[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
presents two talks by 

Erich Neuwirth
Didactic Center for Computer Science and Institute for Scientific Computing
University of Vienna

Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Both talks in Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

11:45-1:30:

Music as a paradigm for teaching Computer Science abstractions

Creating and performing music has a lot of structural implications.
The base unit to deal with is a musical phrase. Combining phrases
creates melodies. Playing a melody as a canon can be seen as combining
shifted copies of one melody. Transposing can easily be seen as an
arithmetic operation on pitch, and many more musical operations can
easily be mapped into functions applied to phrases.  So the concept of
a musical phrase seen as an abstract data type can be seen as
fundamental when working with music on a computer.  We will see a
toolkit for creating, and transforming musical phrases and combining
them into larger pieces of music.  Performing polyphonic music also
has an important computer science model: synchronizing parallel
processes.

The toolkit has two different mini languages. The beginners version is
implemented in a spreadsheet, so the user always can see the data and
perform transformations manually. The more advanced version in
implemented in Logo.

3:00-4:00:

Design of a Spreadsheet/R Interface

RExccel is an add-in to Excel that allows the use of R as a "helper
application" for Excel. Data can be transferred between Excel and R
(in both directions), and Excel can call R functions to perform
calculations and then transfer the results to Excel. RExcel allows the
use of R functions in Excel cell formulas, effectively controlling R
calculations from Excel's automatic recalculation mechanism.  It also
allows the creation of a standalone RExcel application which hides R
almost completely from the user and uses Excal as the main interface
to R. 

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Upcoming Events:

# Nothing scheduled :-(  Wouldn't you like to give a talk?

--Mitch