January:

The ACM chapter started off the semester with a game night, where students and faculty played Robo Rally.

Later in January, the Computer Science students and faculty gathered for the annual post-holiday “holiday” party at Dr. Owens’ house with chili, a white elephant gift exchange, conversation and games.

 

February:

The computer science honors society, Upsilon Pi Epsilon inducted four new members. As part of the induction, Dr. J. Moore gave an enjoyable and entertaining talk on Formal Methods. The mathematics honors society, Pi Mu Epsilon also inducted four new members.


As most likely many of you did, we watched IBM’s Watson compete on Jeopardy; some of us on campus, and others were able to attend a viewing at the IBM high performance computing facility in Austin, which many had previously visited on a field trip in the fall.

 

Dr. Fumiko Futamura gave a talk, “Drawing Humpty Dumpty in Perspective, an excursion through philosophy, music, art and mathematics”, at a meeting of the Southwestern Math Club. 16 students attended, and drew musical chords formed by squares in perspective.

 

Five mathematics faculty members gave 10 minute talks on various interesting mathematical topics, many describing their areas of research.

 

At the end of February a recent alum, who is currently pursing a PhD at University of Texas at Austin, came back to campus and presented on some of his group’s research using neuroevolution.