CS900
Graduate Seminar
Fall 2017
Thursday 12:40-2pm, King N113

Instructor: P. Hatcher
Office: Kingsbury N215B
Phone: 862-2678
E-mail: pjh@cs.unh.edu
Office Hours: by appointment.

This course is the seminar for new graduate students in computer science. The primary goal of the seminar is to introduce the new students to the department and the university, particularly to the research projects that the current students and faculty are engaged in.

Grading for the course is pass/fail and is based simply upon attendance. Students in the course are expected to attend all sessions of the class unless they arrange an excused absence with me in advance.

The class will normally meet on Thursdays in Kingsbury N113. (There are a few exceptions. Please see the schedule below.)

As a courtesy to the speakers, students should keep their laptops and other electronic devices closed during the seminar.

Here is the current, tentative schedule for the seminar sessions (Google calendar):

• Thursday August 31, 12:40pm: informal session to meet faculty and other graduate students; pizza and drinks will be provided.

• Thursday September 7, 12:40pm: Stephanie Whitney, career and professional development director, CEPS, UNH, and Bryan Dina, senior software engineer, Dyn/Oracle, "Finding Jobs and Internships".

• Thursday September 14, 12:40pm: Patrick MacArthur, PhD student, Computer Science, UNH, "Userspace RDMA Software Emulation on Commodity Hardware using DPDK".

• Thursday September 21, 12:40pm: Scott Kiesel, research scientist, Amazon Robotics, "Continuous Innovation at Amazon Robotics".

• Thursday September 28, 12:40pm: Hala Mostafa, research scientist, United Technologies Research Center, "Transfer Learning With Expert Knowledge".

• Friday October 6, 12pm, DeMeritt 240: Peder Olsen, research staff member, IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, "Three Tales of Separation". Note: This week's session is at a non-standard time and in a non-standard room.

• Thursday October 12, 6pm, Kingsbury N101: A presentation by Facebook engineers on how to get hired by Facebook. Note: This week's session is at a non-standard time and in a non-standard room.

• Thursday October 19, 12:40pm: Avinash Chopde, engineer, Google, "Technology @ Google: Airfare Search, Google Cloud Platform, and Machine Learning."

• Thursday October 26, 12:40pm: Reazul Russel, PhD student, Computer Science, UNH, "Bayesian Methods for Safe Policy Evaluation"; and, Bahram Behzadian, PhD student, Computer Science, UNH, "Low-rank Feature Construction for Reinforcement Learning".

• Thursday November 2, 12:40pm: Michel Charpentier, associate professor, Computer Science, UNH, "Concurrency at UNH/CS: Two Courses and a Project".

• Thursday November 9, 12:40pm: Grace Wilson Caudill, cyberinfrastructure engineer, UNH IT, and Scott Valcourt, director of strategic technology, UNH IT, "Cyberinfrastructure: What It Is and Why We Should Care".

• Thursday November 16, 1pm, McConnell 340: Laurent L. Njilla, Program Manager, Cyber Security Center of Excellence, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, "Securing Power Grid: A Markov Game Theoretic Approach". Note: This week's session is at a non-standard time and in a non-standard room.

• Thursday November 23: No class. Thanksgiving holiday.

• Thursday November 30, 12:40pm: Abir Das, postdoctoral researcher, Computer Science, Boston University, "Consistency for Re-identication and Saliency for Explainability".

• Thursday December 7, 12:40pm: Drew Stevens, PhD student, Computer Science, UNH, "Hairy Slices: Evaluating the Perceptual Effectiveness of Cutting Plane Glyphs for 3D Vector Fields"; and, Tom Butkeiwicz, research assistant professor, Computer Science and the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, UNH, "Designing Augmented Reality Marine Navigation Aids using Virtual Reality".