Professor – Computer Science at CSU Channel Islands
Yesterday I gave a talk in the joint Mathematics and Computer Science seminar, at CI. Here are the slides.
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The CSU Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement Scholarship is available for the 2015-2016 academic year. Students who have overcome adversity, demonstrated financial need, and have attributes of merit, including significant personal achievements, superior academic performance, and exemplary community service are eligible for this award.
The CSU Trustees Award will be available for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) students, an Information Technology student, engineers, a veteran, a student who gives the most to his/her home, university, or global community, students studying the humanities, and students studying to become teachers.
Scholarships will be awarded in the amount of $6,000 for the 2015-2016 academic year.
Applicant must:
Application Deadline: Friday, April 3, 2015
For detailed information regarding this scholarship including the application and selection process, please contact Jose Delgado, Scholarship Coordinator directly at (805) 437-8499 or jose.delgado@csuci.edu.
LIRMM – UMR 5506 & Univ Montpellier 2 is looking for an enthusiastic and motivated post-doctoral fellow with a background in computer science and algorithms to investigate theoretically, as well as to conceive and develop novel algorithms for analysing sequence data coming from High Throughput Sequencing technologies.
With their huge throughput and scope of applications, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies are turning biology into a data driven science. Many questions related to genome organisation and funtion can now be asked as computational questions and require large scale analysis on large volumes of sequence data. A key to scalability of used methods is to design sophisticated algorithms for processing this data and inferring biological knowledge. The IBC is a multidisciplinary institute with five collaborating axis of research, one of which is devoted to approaches for analysing sequencing data.
Overall topic: Practical algorithms and indexing data structures for NGS processing
For example, the following topics are of interest:
– Designing methods for comparing sequences to a collection of similar genomes. Genomes from individual or populations from the same species usually differ by a limited number of positions. Hence, a succint representation of several of these genomes in a compact form in memory encode some reference and the differences from other genomes with respect to the reference one.
– Novel approaches for large scale sequence assembly. Current genome assembly methods have strong limitations and are hindered by a varying level of sequencing depth. To solve these limitations it is promising to develop approaches able to exploit variable size of overlaps between the input sequences, without loosing the effectiveness of de Bruijn graph based solutions.
The position is available as soon as possible. The prospective candidate should send a CV and the name and e-mail contacts for 3 references to rivals@lirmm.fr. The official application will be made on the IBC website: http://www.ibc-montpellier.fr/
** Background and requirements
– Background keywords: computer science, text algorithms, combinatorial algorithms, indexing techniques, data compression
– Required: advanced knowledge in algorithmics, software development in C/C++
– Required: interested in life sciences, eager to work in a team and to collaborate with scientists from other disciplines
– Knowledge of French is not required
– Desired: strong publication record, good communication skills in English.
– Appreciated: experience in High Performance Computing or in genomics analyses
– Offered: good working environment, dynamic team, research budget, access to meso-computing server, opportunities of local and international collaborations with highly qualified life scientists, fantastic region and nice living quality.
** Practical issues
– Duration: 24 months
– Salary: depend on experience, according official salary grid
– Social security and Health insurance are included
– Employer: Université de Montpellier, France
– Institute: Institut de Biologie Computationnelle
– Location: Montpellier, south of France
– contact: E. Rivals, rivals@lirmm.fr
– The official application will be made on the IBC website: http://www.ibc-montpellier.fr/open-positions
Refreshments will be served
Title: A combinatorial-topological method for automatic classification of global dynamics in multi-parameter systems
Speaker: Pawel Pilarczyk
Date and Place: Wednesday, February 25, at 6pm, in Del Norte 2530
Abstract: A dynamical system is a mathematical concept for describing an object varying in time, using a fixed rule that depends on the current state of the object (and not on its past). Dynamical systems can be used to describe a variety of phenomena, such as the growth of a population or spreading of an infectious disease. In this talk, a computational framework will be introduced for automatic classification of global dynamics in a dynamical system depending on a few parameters (such as fertility rates or disease transmission rates). A set-oriented topological approach will be used, based on Conley’s idea of a Morse decomposition, combined with rigorous numerics, graph algorithms, and computational algebraic topology. This approach allows to effectively compute outer estimates of all the recurrent dynamical structures encountered in the system (such as equilibria or periodic solutions), as perceived at a prescribed resolution. It thus provides a concise and comprehensive classification of all the dynamical phenomena found across the given parameter ranges. The method is mathematically rigorous (a.k.a. computer-assisted proof), and has a potential for wide applicability thanks to the mild assumptions on the system. Effort will be made to ensure that the talk is accessible to non-specialists in the discipline.
Short bio: A Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Research interests: computational analysis of dynamical systems and computational methods in algebraic topology. MSc in Mathematics, MSc in Computer Science, PhD in Computational Mathematics. Conducts inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research, with international collaborators. Post-doctoral experience at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland), Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA), Kyoto University (Japan), and the University of Minho (Braga, Portugal). Author of 16+ publications in peer-refereed academic journals. Delivered 20 talks invited to international conferences and workshops, and 30+ seminar talks at academic institutions in several countries.
ALGORITHMIC AND ENUMERATIVE COMBINATORICS
funded by the Austrian Science Foundation FWF, there is a PostDoc position available at
RISC (Research Institute for Symbolic Computation, Linz) for the project
Computer Algebra for Nested Sums and Products (C. Schneider)
Possible research topics within this project are:
– symbolic summation/integration algorithms
– algorithms to solve differential/difference equations
– the development of special function algorithms to extract, e.g., analytic properties
– the application of the available tools in this context to attack challenging problems in combinatorics and related research areas.
Suggested starting date: April 2015;
Duration: one, maximally 2 years
Further details (in particular the electronic application form) can be found at
Refreshments will be served
Title: Algorithms on Strings
Speaker: Michael Soltys
Date/Place: February 4th, 2015, at 6pm, in Del Norte 2530
Abstract: This talk is going to be centered on two papers that are going to appear in the following months:
Visit http://prof.msoltys.com for more details (these two papers are number 3 and 19 on the page), as well as Python programs that can be used to illustrate the ideas in the papers. We are going to introduce some basic concepts related to computations on string, present some recent results, and propose two open problems.
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Mobile Robots for Exploration, Assistance and Education
a talk by
Professor David P. Miller
College of Engineering, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering,
The University of Oklahoma
Tuesday, February 3rd, 6-7 pm
Del Norte 1500
Abstract: Mobile robots share some basic characteristics with animals and even people. This makes them ideal for carrying out some tasks normally done by people. This talk will discuss some past and present research I have done using mobile robots to explore natural terrain, and how a correct balance between mechanical and cognitive capabilities can significantly improve performance in certain aspects over what has been demonstrated by NASA rovers. Current work using an assistive co-robot to help children at risk for cerebral palsy to learn how to crawl will also be presented. We will conclude with a discussion of why robotics is an effective CS and engineering outreach tool, and how the sense of deification robotics can create amongst students is useful for promoting STEM education.
Bio: David Miller has a Bachelors in Astronomy from Wesleyan and a PhD in Computer Science from Yale University. While at JPL (1987-1993) he formed the Robotics Intelligence Group and started the work in small rovers that led to Mars Pathfinder Mission and the Sojourner Rover. in 1994 he co-founded the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, a non-profit that continues to create and deliver educational robotics programs and robot technology world-wide today. Since 1999 he has been the Wilkonson Chair and Professor of Intelligent Systems at the University of Oklahoma attached to the schools of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, and Bio-Medical Engineering. His research concentrates in two main areas: robotics technology (particularly exploration and assistive applications) and robotics as a mechanism for technology education. His interests in robotics technology are in automated planning, robotics, and communications between people and robot systems.
Forget Windows 10. The successor to Windows already exists: it's called Android http://t.co/maN79FOalv pic.twitter.com/5hA4PSe2Vo
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 21, 2015
Refreshments will be served
Speaker: Neerja Mhaskar
Time/Place: Monday February 16, 2015, 7:00-8:00pm, in Del Norte 1545
Title: Repetition in Strings and String Shuffles.
Bio: Neerja Mhaskar is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at McMaster University. She did her masters in Engineering Science with Information Technology as major at Louisiana State University, and her undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India. Her research interest is in the general area of string algorithms and combinatorics on words with an emphasis on computational complexity of the problems.
Abstract: There are several areas of emerging and continued interest such as bioinformatics, text searching, data compression, signal processing, abstract algebra which benefit from research in the general area of string algorithm.
A string (word) is traditionally a sequence of characters. A string (word) is said to be non-repetitive (square-free) if it does not contain a subword of the form vv. Given a list of alphabets L=L_1,L_2,…,L_n, we investigate the question of generating non-repetitive words w = w_1w_2,…,w_n$, such that the symbol w_i is a letter in the alphabet $L_i$. This problem has been studied by several authors (e.g., Grytczuk et al., Shallit), and it is a natural extension of the original problem posed and solved by A. Thue. In the first half of the talk, I will present our work on this problem, where we show that such strings exist over many classes of lists and suggest techniques for tackling the problem, ranging from online algorithms, to combinatorics over 0-1 matrices, and to proof complexity. Finally, we show some properties of the extension of the problem to abelian squares.
In the remainder of the talk, I will present our contribution in the area of string shuffles. A shuffle of two strings is said to be formed by interleaving the characters into a new string in a way that keeps the characters of each string in order. In the paper “String Shuffle: Circuits and Graphs” we show that shuffle, the problem of determining whether a string w can be composed from an order preserving shuffle of strings x and y, is not in AC^0, but it is in AC^1. The fact that shuffle is not in AC^0 is shown by a reduction of parity to shuffle and invoking the seminal result of Furst et~al., while the fact that it is in AC^1 is implicit in the results of Mansfield. Together, the two results provide a lower and upper bound on the complexity of this combinatorial problem. We also explore an interesting relationship between graphs and the shuffle problem, namely what types of graphs can be represented with strings exhibiting the anti-Monge condition.