Colloquium

Daniel Scharstein

Benchmarking Stereo Vision and Optical Flow Algorithms Stereo vision and optical flow methods attempt to measure scene depth and motion by matching and tracking pixels across images. To evaluate the performance of such methods, we need “ground truth” — the true depth or true object motion. In this talk… Continue reading »

Josh Ain ’03

Finding Structure In Webpages: A user friendly tool extracting structured data from the unstructured web Needlebase is a cloud database and data acquisition platform which makes it easy for non technical users to extract structured data from webpages. Based on a few examples in a simple data tagging UI, Needlebase’s… Continue reading »

Michael Hay, PhD

Analyzing Private Network Data Many of our social interactions — email, phone, online networking — leave behind a digital trace. These traces are a rich source of data for social science and present an opportunity to fundamentally advance our understanding of many facets of society. However, these traces are… Continue reading »

David Liben-Nowell

You Can Pick Your (Best) Friends Recent research has revealed many remarkably robust structural properties of social networks: triadic closure, heavy-tailed degree distributions, and small-world phenomena, to name just a few. Of course, the ”why” of these properties has generally been more elusive. In this talk, David presented some results… Continue reading »

Christopher Cyll ’04 and Michael Gnozzio ’07

Building a Profitable Website: Algorithmic Marketing, Quality Modeling, and Other Things You Need to Run an Internet Startup In this talk, we explored the mathematical and technological challenges one encounters when building a successful internet startup company. After presenting the basic concepts behind online advertising, we explored techniques for using… Continue reading »

Mark Terrano

Games and Immersion Games establish a unique relationship with the player – unlike any medium in history. In this fast-paced multimedia talk we looked at games in a new way, learned from a game design perspective how games establish an emotional relationship with the player and immerse them in… Continue reading »

John W. Byers

Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramifications Daily deal sites have become the latest Internet sensation, providing discounted offers to customers for restaurants, ticketed events, and services. We undertake a study of the economics of daily deals on the web, first by analyzing a dataset we compiled by monitoring… Continue reading »

Jeffrey S. Chase

Reflections on Trusting Trust, Part 2: The Cloud More than two decades ago, Ken Thompson gave an ACM Turing Award Lecture called “Reflections on Trusting Trust”, in which he showed how our trust in the software we run is based on chains of reasoning with many hidden and vulnerable… Continue reading »

Matthew Ginsberg

Dr. Fill: Crosswords and An Implemented Solver for Singly Weighted CSPs We described and demonstrated Dr.Fill, a program that solves American-style crossword puzzles. From a technical perspective, Dr.Fill works by converting crosswords to weighted CSPs, and then using a variety of novel techniques to find a solution. These techniques… Continue reading »

Heeringa and McGuire receive tenure.

Following the recommendation of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, the Williams College Board of Trustees has promoted both Brent Heeringa and Morgan McGuire to the position of associate professor with tenure. The promotion will take effect July 1, 2012. In total, eight professors… Continue reading »