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Spring 2020

Faculty Research Talks

  • Feb 7 - Prof. Mike Lam. Do You Understand IEEE Floating Point?
  • Feb 21 - Prof. Chris Mayfield Postponed to 3/20, 4/03, or next fall
  • Mar 6 - Prof. Dee Weikle
  • Mar 27 - Prof. Nathan Sprague
  • Apr 17 - Prof. Taalman
  • Apr 24 - Prof. John Bowers. Circle packing for 3D printed infill design.

Undergraduate Thesis Presentations

  • Apr 3 - TBD
  • Apr 3 - Charles Hines: Less-Java, More Type Safety (Advisor: Prof. Lam)
  • Apr 10 - Jake Brazleton: Using Software to Generate Acoustic Projections for 3D Models (Advisor: Prof. Bowers)
  • Apr 10 - William Lovo: Analyzing Text Classifiers to Support DLP Systems (Advisor: Prof. Molloy)
  • Apr 10 - Megan Gilbert: Fourth Hour: A Pilot Study on the Impact of PI (Advisor: Prof. Weikle)

Abstracts

2 / 7 Prof. Mike Lam

Do You Understand IEEE Floating Point?

Floating-point arithmetic is used for nearly all real-valued computation in modern software. CS 261 teaches the basics of the IEEE standard format as well as some of its caveats (e.g., rounding error and its non-uniform distribution). However, there are many other floating-point issues that cannot be covered in that course due to time constraints, and many of them may surprise even an experienced software developer. This talk will discuss some of these issues and explore the published results of a recent survey from Northwestern University that attempted to quantify the level of understanding of floating-point issues among software developers across academia, national labs, and industry. The talk will also highlight the importance of these findings to ongoing research projects here at JMU.