First year friendly

First year friendly talks are talks with few prerequisites. These talks are easily understood by most first year students, and can be delivered by most first year students. First years are also encouraged to talk about more deep concepts and should not feel restricted by this list.

There have been 15 topic suggestions tagged with first year friendly.

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Abstraction in Technical Computing

Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers have an increasing need to write efficient computer programs but they tend to use specific languages for technical computing like Matlab or Mathematica rather than general purpose languages. The suggested reference discusses the properties a general purpose language would need to be able to also handle technical computing – one possibility for allowing efficient technical computing involves a powerful type system and dispatch system to enable generic, staged, and higher-order programming.

Required Background: First year CS at the level of CS 135 and 136.

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Tech Talks computer science first year friendly polymorphism programming language type theory

Complex Event Processing Systems

The ever-increasing amount of information that needs to be processed has led to the development of Complex Event Processing systems such as Apache Storm or Twitter Heron. These systems distribute a workload over many machines in a cluster, and offer both efficiency and fault-tolerance.

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Tech Talks computer science data science distributed system first year friendly parallel computing statistics

Conway’s Game of Life

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automaton cellular automaton computer science first year friendly recreational mathematics theoretical computer science

Dealing with Missing Data

Data are rarely perfect. Robust data science tools must have ways to deal with missing data. However, this is not always easy. A balance must be struck between performance and convenience.

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Tech Talks computer science data science efficiency first year friendly statistics

Hyperbolic Geometry

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first year friendly geometry

IEEE 754-2008: Floating Point Arithmetic

Most programming languages provide a floating-point type. What is floating point, and how does it work? What caveats should programmers be aware of?

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Tech Talks computational mathematics computer science first year friendly floating point number

Jupyter Notebooks

Jupyter Notebooks are a must-have for any data scientist or engineer. They are available for a wide variety of programming languages, particularly Python.

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Tech Talks data science first year friendly statistics tutorial

Patterns in Primes

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first year friendly number theory prime number

Plausible Conjectures

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first year friendly open problem

The Nine Point Circle

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first year friendly geometry

The Strong Law of Small Numbers

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first year friendly number theory recreational mathematics

Understanding LLVM

The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project now powers a wide variety of software, including major programming languages including Rust and Julia, as well as compilers for the popular C and C++ programming languages. Understanding how LLVM works, and being able to read some LLVM bytecode, is extremely useful for optimizing code.

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Tech Talks compiler computer science efficiency first year friendly programming language

What is Area?

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analysis first year friendly geometry measure theory

Why are some functions not integrable in terms of elementary functions?

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Zero-Cost Abstraction

Computer science is, fundamentally, about abstraction and efficiency. A programmer would rather use high-level bricks to build a product than worry about low-level details. Regrettably, the use of high-level bricks often comes at a cost in efficiency, forcing programmers to worry about low-level details. Recently, many programming languages have begun to stress the importance of zero-cost abstractions: ways to construct high-level bricks with zero efficiency cost.

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Tech Talks abstraction computer science efficiency first year friendly