Gregory M. Kapfhammer

Spring 2008 Presentations

• March 14, 2008 (Announcement Poster)

  Lisa Michaud (Faculty Candidate): A Computational Environment for Language Acquisition: King Alfred

  Students can study Anglo-Saxon (Old) English with the help of King Alfred, a tutoring environment that applies the benefits of a computational environment to the age-old task of translating phrases from an ancient language. King Alfred efficiently models the feature-rich source language and tracks the user's successes and failures in order to provide feedback, guiding self-reflection and further study. Ongoing work explores how King Alfred can effectively give feedback to specific translation errors through a pedagogically-motivated automated analysis.
  
  

• March 24, 2008 (Announcement Poster)

  Matthew Jadud (Faculty Candidate): Simple Languages for Complex Robots

  Today, turning off most computers involves pushing a button called "Start." Programming languages are every bit as unusable—it is rarely the case that simple things can be expressed with simple programs. As we move towards increasingly complex robotic applications, the complexity of the languages we use to program them will get in our way of writing robust, maintainable, and reliable software. In this talk, I will discuss the role of human-centered design and parallel-safe languages in the pursuit of my ultimate design goal of a robotic shortstop, one of the most active and challenging positions on a baseball diamond.
  
  

• April 4, 2008 (Announcement Poster)

  Christopher Taylor (Faculty Candidate): DNA Sequencing: Algorithms for DNA Replication

  We are entering an exciting era of genomic research that is being driven by constantly evolving DNA sequencing technologies. In just the last decade we have witnessed the completion of the human genome sequence (Human Genome Project 2001), nearly 1000 bacterial genomes, and over 165 eukaryotic species. The advent of DNA microarrays has significantly decreased the cost of many resequencing applications and a number of emerging ultra high-throughput sequencing technologies promise to move us ever closer to the much sought-after $1,000 genome.

  This talk will present recent work using DNA microarray technology that investigates human DNA replication timing. The focus will be on algorithms developed to classify, visualize, and simulate the process of DNA replication and its timing. Due to the sheer size of the full human genome, efficiency of our algorithms are a paramount concern in terms of both time-complexity and memory requirements.

  The computational challenges involved with anticipated ultra high-throughout sequencing technologies provide an ideal realm for future research which can build on the same algorithmic techniques we use to analyze and process microarray data.

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• Research in Computer Science Seminar last edited on 29 September 2009 at 10:26 pm by 141.195.226.29