February 28, 2010

The Coffee Song

Frank Steinhoff suggested this Sinatra’s song. It’s about coffee and Brazil and it would have arise in a coffee talk at IMECC’s coffee room. Way down among brazilians Coffee beans grow by the billions So they’ve got to find those extra cups to fill They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil You can’t get cherry soda’cause they’ve got to sell that quota And the way things are I’ll bet they never will

February 28, 2010

A romance of many dimensions

Editor’s note:This is a guest post from Luciana Takata. Last week I read for the second time Flatland − a romance of many dimensions (Edwin A. Abbot, 1884). No matter how many times I read this book I guess I’ll never stop finding it interesting. In Flatland, its inhabitants − triangles, squares, pentagons and other two-dimensional geometrical figures − can only move to right, left, forward, backward or its composed directions.

February 25, 2010

Problem solving, artificial intelligence and computational linear algebra

When students come to computer science, it’s hard to motivate them to learn fundamental mathematics subjects such as linear algebra and numerical calculus. In this post I intend to spark this motivation through AI and sketch a method (and some variations) to solve optimization problems. It’s hard to define AI. We know what artificial means, but what about intelligence? Russel and Norvig [1] present us four approaches to AI: systems that think like humans, systems that think rationally, systems that act like humans and systems that act rationally.

February 23, 2010

Engineering Paradise

Edit: this is another restored old post. This is old, but I think it’s so funny and propelling to study I feel I must share it. This video was made by a colleague, John Cohn, at IBM as a contest for choosing best video to encourage young people to go into engineering and computer science. He made it for fun, since he couldn’t take part at contest as he was organizing it, but he felt it would be good to create something to use as example.