The Router

UQ Computing Society

Join the UQ Computing Society as we explore the human side of studying and working in technology.

  1. 04/10/2021

    The History of UQCS with Jackson, Taylor, Cameron, Nick, Madhav and James

    As you may know, the UQCS AGM is coming up, and at the AGM we will elect a new committee for 2022. UQCS has been around for just over 10 years, and we thought that now would be a great time to have a chat to some of the past president and talk to them about what they learned during their time at the helm of one of UQ’s largest technology focused societies. This is the history of UQCS, as told by six former UQCS presidents, Jackson, Taylor, Cameron, Nick, Madhav and James. — Jackson is a former UQ student of IT and maths who, with two other friends, co-founded the UQ Computing Society in 2011. He served on the executive committee until he graduated in 2014, including two years as president. He now works at Google in Sydney, building software to support network operations teams. Taylor was treasurer in 2015 and president in 2016 and 2017. She currently works as a software engineer at Cubiko, and graduated with a dual degree in software engineering and mathematics. Cameron was the UQCS President in 2018, and currently works as a Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Microsoft News. Things he has worked on include the new tab page for Edge Chromium and the Widgets feed that is coming to Windows 11! Nicholas is a UQ computer science graduate and was UQCS president in 2019 before joining Canva in 2021 as a Machine Learning Engineer. Madhav is a computer science/mathematics student at UQ who was UQCS President in 2020 (that-online-year) and is currently on the General Committee. He works at a startup and tutors, and likes board games and plants. James (Jimmy) is in his final semester of computer science at UQ and currently works as a software developer at the QLD Department of Environment and Science. In his spare time he enjoys watching cartoons, playing video games, and working on various software projects.

    43 min
  2. 15/08/2021

    Computational Topology with Benjamin Burton and Rhuaidi Burke

    Today, we have an exciting episode at the intersection of computer science and mathematics! Ben Burton and Rhuaidi Burke, from the School of Mathematics and Physics at UQ, both work in the field of computational topology. They’re here to give a brief introduction to computational topology, as well as some of the unique challenges that arise when writing software for mathematicians. Benjamin Burton (pronouns he/him) is a professor in the School of Mathematics and Physics at The University of Queensland, where he spends his time teaching supercomputers how to untangle knots. His mathematical career has spanned geometry, cryptography and finance, and he enjoys puzzling over how to find fast computational solutions to difficult mathematical problems. Benjamin is passionate about bringing mathematics to the public, and he has worked behind the scenes for many years to help organise the International Olympiad in Informatics and other secondary outreach programmes. He also volunteers for the Debian GNU/Linux project, and knows more about Eurovision than you will ever need to know. Rhuaidi Burke is a PhD student working on 4-dimensional computational topology. Specifically, he is investigating combinatorial representations of "exotic" 4-dimensional spaces — these are spaces which can be continuously deformed into one another, but not smoothly deformed into one another — a phenomenon which only appears in dimensions 4 and higher. Some links: Regina: https://regina-normal.github.io/SnapPy: https://snappy.math.uic.edu/Curved Spaces, “a flight simulator for multi-connected universes”: https://www.geometrygames.org/CurvedSpaces/index.htmlThe Shape of Space by Jeffrey R. Weeks: https://www.routledge.com/The-Shape-of-Space/Weeks-Weeks/p/book/9781138061217The four colour theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theoremPersistent homology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_homologyJeff Erickson’s course on computational topology at Illinois: http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/compgeom/

    47 min

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Join the UQ Computing Society as we explore the human side of studying and working in technology.