*** Deadline has been extended to Sept. 22 at 12:00pm ***
Think you know your profs REALLY well? Try identifying faculty and staff from their baby pictures! We have two prizes to give away from our sponsors for the top answers: “Madden NFL 06” from EA and “Dark Summit” from Radical Entertainment. Contest ends on Sept. 13. Winners will be announced at the BBQ (Sept. 14th) at 11:55am.
It’s time for school again! Are you new to UBC Computer Science? Then come on out to the welcome event put on by the Computer Science department!
“Say what?”
Thursday, September 8 @ DMP 310, 12:30-1:15PM
You’ll get the chance to meet some of your future professors, academic advisors, co-op coordinators, as well as mingle among some of your fellow newbies who you hadn’t met on Imagine Day! You’ll get to hear from the department head of Computer Science, Bill Aiello, as well as the president of Your Student Society(TM), Rachel Chao!
Not only that, you’ll get FREE pizza!
Afterward, head on down to the X-Wing (TIE Fighter!) student lounge, located near the Reboot Cafe.
“What’s that?”
Thursday, September 8 @ X-Wing student lounge, 1:15-2:00PM
Oldbie CSer? Come on down!
You’ll get a chance to mingle even more with fellow students and Computer Science faculty. Got a question about your classes? Just ask someone! Wanna brag about the program you’ve been working on? Go ahead!
Not only that, you’ll get FREE chips and pop!
Isn’t that just icing on the cake?
So, to recap:
Newbies!
Tuesday, September 8 @ DMP 310, 12:30-1:15PM
FREE pizza!
…then…
Follow the crowd down to the X-Wing student lounge, 1:15-2:00PM
FREE chips and pop!
(oh, and of course there will be some of them, y’know, speeches and such… and mingling, too)
Oldbies!
Thursday, September 8 @ X-Wing student lounge (near the Reboot Cafe), 1:15-2:00PM
FREE chips and pop!
(and some mingling… call it networking)
There are many applications where one needs to search for a “function” that has “minimal energy” while satisfying some boundary constraints. As a simple example, consider the problem of finding the minial area soap bubble surface that spans a wireframe boundary. Numerical methods are typically only good at finding local minima to such varational problems.
In this talk, we show how global optima can be found as the limit of a set of purely combinatorial problems. These combinatorial problems can be thought of higher dimensional analogues of the “shortest path in planar graph” problem. For example, when the problem dimension is 3, the combinatorial problem is to find a “discrete minimal surface” in a volumetric cellular complex. We then show how these combinatorial problems can be solved in polynomial time by reducing them to instances of MIN-CUT. If time permits, we will also explore an application of these ideas to 3-camera stereo vision. More information: [http://www.cs.ubc.ca/events/seminars/csicics.shtml](http://www.cs.ubc.ca/events/seminars/csicics.shtml)
