The computer programs of Charles Babbage
Raúl Rojas-Gonzalez
Fred D. Gibson, Jr. Endowed Professor in Science
University of Nevada, Reno
11/14/2023
The mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage drafted 26 code fragments between 1836 and 1840 for his unfinished “Analytical Engine.” The programs were embedded implicitly in tables representing execution traces. In this talk, we explore the programming architecture of Babbage’s mechanical computer, that is, its structure from the point of view of a programmer, based on those 26 coding examples preserved in the Babbage Papers Archive. I will also show the world's "first computer program". The programs illustrate how Babbage intended to build the Analytical Engine and its capabilities.
Bio: Dr. Raúl Rojas is a professor of Statistics in the Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics at UNR. Previously, he was a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Universities of Berlin, Vienna, and Halle-Wittenberg. His field of research is the theory and applications of AI. He has written three books about the history of computing. For his research in this area, especially the reconstruction of historical machines, he received the Tony Sale Award from the British Computer Society in 2015 and the Wolfgang von Kempelen Prize from the Austrian Computer Society in 2005.
Fall 2023 Short Presentations of Student Research and Awards
11/28/2023
Short presentations of research carried out by Sonoma State Computer Science Students, and CS awards.
- Jacob Jaffee, "DFA Approximations of Non-Regular Languages"
- Brandon Dale, "Modeling AI Fairness by Equity"
Fall 2023 Presentations of Student Capstone Projects
12/05/2023
Short presentations of capstone projects carried out by Sonoma State Computer Science Students.
Learning by Making: Rockets, Cubesats and More!
Lynn Cominsky
Professor
Sonoma State University
02/05/2024
Over the past decade, Sonoma State University’s EdEon STEM Learning group of educators and technologists has developed an integrated ninth-grade physical science curriculum branded as “Learning by Making” (LbyM). LbyM teaches coding, electronics and sensors as tools for students to design and build their own science experiments. LbyM also teaches computational thinking to help students focus on real world problem solving inspired by various physical phenomena. Solutions to the problems are constructed by teachers and students working together. This innovative curriculum grew out of previous EdEon group projects that taught students how to build rockets, drones, and CubeSats together with experimental payloads using similar technology. In this talk, Prof. Cominsky will review the history of flight projects at EdEon, discuss LbyM and ongoing group projects that have grown from these earlier efforts
Network Analysis and Brain Disorders
Eric Friedman
Senior Research Scientist
International Computer Science Institute (ICSI)
02/12/2024
In this talk I will provide an overview of network analysis and its applications to understanding brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. I will discuss the approach and some of the computational issues that arise in the analysis.