CS Visit Day Sessions

Natural language processing is about writing software that understands what humans say and write, but it's also more than that. Often, language is too complex for anyone to fully describe in a program, so instead we feed lots of examples of language (like speech samples and text documents) into a computer and write programs that can learn language on their own from those examples. Computers can learn all kinds of things about language, like what you sound like, what words mean, how to translate between languages, and so on.

Making software is one thing, but what about selling it? Come to this session, and hear a software entrepreneur tell you about the many success stories he's had with the startups that he's created...and a few of the failures as well.

Learn how a computational climate model works, and trace the history of climate modelling, from the early ENIAC weather simulations created by in the 1950's, through to today's Earth System Models. In this session, you'll get to see models of the atmosphere, ocean, vegetation and ice sheets are coupled together to study interactions and feedbacks across the climate system.

Creating great software requires the talent and participation of many people. In this session we will discuss different types of jobs in the computer software field and how people in these different jobs work together to create and deliver Firefox to half a billion people.

Have you thought about how networking technologies that can help with health care? We will go through several examples of recent technologies (sensor networks, social data collection, etc.) and their impact on health care. We'll also discuss about future technologies and how we can create better networks that can be even more useful in this area.

Games aren't just for fun these days, but can be used to do great good in the world! In particular, games are being used with seniors as a way to diagnose and treat medical conditions, like dementia or other congitive deficiencies. In this session, you'll learn a little of what's being done in this field, and what developments you can help with!

Human-Computer Interaction is the study of how to make the interface between computers and people as natural as possible. Everything from smartphones to tablets to game controllers requires computer scientists to understand how to make these interfaces work, and in this session you'll get to learn all about them from one of the foremost experts in the field!

Virtual reality has come a long way since the days when it was science fiction and toy applications, to the applications we see today. Now that devices like the Oculus Rift are here, virtual reality can have more everyday applications. For instance, what happens when you combine virtual reality with a web browser? Come to this session to find out!

We've seen how pictures and movies can be viewed in 3D, but how would you draw these pictures or movies using 3D technology? In this session, you'll learn some of the basics of computer graphics, and see a little demo on how to use 3D glasses to make 3D models.

Hacking has become a big part of the news lately, and knowing more about hackers is important, so you'll know how to protect yourself from them. Learn about the biggest cybercrimes that are happening today, from somebody whose made it his business to protect us from them.