Reminder: CS Department Picnic is this Saturday, May 17.

There has been a significant change in the Upcoming Events lineup. Elections for next year's e-board will be taking place this Wednesday, before Dr. Rich's talk. We don't expect it to take long as votes are usually conducted by raising one's hand.

EDIT: We decided that five minute elections are probably a bad idea, so elections will still take place on the original date of May 21st. We're still keeping it short--if you want to participate in elections, please show up during the first 20 minutes.

The rest of the hour will be given to Sean Taylor's security talk on buffer overflows. If you live in the Suites, you've probably seen an example of this with the recent virus and Internet connection problems. Sean will be talking about that in more detail.

• If you missed Dr. Rich's talk on Cryptographic Primitives yesterday, you can download his slides here.
• He will be giving another talk on cryptography in two weeks. We will hopefully have some kind of abstract the week before the talk, so you'll have a clue what it is about.
• At next week's General Meeting, Dr. Sang will give a brief talk about the JPL Student Independent Research Internships for Fall 2008. If you're interested, please show up within the first 20 minutes. She has to go to a meeting immediately afterwards.
• Also, JPL has their annual Open House this weekend, Saturday and Sunday. It is supposed to be a fun event where they bring out all their cool toys and show off. It's a kid-friendly event if you want to make it a family outing. They recommend coming early as there will probably be long lines for some attractions. There is a forum thread for carpooling.
• You've probably seen flyers posted regarding two new scholarships for the CS department. Both are due in the CS Department office by 5PM on May 8, 2008.
  
  1. The Nodus Technologies CS Scholarship ($500)
  2. The Computer Science Junior Scholarships ($7,500)
  
  

The calendar (general interest and CSS-specific) and Upcoming Events (CSS-specific) have been updated.

We are highlighting the following events:

• Thu, April 17: The Career Center is hosting a Spring Career Day in the Quad tomorrow. You won't be able to miss it.


• Wed, April 23: Seth Bernstein from the Career Center conduct a workshop on using Bronco Connection and securing on-campus interviews. Tammy Pham, the recruiter for Hitachi Consulting will be there with advice on do's and don'ts when submitting resumes and signing up for interviews.


• Thu, April 24: Dr. Daisy Sang will have an information session for the Master of Science in Computer Science program at Cal Poly Pomona. There will be pizza and drinks and lots of graduate students to talk to. If you're thinking of graduate school, this event is for you.

If you missed today's meeting, here's a recap of club business:

• CSS elections are coming up. If you're interested in becoming involved with CSS next year, start thinking about what position you want to run for. There's a forum thread here if you wish to discuss it. The actual election will be held on May 21st.


• Movie Night is scheduled for April 30th and the room has been reserved. There has been talk about holding a second movie night. More information will be posted when and if it is organized. As for the movies themselves, that's to be decided.


• The CSS picnic will be held in Bonelli Park on May 17th. Details are still being worked out. If you're interested in helping to plan the picnic, please e-mail us at css at csupomona dot edu.


• The Study Break will likely be held on a Thursday this quarter as the Bronco Student Center is booked up on all Fridays in May. We won't know the date and times until we are successful in reserving a room. Looks like Lance and Mendez will be organizing things. They did a great job last quarter, so here's looking to another fun study break.


• Mendez and Malak are organizing a Linux installfest in the CS lab. They're working on the details, but they hope to hold it next Friday. Linux experts and newbies are welcome. Details forthcoming.

As for the Django talk, Kevan gave a brief intro to the Django web framework with a particular emphasis on the ORM (Object-Relational Mapper). He will be posting his presentation and the source code of his demo here. You'll know if he has when you stop getting Cal Poly's 404 page. Here's a list of resources to reference if you would like to start working with Django:

• djangoproject.com


• djangobook.com


• djangosites.org

For anything else, Kevan advises you to RTFM.

Before we get to the recap, we wanted to mention that David Gershman, a CPP CS alum and occasional lecturer for the CS department, has volunteered to give some talks to CSS on various topics, in return for some online feedback to be completed after the talk. The list of topics are available here, if you want to discuss them. The talk will probably be in May, as April is full.

If you missed today's meeting, Dr. Peter Oelschlaeger talked about his research into beta-lactamases. They are the enzymes that provide bacterial resistance to antibiotics. The goal of his research is to understand how enzymes evolve under the selective pressure of antibiotics. The methods they use include molecular dynamics simulations (AMBER 9) and quantum mechanics (Gaussian 03). They use specialized software running on a Linux cluster to do their computer modelling. He would appreciate a computer science student to be involved in his research--someone who can optimize the algorithms, run the simulations and write scripts in csh, C++ or FORTRAN to automate the process.

If this sounds interesting to you, his contact information is available at his website. You may also see him during his office hours on MW 2-3pm in Bldg 4, Rm 3-421.

We only really had time for Science Council announcements. Apparently CSS won Club of the Quarter. Yay us.

You can now apply for the Science Council Scholarship, which is funded from donations and Casino Night. There will be two scholarships of $500 each for College of Science students with minimum GPA of 2.3, showing financial need, with a record of involvement within their community or College of Science. Please see this Word document for application details. The application must be submitted to the Dean's Office by noon on Friday, April 25th.

You can also now register for the 3rd Annual College of Science Research Symposium, which is where College of Science students share their research and projects through oral and poster presentations. The registration deadline is May 7, 2008. The Symposium will be held on Friday, May 23rd, 9am-3pm. If they do the same thing as last year, it'll be held somewhere around building 8.

Belated welcome back to everyone. If only spring break lasted longer...

Reminder: The deadline for the Boeing Scholarship is this Tuesday, April 8, at 5pm. There are five scholarships available, and considering the apathetic nature of most CS students, you've got a pretty good shot if you get that application in.

Our first meeting of the quarter will be this Wednesday, and we have a special guest. Dr. Peter Oelschlaeger from the Chemistry department works with computational chemistry and enzymes that are resistant to antibodies. He's got some research opportunities available for CS majors. In his own words:

"I work with beta-lactamases, which are enzymes that inactivate
antibiotics and are responsible for antibiotic resistance. We are
especially interested in how mutations in these enzymes affect their
activity. The ultimate goal is to understand and predict how these
enzymes evolve under the selective pressure of antibiotics. You can find
more information on my webpage, although it is not very complete, yet:
www.csupomona.edu/~oelschlaeger"

If you're interested in scientific computing or you just want to work on a cool project, you should come to this meeting.

As you can see, we've started filling in the calendar. (BTW, Upcoming Events only lists the five most recent events. If you want to see everything we have planned, you should look at our Events page or the Calendar page.) If you have any talks you want to give or events you'd like to advertise, please e-mail us at css-at-csupomona-dot-edu or post to the forum.

Those of you who are still looking for jobs should be interested in the Career Center workshop we will be having on April 23rd, which will be a tutorial on using Bronco Connection to secure on-campus interviews. In addition, the Career Center is hosting Spring Career Day on the Quad. It will be on Thursday, April 17th, 10-3am. Of possibly more value to those of you still tweaking your resumes is the Resumaniac event on April 16th, where you can have employers critique your resumes.