"An Afternoon with Euler" Talk by William Dunham

You are invited to the following talk sponsored by the Penn State Harrisburg Math Club!

“An Afternoon with Euler”
By William Dunham
Koehler Professor of Mathematics Muhlenberg College

Wednesday, 17 October 2012 244E Olmstead Building at 6pm

NOTE: This talk is accessible to anyone who has seen calculus.

About the Talk:

“Among history’s greatest mathematicians is Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), the Swiss genius who produced an astonishing 25,000 pages of pure and applied mathematics over his long and illustrious career.

In this talk, we sketch Euler’s life and describe a few of his contributions to number theory, algebra, and other branches of mathematics. Then we examine a particular derivation: his proof of “Euler’s Identity” using integral calculus. The argument is short and (yes) a bit strange, but it perfectly illustrates Euler’s mathematical brilliance.

Condorcet, in his Eulogy to Euler, wrote that “All mathematicians now alive are his disciples.” This talk should make it clear that Condorcet’s words are as true today as when first set down, over two centuries ago.”

Biography:

“William Dunham, who received his B.S. (1969) from the University of Pittsburgh and his M.S. (1970) and Ph.D.(1974) from Ohio State, is the Truman Koehler Professor of Mathematics at Muhlenberg College.

Dunham’s expository writing has been recognized by the MAA with the George Pólya Award in 1993, the Trevor Evans Award in 1997 and 2008, the Lester R. Ford Award in 2006, and the Beckenbach Prize in 2008. The Association of American Publishers designated The Mathematical Universe as the Best Mathematics Book of 1994.”

FOOD WILL BE PROVIDED!

If you have any questions regarding the talk to be done by Dr William Dunham, please contact Viplav Patel at vnp5004@psu.edu or Dr Boman at ecb5@psu.edu. 

Metaprogramming to Create PostScript Art

Students, in CMPSC 122: Intermediate Programming, recently wrote c++ programs in order to output PostScript code in order to create patterns from lines and circles.  This approach is an example of metaprogramming in which a program writes another program.

Optical Illusion, by Thomas Dippolito (CMPSC 122)

Multi-Colored Disks, by Gal Yaroslavsky (CMPSC 122)
Gal used multiple lines to create the multicolored disks.

Bulls-Eye, by Jeremy Saylor (CMPSC 122)

Master's Thesis Defense: Fast Skeletonization of Blood Vessels

You are invited to attend Aaron Croasmun's Master's Thesis defense on Friday, October 5th at 10am.  The defense will be held in Olmsted W209.  Details about Aaron's thesis can be found below.

Title:  Fast Skeletonization of Blood Vessels

Author:  Aaron Croasmun

Thesis Adviser:  Sukmoon Chang, Ph.D.

Abstract

The study of the morphological and rheological behaviors of intramural vessels plays a critical role in various clinical applications such as surgical planning and radiotherapy. To better understand the rheological behavior of vascular structures in relation to the network morphology, we must obtain the concrete measurements of the morphometric parameters of the vascular networks under various conditions. Morphometric parameters of the networks include vessel diameter, branching points, branch end points, branch length, and branching angles. Because of the complexity of blood vessel morphology, however, it is diffi cult to obtain accurate measurements. In this thesis, we present a novel and effi cient method for skeletonization of intramural vessel networks. The proposed method automatically skeletonizes the vascular network in a given image and constructs a graph structure that represents the branching structures of the network. Since the method processes a given image as a whole, the multiple vascular networks present in the image are automatically detected and skeletonized simultaneously. Moreover, since the skeletons are represented as graph structures, various morphometric parameters can be obtained automatically. We present the promising results of the proposed method applied to the complex structure of retinal vessel networks.

Programming Contest Announcement - Funding and Prizes Available (Part of the IEEEXtreme Programming Contest)

The IEEE PACE (Professional Activities Committees for Engineers) and Region 2 Susquehanna Section is sponsoring a section-wide contest as part of the IEEEXtreme 6.0, which is being held on October 20, 2012.  IEEEXtreme is a global challenge in which teams of IEEE student members – advised and proctored by an IEEE member – compete in a 24-hour time span against each other to solve a set of programming problems.  This contest is geographically spread out - you can create a competition site at your own institution.  Also, students do not need to stay up the entire time.  They leave the competition site to rest, and then return when they would like to continue.

For more information on the contest please visit the website: http://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/students/competitions/xtreme/index.html

The section is providing prize money for top teams and money for food for participants.  This is a "distributed" competition, in that we envision that students will compete at sites in their own schools.  The prizes will be awarded as follows:

• $100 per member of the first place team in the Section*
• $75 per member of the second place team in the Section*
• $50 per member of the third place team in the Section*

* Only teams participating from schools in the IEEE Region 2 Susquehanna Section are eligible for these prizes.  In addition, to be eligible, the teams must be registered with the Section by October 13th.  The rankings of teams will be based on the official results announced at the IEEEXtreme website.  Prizes will be awarded after the official results are posted.  Only one team per school is eligible for prizes, i.e. if two teams from U of Alice score highest, followed by a team from Bob College and one from Chuck U, the top team from U of Alice will be awarded the first prize, the team from Bob College will be awarded second prize, and the team from Chuck U will be awarded third prize.  The Executive Committee of the Susquehanna Section reserves the right to amend the rules as it deems necessary.  Decisions by the Executive Committee are final.

In addition, the Section is also making available a limited amount of funding for food for participants.  On a first-come basis, the section will provide up to $25 per contestant for food during the contest, with a limit of nine contestants per institution.  This funding is limited to the first 39 contestants that are registered.

Registration Details

If you are a Penn State Harrisburg graduate or undergraduate student interested in competing, please send an email to  jjb24@psu.edu.

In order to register a team from another school for the contest, please send the following information to Jeremy Blum, Treasurer of the Susquehanna Section, at jjb24@psu.edu:

Team Name
College/University Name
Student Names
Proctor's Name
How many of students and proctors are new IEEE members
Contact Name
Contact Email Address
Contact Address (where prizes would be sent for distribution to the students)

In addition, after the contest for each site, the contact provided at the time of registration will be asked to provide the following information:  Number of volunteers other than the proctor who assisted in the contest at that site, with counts for how many of the volunteers are IEEE members and how many are not.

If your school's teams register with the Section in time to be eligible for funding for food, you will send either an invoice or receipts to Jeremy Blum within 30 days of the contest.  You will be sent a check for the amount of the invoice or the receipts, up to the limit that was allocated for your school.

If you have any questions, please contact Jeremy Blum at jjb24@psu.edu.  Please also forward this announcement to others that you think would be interested.

New Research on Old Subject Draws Interest

Reposted from the Penn State Harrisburg News Archive.

Students are creating software to display the logical connections between the theorems of The Elements, a discourse on geometry.

Students at Penn State Harrisburg are gaining national attention from research they hope will bring new insights to the age-old study of geometry.

The group is creating software that displays the logical connections between the theorems of The Elements, the oldest written discourse on the study of geometry. The students are the first to extensively display these relationships using a visual technique, according to Dr. Eugene Boman, associate professor of mathematics, who is overseeing the project.

Siddharth Dahiya, of Camp Hill, and Tyler Brown, of Elizabethtown, both computer science and mathematical sciences double majors, received a Penn State Summer Discovery Grant for the project. The students, including Joseph Roberge, a graduate student in the Computer Science program, also received funding from Pi Mu Epsilon, the national mathematics honor society, and the college’s Mathematical Sciences program to complete their work, which began at the beginning of the year. Students Alexandra Milbrand, a mathematical sciences major, and Viplav Patel, a computer science major, also contributed significantly to the work. The students have presented their research in Madison, Wis. at MathFest, an annual nationwide mathematics conference, and at the regional Student Mathematics Conference at Moravian College, and will present at the Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware sectional meeting of the Mathematical Association of America this fall.

The Elements, written in about 300 BC by Greek mathematician Euclid, begins by introducing five basic postulates, or foundational laws, that serve as the building blocks for later theorems. The students have gone through The Elementstheorem by theorem, mapped out the connections between them, and written the software that displays these connections in a visual and interactive form.

“I’m very proud of the progress [the students] have made,” said Boman. “Last January we started with nothing but an idea and now we have a fairly sophisticated piece of software that displays Euclid’s work in a completely original manner. Every colleague I’ve shown this to has been impressed, and we’re not finished with it yet.”

The software can be altered to display the connections of any set of interconnected ideas, according to Boman, who said the program can be generalized for applications in industry as well as in science and mathematics.

Integrated Undergraduate-Graduate Program in Computer Science

Integrated Undergraduate-Graduate Program in Computer Science:  Earn both a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in five years.

The Computer Science Integrated Undergraduate-Graduate (IUG) Program offers a limited number of academically superior Bachelor of Science candidates the opportunity to enroll in an integrated, continuous program of study leading to both the Bachelor of Science and the Master of Science in Computer Science. The ability to coordinate as well as concurrently pursue the two degree programs enables the student to earn the two degrees in five years.

As many as 12 of the credits required for the master's degree may be applied to both undergraduate and graduate degree programs. A minimum of 50 percent of the courses proposed to count for both degrees must be at the 500 level. Thesis credits may not be double counted.

Students have the choice of receiving the BS degree at the end of the fourth year or waiting until the end of the fifth year to receive both degrees. 

See the IUG page on the CS Program website for more information. 

Master's Thesis Defense: "SALIENT: Stochastic, Adaptive Latency Improvement for Event Notification Trees"

You are invited to attend Jason Long's Master's Thesis defense on Friday, September 7th at 2pm.  The defense will be held in Olmsted W231.  Details about Jason's thesis can be found below.

Title:  SALIENT: Stochastic, Adaptive Latency Improvement for Event Notification Trees

Author:  Jason Long

Thesis Adviser:  Jeremy Blum, D.Sc.

Abstract

A challenge in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) is the need for game event information to be quickly disseminated to all participants. Because of the cost and scalability limitations of centralized servers, peer-to-peer technologies have been adopted in which peers serve both to reconcile conflicting actions and to broadcast the events to other peers. This paper describes and evaluates a new algorithm, Stochastic, Adaptive Latency Improvement for Event Notification Trees (SALIENT). SALIENT provides for the efficient broadcast of event dissemination in peer-to-peer MMOGs through a distributed algorithm for constructing and maintaining a peer-to-peer broadcast tree.

SALIENT consists of am MMOG event dissemination model requiring a zone coordinator to be chosen from all participants. Each participant sends their event data to that zone coordinator for the zone coordinator to serialize and then broadcast through a broadcast tree to all participants.

The aim of SALIENT is to decrease the experienced average latency of all participants. In order to accomplish this goal, SALIENT employs a number of independent mechanisms that work over time to incrementally make improvements to the structure of the broadcast tree. SALIENT incorporates randomized algorithms to continually explore alternate tree structures that might reduce average latency and evaluate those alternate tree structures. When an improved structure is found, SALIENT adopts the new structure.

SALIENT was found to greatly reduce experienced latency, typically as much as 30-50% reduction in event delays, as compared to a simple base case where the broadcast tree is randomly assembled. In addition, SALIENT has bandwidth management strategies that help increase the number of nodes that can be supported for nodes with very limited bandwidth. Compared to a base case where a flat broadcast tree is used and can only support 12 participants in total, SALIENT allows 60 or more participants to be supported.

Chancellor’s Award for Graduating Seniors from Penn State

Graduating seniors from Penn State Harrisburg can receive a Chancellor’s Award in the amount of $1000 for the first year in a graduate program at the college.  This award is also available to graduating seniors from six other Penn State Commonwealth campuses.

Penn State Harrisburg is known for its small class size, strong sense of community, and close interaction among students and faculty, qualities that are enhanced by the academic resources and reputation of a major research university.  We are committed to providing intellectual challenges and broad social experiences in a supportive environment where students realize their full potential.  The Chancellor’s Award demonstrates our interest in having our undergraduates join our learning community for a graduate education.

To receive this award, graduating seniors must submit a graduate application prior to July 1, 2012.  If admitted into the program selected, the award will be added to the student’s account at that time, and applied as $500 per semester. (Please note that if receiving a graduate assistantship, one will become ineligible for the Chancellor’s Award.) If you have questions about the award, please contact Robert Coffman, director of enrollment management, at 717-948-6250.

Johnson & Johnson Talk on Project Management

Penn State Harrisburg Career Services and the IST, ACM, and IT Clubs of Penn State Harrisburg
invite you to attend an event featuring:

Bill Bradley
Director, Johnson & Johnson

speaking on

Project Manangement

Mr. Bradley has had extensive experience managing large programs and projects throughout his career in Information Technology at J&J. Join us to hear about these experiences and learn how what you are learning in class directly relates to projects in the corporate environment!

Date: Tuesday April 24, 2011
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 P.M.
Location: E330 Olmsted

Jason Jones and Mary Constantine Honored at Student Awards Ceremony

Graduating seniors Jason Jones and Mary Constantine were honored at Penn State Harrisburg's Student Awards Ceremony on April 20, 2012.  Jason Jones received the Computer Science Outstanding Student Award.  Mary Constantine received the Mathematics Outstanding Student Award.  The students won the awards based on their overall academic performance.  

Math Club Talk: "What do those engineers do?"

This Tuesday April 17 at noon in TL 128, the Math Club is hosting the talk "What do those engineers do?" by Dr. Jim Davis of the University of Richmond. Dr. Davis has done research in the area of mathematical coding theory, including some research in connection with the technology company Hewlett-Packard. A brief abstract is listed below. Free food and drinks will be provided. I hope to see you there.

Abstract: Based on a sabbatical experience at Hewlett-Packard, I will describe some of the math I used to implement a wireless transmission scheme in the mid 1990s. This talk is rated G, meaning that anyone who has completed a high school trigonometry course will be able to understand the talk.

Calculus: The Musical

You are invited to attend the show "Calculus: The Musical," hosted by the Penn State Harrisburg Math Club. The show will be held on Thursday, April 19th, from 12-1 in the Community Center. Admission is free. Donations will be accepted for the Math Club Recycled Textbook Foundation.

You can view more information about the show here.

Students apply skills in programming competition

Check out the news item from the Penn State Harrisburg website about our recent programming competition.

SSET Seminar Series: Towards an Enhanced Software Safety

All faculty and students are invited!
Light lunch will be served.

Presented by Dr. Omar El Ariss, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Date: Monday March 19, 2012, 12:00 to 1:00 PM
Room: E253 Olmsted

Abstract: Functional modeling and safety analysis are two important aspects of safety-critical systems. However, they are often conducted separately. Software vulnerabilities due to design errors, inconsistencies, incompleteness, and missing constraints can lead to hazards and safety failures. Our aim as Software Engineers is to design software that delivers correct services and evades faults that are capable of altering the behavior of the system, thus causing unwarranted side effects. This talk will focus on improving the quality of software by clearly defining and understanding safety concerns as the software is being designed. We will explore how the fault trees can be designed modularly and dynamically through the use of components and reusability.

Career Connections with the PA Dept. of Labor & Industry

Tuesday, March 13 at noon, in room E334.

Meet Sue Zehner, Recruiter with Labor & Industry, and learn about applying for information technology opportunities with the state of PA. They are recruiting for application developer positions, among others. Open to all students. Presented by the IT club and the Career Services Office.