May 2012 - csc-general

Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference 2012
by Computer Science Club 30 May '12

30 May '12

Hail, membership! Consider this a special invitation to undergraduate students that would like to attend CUMC 2012! For those of you that are not familiar with CUMC, it is the Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, and is being held this year at UBC Okanagan Campus, in Kelowna, British Columbia. (A gorgeous city, especially in the summer!) It will be a great experience for all those interested in mathematics. Regardless of your personal ability in mathematics, the conference is aimed at an undergraduate level, and all undergraduate mathematics students will be able to take something away from it. We will be departing by plane on Tuesday, July 10th in the afternoon, and will be returning in the evening on Sunday, July 15. All airfare and accommodations are generously funded by the Mathematics Endowment Fund (MEF), the Mathematics Society (MathSoc), and the Dean's Office. If you are interested in attending, please contact either myself directly (ehashman(a)uwaterloo.ca) Joseph Horan (jahoran(a)uwaterloo.ca) or email cumc2012(a)mathsoc.uwaterloo.ca. Joseph will also be operating a booth on the third floor of the MC during lunchtimes, right outside the CSC, if you have any questions. You will need to pay your conference fee online before we can consider you officially signed up. You can do this at http://cumc.math.ca . The conference fee is $95. We may have to levy a small additional transportation fee for buses (~$25) if our funding does not cover costs entirely. You'll also be responsibile for your own personal incidental expenses, but everything else should be covered! We have limited space for 40 students, so please make sure that you pay your conference fee and contact either myself or Joseph as soon as possible. I hope to see you boarding a plane with me in a little over a month, -- Elana Hashman CUMC 2012 UW Trip Planning Committee

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Scheduled Downtime (caffeine, mail) 2AM-6AM on Tuesday, May 15
by Computer Science Club 12 May '12

12 May '12

The following CSC hosts will be down for scheduled maintenance from 2AM-6AM on Tuesday, May 15th: - caffeine - mail - wiki - git - rt Details of maintenance include: - migrating mail to its own container - This means that caffeine and mail will no longer point to the same host. If you are currently using caffeine.csclub as your mail host to send/receive mail, *please change* this to mail.csclub ASAP. This includes related services such as imap, pop3, and webmail. Forwarded mail will be unaffected. - migrating mailman to the new mail.csclub - aliasing mailman.csclub to mail.csclub - miscellaneous fixes to caffeine The following services will be affected: - mail - mailman - apache - mysql - postgresql - ssh - pop3 - imap If you are currently logged into caffeine for general-purpose computing (irc, etc.) please transition to a different CSC server before Tuesday. There will be another reminder on Monday evening. Cheers.

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Elections! / Palantir Tech Talk
by Computer Science Club 02 May '12

02 May '12

Hello all! I hope you had a nice break between terms. We're going to kick off the spring term fast, so get ready. ELECTIONS: Thursday, May 10, 4:30 PM, Comfy Lounge (MC 3001) --- Calum T. Dalek asked me to relay the details of the election. We will be holding the election at 4:30 PM in the Comfy Lounge on May 10th. Nominations are now open, so feel free to write your nominations on the whiteboard in the CSC office, or email them to cro(a)csclub.uwaterloo.ca. PALANTIR TECH TALK: "mmap and the Mortgage Crisis" by Palantir Engineers; Monday, May 7, 6:00 PM, DC 1302 --- Palantir is a Palo Alto-based intelligence analysis software company that has partnered with the CSC to put on a tech talk and social. There will be free food, free drinks, and for one lucky winner, a free iPad, so why not come on out? Abstract: In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, large banks have been saddled with the prospect of foreclosing on millions of distressed mortgages, at a financial cost of billions of dollars and an incalculable social cost. Crucial to solving this problem is the ability to model and analyze these millions of loans in real time, enabling lenders to price homes so that they can find effective and mutually beneficial alternatives to foreclosure. In this talk, we'll describe how engineers at Palantir are working on a calculation engine that supports such analyses. We’ll outline our design goals of constructing a platform that supports queries against large sets of data at interactive speeds and exposes a high-level object-oriented interface that enables analysts to construct models intuitively without having to worry about the underlying implementation details. We’ll describe the different architectures we explored in prototyping the system, demo how to use our product to analyze massive datasets, and discuss how we've ultimately deployed it in the field. Details: Monday, May 7th 6:00 - 7:30pm DC 1302 Free dinner and drinks after the talk at McGinnis FrontRow! For more details about Palantir and information about their info session earlier in the day, please see their csc-industry post: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/csc-industry/2012-May/000030.html Good luck in all your classes this semester, or whatever endeavors you may be enjoying the next few months. I hope to see you out at the elections and talk---mark your calendars! ^_^ -- Elana Hashman Vice-President, Winter 2012 Computer Science Club University of Waterloo ehashman(a)uwaterloo.ca

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