Jeff, one of my co-workers in the Maclab, had this cake made; it didn’t taste too great, but it was a fun cake. For those of you who have played the game Portal, this cake should be of great humor. It was one sweet paradox (hahahaha). Apparently, he asked whoever decorated this thing to make a blue and an orange portal; the ovals on the side are the result. The flowers are just random.

Last night, the UofC ACM held its first major event, an interdisciplinary panel on artificial intelligence. Since Cord and I took over as co-chairs of the chapter, we have been fighting to get things happening in the CS department, which hasn’t been easy. The Facebook event had about 25 confirmed guests and 40 maybes, so we were a little nervous about turn out. The fliers and e-mails we sent seemed to pay off as we had about 60 attend. We were pretty happy.

For our first big event, we felt it went pretty well. The panel had David McAllester, John Goldsmith, Terry Regier, and Philip Ulinski. The majority of the panel were basically computer and linguistics people, so it definitely skewed, but we ended up discussing AI in a pretty broad way. Really, the panel was too broad. For the most part, the discussion was guided mostly by the audience, which made it pretty disorganized. I felt like I didn’t come away with a greater understanding of AI. Really, many of the AI-related questions I have pondered (which others asked) were answered, but I have yet to really process the answers. I have been thinking most about the singularity, which McAllester wanted to talk about, but we didn’t really stay on the subject much. Overall, it was a really enjoyable panel, and it was a pretty awesome thing to help organize. Borja said there was a food spread for another talk that was supposed to be at the same time that the CS department got hundreds of cookies for that only a few people went to. Future panels should be even more of a success.

See Also

• Page on the ACM Site for Event