Classes started about a week ago. For those who are curious, here are the courses I'm taking:
So far, the first three are really exciting, while the last is a bit slow.
In CS275, we get to pick our own topics, and my first topic is on Software Transactional Memory. I've been interested in STM for a while, and by happy coincidence, the professor for that course, Maurice Herlihy, is one of the biggest contributors to the area. (I'm so bad with names that I didn't even realize this was the case until another student pointed it out to me in the second class.)
CS296-1 is basically formal verification. This week's class included a quick overview of model checking, and last week's homework was to go through the Alloy tutorial. After the model checking class, some of the class hung around afterwards and learned about things like the difference between CTL and LTL, and the mu operator (which was fun because I'd already come across mu in TAPL, for describing fixpoints of infinite types).
In CS258, we're studying approaches for tackling NP hard optimization problems. Today we discussed local search, constraint propagation over a graph, and the simplex algorithm. The current homework is to implement dynamic programming and branch-and-bound implementations of the knapsack problem.
In CS196-1, we're currently doing sequence alignment. But the instructor claims eventually we'll get to things I find more interesting, like protein folding and systems biology.
Also, every thursday there are seminars. Today's seminar was on adding reflection to NuPRL, which was quite interesting.
In short, there's a whole ton of stuff going on, and almost all of it is really interesting.
Posted on February 2, 2006 10:20 PM
More school articles
I was wondering what languages they let you use in the courses. Are they dictated, or do you get to pick your own?
Was also wondering about the computational biology class, since I have an on again/off again interest in bioinformatics. Did your wife get you interested in that? I remember you helping her with gels or microarrays in the past.
Posted by: Richard Cook at February 6, 2006 10:47 AMIn CS258, we get to pick our own languages. I chose haskell for the branch-and-bound problem, but I'm probably going to switch to ocaml for graph coloring (since efficient graphs in haskell are not especially obvious). I've considered asking whether they'd let us use a constraint language like Oz, but that would probably be cheating.
In CS296-1, we're going to have to analyze a system written in Scheme. So the choice of language will very likely be Scheme.
CS275 has no programming component, it's all about reading papers and giving presentations.
The comp bio class is an undergrad class, so they're more likely to require certain languages. There hasn't been any programming homework yet, though.
As for my interest in comp bio, that actually preceeded meeting my wife. I went through a phase of wanting to work on programs that were "relevant to the real world", and I figured I could either choose robotics or biology. I chose biology. My interest since then has waxed and waned at unpredictable intervals.
Posted by: Kim at February 6, 2006 11:40 AMMartin Erwig's Functional Graph Library is in Data.Graph these days, and is efficient for some things, not sure if it's efficient for what you're doing.
Posted by: Shae Erisson at March 8, 2006 04:55 AM