this be you! Come hear professor of physics Brad Marston's talk "Riding the Tiger." He'll discuss how he keeps up with the rapid pace of computer software and hardware while carrying out computational physics research!
Free food and drinks! Co-sponsored by the physics and CS DUGs.
*Oh wait, there are no tigers in the Amazon.
TripAdvisor Tech Talk Series: Scalability Amy Winter, Senior Software Engineer
4:30pm • Thursday, October 20, 2011 • Lubrano
TripAdvisor is a first class engineering and operations team that is responsible for the world's largest travel site, TripAdvisor. For TripAdvisor, scalability is woven into the organization on many levels such as data center, software architecture, and development/deployment/operations. It includes having a scalable data center and a scalable software architecture. This presentation focuses on describing the general architecture, flow of control, and data center involved in a complex and highly scalable consumer web site with 50M visitors, 200M dynamic page views, and 30TB data.
Brown/RISD Meetup
8pm • Thursday, October 20, 2011 • RISD Met Room A
Looking for artists? The CS DUG is co-hosting a Brown/RISD meetup to bring coders and artists together! This will be an informal get-together to help people put together project teams. An informal get-together with cookies, that is.
Bringing ideas, plans, and especially demos is encouraged!
We'll meet at the CIT at 7:45 to walk over.
Microsoft Imagine Cup Submission Party Edwin Guarin
4:30pm • Friday, October 14, 2011 • Lubrano
Each year hundreds of technical students from around the world compete on the worldwide stage for something akin to the Olympics. Microsoft is looking for Brown's students to be a part of it and show that they have what it takes to compete against other student all over the globe, changing the world in a positive way.
Edwin Guarin, Senior Academic Developer Evangelist, for Microsoft New England will lead an Imagine Cup submission party. Imagine Cup is a team-based, worldwide student ` developer competition encouraging students to create technology that solves some of the world's toughest problems, while learning what it takes to potentially create a socially responsible startup. Microsoft announced that they will grant $3 million over the next 3 years to help students launch their projects. This is your opportunity to make a difference with technology. Nice Slice pizza will be provided and Raffle prizes including an HD Webcam, Arc Mouse, and more!
Nodejitsu Tech Talk -- Beyond Evented Programming Paolo Fragomeni, Nodejitsu
4:30pm • Tuesday, September 27, 2011 • CIT 368
Evented programming has become critical throughout the entire stack as the web evolves to include real-time capabilities. Javascript was born to be `evented`, making it a great choice to promote a non-blocking style of programming on the server. Let's learn and exploit browser programming knowledge to build realistic, scalable, and robust network programs using Javascript!
Bio: Paolo Fragomeni, Co-Founder & CTO of Nodejitsu. Formerly at MIT in research and development, a dynamic languages enthusiast. Worked in both the start-up and enterprise cultures for over twelve years writing a variety of languages including C and C++, but specializing in Javascript. A full stack developer and an open web advocate. Dedicated to making New York City a technology hub.
Scaling the Social Graph: Infrastructure at Facebook Jason Sobel BS'02, MSc'03
5:30pm • Monday, September 26, 2011 • CIT 368
Facebook started off running a LAMP stack in a single colo and has since expanded to run in multiple datacenters across the country (and soon the world). Jason will give an overview of the major infrastructure pieces at Facebook and how they have evolved over time to keep up with Facebook's incredible user growth.
Jason Sobel is an engineering manager on the Mobile team at Facebook. He focuses on bringing a great mobile experience to users. Jason has also worked on the Infrastructure team where he helped keep the site fast and scalable in the face of exponential user growth. He helped develop Facebook's multiple datacenter strategy and also worked on Haystack, Facebook's custom built photo storage infrastructure. Before joining Facebook, Jason was a member of the WAFL team at NetApp where he worked on filesystem performance. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Brown University.
Mozilla Bootcamp Matthew Claypotch, James Socol, and Crystal Beasley
5:00pm • Friday, September 23, 2011 • CIT 3rd floor atrium
JavaScript: not just for breakfast anymore! by Matthew Claypotch, Angle Bracket Coordinator aka Front End Web Engineer. Matthew will be talking about JavaScript- how it's capable of some incredible things, and its importance in the tech landscape today.
Scaling Modern Web Apps, by James Socol, Web Engineering Manager, SUMO (support.mozilla.org): James will be answering some important questions, such as, "How do you grow a web app from 10 users to 1,000 to 1,000,000? What are the challenges big apps face? Where can you go to work on big web apps right now? (Hint: Mozilla!)
UX Hoedown-Showdown, by Crystal Beasley, UX Designer. Crystal will be giving an introduction to user experience design and site critique.
Welcome to CS
5:30pm • Friday, September 16, 2011 • CIT 3rd floor atrium
Join the CS DUG (Department Undergraduate Group) and WiCS for a FREE PIZZA dinner and the chance to learn about TAing, internships, research projects and the department computer systems. If you're interested in concentrating in CS, we highly recommend you attend!
There will be pizza.
International Relations & Cyber Conflict John Savage, Anna Lysyanskaya, and Sue Eckert
12:00pm • Wednesday, May 4, 2011 • Watson Institute for International Studies: North Common Room
The IR DUG and CS DUG present a panel discussion about cyber security and threats. Student participation in the dialogue will be encouraged. The event is open to all, including people new to the subject.
Featuring:
- State Department Fellow Professor John Savage
- Cryptography Specialist Professor Anna Lysyanskaya
- Watson Institute Senior Fellow Dr. Sue Eckert
Kabob & Curry lunch will be served.
Pre-registration party
8:00pm • Thursday, April 21, 2011 • CIT lobby
Don't know what CS courses to take in the fall? Come to the CS DUG's pre-registration party this Thursday in the CIT lobby! Pre-registration for freshmen opens on Thursday morning, so be sure to drop by and have your questions answered while enjoying some Meeting Street cookies. All undergrads are welcome to come and give advice to freshmen!
The Importance of the API Featuring Matt LeMay '06 and Tracy Pesin '96
5:00pm • Thursday, March 24, 2011 • CIT 477 (Lubrano Conference Room)
Matt and Tracy are coming to explain the importance of developing an API, and maybe a little more about how startup culture works and how to look for a job at a startup. bit.ly is a Series B URL-shortening startup in New York City. Check them out at http://bit.ly.
There will be pizza.
Venture Capitalist David Hornik on Startups and Success
8:00pm • Tuesday, March 22, 2011 • CIT 165 (Motorola Room)
Join David Hornik of August Capital for a talk on startups, funding and achieving success. David is a well known venture capitalist who was involved with Yahoo! and others. He teaches at Stanford School of Business and Harvard Law School. His previous investments include Aardvark (acquired by Google), Notiva (acquired by Oracle), and Tickle (acquired by Monster), among many others.
There will be pizza and refreshments.
New England College Hackathon
6:00pm • Friday, February 11, 2011 • Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Brown CS DUG would like to invite you to the New England College Hackathon. The DUG has been organizing this event in partnership with MIT, Harvard, Olin and Microsoft over the past few months. It's going to be a ton of fun - we hope to see you there!
WHAT: New England College Hackathon
WHEN: 6 PM, February 11th - 3 PM, February 12th
COST: Free :)
The New England College Hackathon is an overnight event which will be held at Microsoft's New England Research and Development (NERD) facility. Computer Science students from New England schools are encouraged to bring their friends and ideas to the event. Once there, students will transform these ideas into realities. The best hacks will be awarded prizes at the end of the event.
Attractions:
- Tutorials on mobile phone, web and game development
- Free O'Reilly eBook for all attendees
- 2 AM Intercollegiate Kinect Tournament (with prizes!)
- Tea, Dinner and Breakfast provided
Sponsors:
Microsoft and Zynga are sponsoring food for attendees and Microsoft has generously agreed to host the event. O'Reilly Media and Swipely will also be providing additional prizes.
Register:
Betaspring Panel
4:30pm • Tuesday, November 2, 2010 • CIT 368
Thinking about running a startup from your dorm room? Come join Betaspring's managing partners for a panel and discussion about lightweight startups! Betaspring is a Providence-based seed accelerator for tech/design startups.
Panelists:
Jack Templin: entrepreneur and lover of art, innovation, and Providence.
Owen Johnson: entrepreneur, investor, and technologist. A big fan of disrupting the status quo and great beer.
Allan Tear: Founder of three startups, from bootstrapped to $20M in VC. Good at: starting things. Bad at: finishing them.
There will be pizza!
Startup Panel of Brown Grads
4:30pm • Thursday, October 7, 2010 • CIT 368
Want to know what it's like to work at a startup? Betaspring is a tech startup incubator based here in Providence, that helps turn entrepreneurs' ideas into viable businesses. The panelists are all local entrepreneurs who have been through the Betaspring program:
Spiros Eliopoulos '07 M'10 is a co-founder of Tracelytics, a Providence-based startup that provides a performance analysis and diagnostic service for web application.
Evan Stites-Clayton '11 is a Computer Science concentrator. He joined the Jobzle team as the lead engineer earlier this year, and has helped Jobzle gain a foothold in the student job-finding market.
Brian Fisher '10.5 is a mechanical engineering concentrator. He is a co-founder of Diavibe Inc., a start-up medical device company that is developing drug-free topical anesthetic technology to reduce the pain of medical injections.
Jamie Brim is a CS/Econ concentrator, who's taking time off to build tu.nr, a mobile web app that allows listeners to take control of the music that they hear in public situations, like bars, dance clubs, and parties. Think Reddit meets Foursquare meets Grooveshark.
Pizza will be provided!
CS Orientation
12:00 pm • Thursday, September 16, 2010 • CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
Here at Brown CS, we pride ourselves on our strong departmental culture. As a public service to our first-year students, we would like to introduce you to one of our proudest traditions: FREE FOOD! Join WiCS and the DUG (Department Undergraduate Group) for a free pizza lunch and the chance to learn everything you wanted to know but were too afraid to ask about TAing, research projects, internships, and whatever else is on your mind. If you're interested in concentrating in CS, we highly recommend you attend!
Caml Trading – Experiences with Functional Programming on Wall Street Yaron Minsky, Jane Street Capital
12:00 pm • Thursday, April 22, 2010 • CIT 477 (Lubrano Conference Room)
Jane Street Capital is a proprietary trading company that has shifted from developing software in mainstream programming languages to developing software almost entirely in OCaml, a statically typed functional programming language that has only modest industrial use. The scope of the enterprise is small but growing: Jane Street now has over 40 OCaml programmers that have collectively written hundreds of thousands of lines of OCaml code. OCaml is used for building everything from trading systems to research infrastructure to user interfaces to systems administration tools. This talk will discuss the motivations behind Jane Street's adoption of OCaml, and why they think that statically typed functional programming languages are a good fit for the world of trading and finance.
Startups: Where Engineering and Entrepreneurship Collide Angus Davis and Matt Gilooly from Swipely
4:30 pm • Thursday, March 25, 2010 • CIT 368
Swipely is a social application that connects payment and social networks, helping friends recommend recent purchases to friends, discover what friends are buying, get savings and deals, and have more fun shopping. Those coming to the event will get an invite code to be among the first to try the service.
Part I: Lessons learned from modern startup software engineering and how they add up to delivering a killer user experience for a modern Web startup.
Part II: Why joining a startup is better than working at Microsoft, Google, or Apple.
Speakers:
Matt Gillooly, Brown '04, is an experienced software engineer and leader in Providence's local "geek" community of entrepreneurial technologists. He has deep experience building Web-based software applications and will talk about modern frameworks like Rails, the pros and cons of "nosql" databases like Mongo or Cassandra, advantages of building applications on cloud computing platforms like Amazon EC2, challenges with performance improvement approaches like memcached, and how this all adds up to delivering a killer user experience for a modern Web startup.
Angus Davis skipped college to join Netscape, becoming the company's youngest full-time employee at age 18 in 1996. He left in 1999 to co-found Tellme, which pioneered voice search and speech user interfaces, growing the company to more than 300 employees and >$120mm/year in sales before it was acquired in Microsoft's largest-ever acquisition of a private company in 2007. After staying on at Microsoft to run speech recognition for 2 years, Angus left in 2009, returned to his native Rhode Island, started a new company in Providence called Swipely, and hired Matt as one of his first employees. He'll talk about challenges in building a new company, what advantages startups have over bigger companies like Microsoft, why he left Silicon Valley to start Swipely in Providence, what 3 key questions you should ask any prospective employer, what to look for in an internship, and why a startup is a good choice for some, but not for everyone. He lives on the Brown Campus, across the street from Keeney Quad.
College Hill Programming Competition
9:30 am • Saturday, March 6, 2010 • CIT Sunlab
The College Hill Programming Competition is a programming competition for high school students hosted by the CS DUG. Teams consist of 4 students from each school, and schools can bring one or two teams. Programming will be done in Java in the Sunlab.
We would like to thank the Brown Admissions Office, the Brown Computer Science Department, and the Brown Science Center for making this competition possible. We would also like to thank our corporate sponsors, who will be providing the prizes: Adobe, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and NetApp.
Teaching Algebra through Programming Emmanuel Schanzer
4:30 pm • Tuesday, February 9, 2010 • CIT 368
Bootstrap is the creation of Emmanuel Schanzer, a former Citizen Schools employee and now a Doctoral Student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Schanzer is supported by Kathi Fisler at WPI, Shriram Krishnamurthi at Brown, and Matthias Felleisen at Northeastern, as well as the extended team behind TeachScheme/ReachJava.
Algebraic Functions have long been considered a foundational concept for higher mathematics, STEM classes, and abstraction as a discipline. Unfortunately, algebra is the subject that most American middle and high school students decide they "hate". National data on student grades makes this claim depressingly believable. In his talk, Schanzer will share recent studies in cognitive and developmental science that address the challenges associated with learning about algebraic functions. He will describe the unique role that functional programming has to play in helping students overcome these challenges.
Schanzer will introduce Bootstrap, an after school curriculum that teaches students as young as ten years old how to create a simple videogame using the scheme programming language. Over the course of 10 weeks, these students are introduced to functions, variables, inequality, composition, and other algebraic concepts. More than 400 students have been introduced to these algebraic concepts through Bootstrap classes, which are taught entirely by volunteer teachers from tech companies and college computer science programs. He will describe the curriculum, highlight some of the successes and challenges during the last four years, and talk about how Brown University is working to bring the program to at-risk students in the Providence Public School System.
CS DUG Kickoff Meeting Join the CS DUG!
4:00 pm • Friday, September 18, 2009 • CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
Want to get involved in the Computer Science Department?
Want to host awesome events for your fellow students?
Want to meet professors and contacts in the industry?
Pizza will be provided!
The Grad School Talk Shriram Krishnamurthi
4:30 pm • Tuesday, April 7, 2009 • CIT 368
Why should I go to grad school?
What should I look for in a grad school?
Should I go right after I graduate from Brown?
Do I want a Master's degree or a PhD?
How should I go about applying?
Who should I ask for letters of recommendation?
Shriram Krishnamurthi will answer all these questions and more...
RI Tech Startup Panel Bring your startup ideas and business plans to get feedback!
6:00 pm • Wednesday, March 11, 2009 • CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
Have you ever thought of starting your own business? Ever wondered how to evaluate a startup you want to join? In love with Rhode Island, but can't find any good local options?
All these questions, and more, will be answered! This Wednesday, you'll have the opportunity to direct your questions to some of Rhode Island's most distinguished tech entrepreneurs. Each panelist will give a short description of what he does, and then we will open the floor to questions and discussion.
Panelists:
- Sean Ransom is the VP of Technology at Batch Blue Software. Sean's job is to shape the direction of everything from what programming languages are used to how the end products will look and behave. Sean began his programming career at Amazon.com writing customer service-based applications. His most recent project was a phone order tool that enabled Amazon to partner with third parties which generated millions of dollars in revenue. Sean has a background in bioinformatics from the University of Washington.
- Owen Johnson is an entrepreneur and investor. He was most recently COO of Investment Instruments Corporation, provider of online residential real estate services Rentomatic.com and Rentometer.com. He founded the Board of Making Progress Incorporated, a nonprofit that enables individuals to support the arts and sciences; and Connect Providence, a group helping to connect newcomers to the City of Providence. He is the owner and principal broker of Reagent, a real estate brokerage in Providence and holds an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.
- Charlie Kroll is the CEO of Andera, a technology startup he co-founded in 2000. He is an entrepreneur, fascinated by the challenge and creative process associated with starting and operating a company successfully. He grew up in New York City, went to Trinity School and Brown University, and currently resides in Providence, RI with my wife Jennifer, son Parker, and daughter Maisie.
- Allan Tear is a founding partner of the Aptus Collaborative, a team of expert advisors in innovation, global partnering, and technology strategy. A serial entrepreneur, Allan was on the founding team of three venture-funded technology firms. In the first 10 years of his career, Allan served as a technology executive for Fortune 500 and startup companies in the US, Europe, and Asia, including Nortel Networks, Elastic Networks, and CNG. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a dual B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Public Policy.
- Jack Templin leads the RI Nexus program for the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. He is Providence-based entrepreneur and Internet strategy consultant, and a co-founder of the popular networking group, Providence Geeks.
- Brad Weinberg is a co-founder and CTO of the wellness company Shape Up The Nation. He graduated from Brown University in 2003 and is on fellowship leave from the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University. He is also an avid biker, having biked over 3,000 miles across China from Shanghai to the border of Kazakhstan to raise awareness of mental disabilities and money for autism research.
Food will be provided. Please RSVP at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=55339412953.
Cloud Computing, Entrepreneurship, and Life after Brown Eliot Horowitz
4:30 pm • Tuesday, March 3, 2009 • CIT 477 (Lubrano Conference Room)
The CS DUG will be hosting guest speaker Eliot Horowitz '03, founder and chief scientist of ShopWiki.com, CTO of 10gen.com, and recently voted as one of "Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under Age 25" on BusinessWeek.com. Eliot will talk about cloud computing, life after Brown, and career paths, including starting your own entrepreneurial venture. 10gen develops the Mongo database which makes data storage for web (and other) applications fast and easy. Mongo is a high-performance, document oriented (JSON-style) database. 10gen's goal is to build a cloud-scale data store that's easy to deploy, manage, and use.
Food from Kabob and Curry will be provided.
Facebook Tech Talk
4:30 pm • Monday, February 23, 2009 • CIT 477 (Lubrano Conference Room)
At Facebook, our engineers develop products that millions of people use around the world, work in a fast-paced high-energy environment, solve tough technological challenges, and interact with a team of people who are just as talented as they are.
We invite you to join us in the Lubrano Conference Room in the CIT for our Tech Talk delivered by Facebook Engineers Jason Sobel (BS '02, MSc '03) and David Ellis (BS '08) to learn more about what makes Engineering at Facebook unique.
Food is on us, but do us a huge favor and RSVP so that we know to expect you. Please add any of your friends to this event that you think might be interested.
Please RSVP at http://www.facebook.com/browntechtalk.
Facebook Resume Workshop
12:15 pm • Monday, February 23, 2009 • CIT 477 (Lubrano Conference Room)
Need help on getting your resume up to par?
Want your resume to stand out from the pack?
Join Facebook Recruiter Clifton Tay for a quick presentation on "dos and don'ts". Learn about what recruiters and employers look for in addition to some common mistakes applicants make.
After the session, sit down with Clifton and Facebook Engineers Jason Sobel (BS '02, MSc '03) and David Ellis (BS '08) in the 4th floor atrium for some hands on help so make sure to bring your resumes!
Please RSVP at http://www.facebook.com/brownresumeworkshop.
Facebook Hackathon
8:00 pm • Friday, February 20, 2009 • CIT 3rd Floor Atrium
A Facebook Hackathon is a long night of intense pleasure where our engineers can code up features that they've always wanted to work on but never had the time. Past Hackathon projects have led to site features like Video, Chat, and Marketplace, infrastructure projects like PHP => C++ conversion, internal tools, and sweet site tweaks like the search typeahead and share integration with Inbox.
This year, we're bringing the Facebook Hackathon to Brown. Come to the CIT 3rd Floor Atrium for the kick off at 8 PM sharp. Food and caffeinated beverages will be provided and if anyone can code through the night, we'll also treat you to breakfast.
To participate, you'll need to bring a laptop, some friends, and a cool idea. We'll give you a short introduction about coding and Facebook and then you're off! Our only guideline for your Hackathon idea is that it is creative and appeals to other programmers.
We hope that you will attend so we can share with you a bit of our culture, but more importantly, we'd like to show you how we encourage creativity and innovation, which is integral to maintaining our position as the world's leading social network.
Do us a huge favor and RSVP so that we know to expect you. Feel free to add any of your friends to this event that you think might be interested. See you there!
Please RSVP at http://www.facebook.com/brownhackathon.
Cryptographic Diversions for Valentine's Day Anna Lysyanskaya
4:00 pm • Thursday, February 12, 2009 • CIT 368
Alice and Bob decide to do some matchmaking among their straight and single friends in the CS department. Alice is friends with all the women in the department, while Bob is friends with all the men. Each woman confides in Alice and tells her whom among the men she likes. Each man similarly confides in Bob. Now Alice and Bob together can figure out which of these crushes are mutual. But how do they do it in such a way that Bob does not learn any other information about the women, and Alice does not learn any other information about the men? I.e., unless Carol's crush on Dave is mutual, Bob does not find out about it.
In this meeting, not only will we see various solutions to this pressing problem, we will also see, more generally, how Alice and Bob can jointly compute any function of their inputs such that they don't leak to each other anything but the output of the function. This area of cryptographic research is called "secure two-party computation" and was pioneered by Andy Yao.
No background in math, CS, cryptography, or matchmaking will be assumed.
Software Design and Entrepreneurship Angus Davis
4:30 pm • Monday, November 3, 2008 • CIT 477 (Lubrano Conference Room)
The CS DUG and Brown EP will be hosting guest speaker Angus Davis, founder of Tellme Networks. If you've ever used a voice-operated phone menu, then you've probably used a Tellme product. Tellme was recently purchased by Microsoft for $800 million, the largest acquisition of a private company by the software vendor. Mr. Davis will reveal the story of how his company was founded and acquired, as well as share his thoughts on what a Brown student should do next in today's economy. This event is an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in technology startup entrepreneurship or software development.
Food from Kabob and Curry will be provided.