Q Club
The Q Club, short for "Quantitative Club," is the departmental student organization, boasting over fifty members. The Q Club sponsors activities such as Pi Day (on 3/14, of course), celebrates Euler's Birthday Party, and features a regular colloquium series. At these talks students speak on their research or share their internship and summer program experiences. Faculty members occasionally give talks as well, on topics ranging from "Math and Horror" to "An Outrageously Brief History of Mathematics." Pizza, beverages and cookies are served at Q Club events. All are welcome to join; please contact Shelley Kandola, club president, Jessica Chapman, club advisor or Ivan Ramler, co-advisor.
Schedule of Q Club Activities, 2011-2012
The complete schedule of talks will be posted soon once it is finalized. Events take place approximately every other Friday from 1:00-1:30 in Valentine 205-206 unless otherwise noted. Additional events may be scheduled on short notice.
If you happen to know of students that might be interested in giving a talk this semester, please let either Jessica Chapman or Ivan Ramler know. There are still openings.
Spring Semester 2012
FIRST MEETING
2/3/12 Cassidy Griffin and Ricky Powell will be presenting on their SYE titled "Obtainability of Strong Orientations: Creating an Efficient Network of One-Way Streets"
Abstract: A strong orientation of a graph is a way to orient the edges so that the resulting directed graph is strongly connected, meaning it is possible to get from any vertex to any other vertex while following the arrows. In his book Graph Theory and Its Applications to Problems of Society, Fred Roberts describes a depth-first search algorithm (which we call the Roberts Algorithm) for putting a strong orientation on a graph. We call a strong orientation obtainable if it is possible to arrive at that orientation using some application of the Roberts Algorithm. We present results about obtainable and unobtainable orientations, including classes of graphs which have unobtainable orientations and classes of graphs for which all orientations are obtainable. In addition, we discuss relative efficiency of orientations which are obtainable or unobtainable, using four different ways to measure efficiency or optimality.
Fall Semester 2011
This will be the last Q club for the semester.
12/2/11 Caitlin McArdle will be presenting about her SYE titled "A New Perspective on Likert Data"
Abstract: Likert-style questions are commonly found on questionnaires, especially in the field of psychology. Likert questions typically have five responses; “strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “neither agree or disagree”, “agree”, and “strongly agree”. For data analysis these responses are then coded as numbers one through five. Oftentimes, this data is then analyzed in a way that does not correspond with what the responses actually represent. There is much debate over how to properly analyze data produced by Likert questions. This talk will discuss common methods for analyzing Likert data, as well as, describing a new method for investigating relationships between respondents and questions and identifying participants that are not responding in a typical pattern.
11/11/11 Lauren Stemler will be presenting about her summer REU project.
“The Representation Number of K_{n} – W_{m} and Other Graphs”
Description: According to Erdös and Evans a graph G has a representation modulo N > 1 if all its vertices can be assigned distinct labels from the set {0, 1, 2, . . . , N − 1} such that two vertices in /G/ are adjacent if and only if the difference of their labels is relatively prime to /N/ . Among all possible representation numbers of a graph /G/, we focus on the smallest N that satisfies these conditions for a graph /G/, called the representation number. This talk will discuss a couple different classes of graphs and then explain the general results found in this REU project, as well as highlighting some of the fun I had while exploring the representation number problem.
11/4/11 Kathryn Glowinski will be presenting about her summer REU project.
“Mobile Privacy: Creating a More Secure Android Browser.”
Description: While there are a plethora of security options for PC’s, mobile devices have not yet caught up to the same security standards. Smartphones, however, are used for the same types of vulnerable browsing as a standard computer. My research dealt with developing a new web browser for the Android operating system, which would alert the user to security concerns for a given web page.
Description: While there are a plethora of security options for PC’s, mobile devices have not yet caught up to the same security standards. Smartphones, however, are used for the same types of vulnerable browsing as a standard computer. My research dealt with developing a new web browser for the Android operating system, which would alert the user to security concerns for a given web page.
10/21/11 Professor Sam Vandervelde will present about "Wallis's Wonderful, Wacky Work, or Why One Times Zero Equals Pi/2." In this talk he will explore some of the curiosities that arise when working with products of infinitely many positive real numbers. We will confirm several bizarre looking identities computationally and then explain them mathematically.
10/7/11 Dan DeBernardi will be speaking about his “Summer Finance Internship at Société Générale”. During this talk his is going to speak about his summer internship at SG Equipment Finance. He will briefly cover how he got into the leasing world, what he learned, and how he applied skills that he learned at SLU to Finance.
09/30/11 Professor Ivan Ramler, Professor Jessica Chapman, and Professor Sam Vandervelde spoke about different summer research opportunities for students and the upcoming Senior Seminar topics for the Spring semester.
09/16/11 Will Weld will be speaking about his summer REU entitled "Iris Segmentation Using Non-Ideal Images." Iris segmentation plays a pivotal role in accurate iris recognition systems. Many iris segmentation methods rely on a controlled environment, wherein the subject may be required to submit themselves to have their eyes photographed in an ideal scenario. In unconstrained environments, however, iris segmentation becomes increasingly difficult to perform due to off-axis tilts, off-angles, and occlusion from reflections, eyelids, eyelashes, eye aids, and hair.
09/02/11 Shelley Kandola will be speaking about her summer SLU Fellowship entitled "Simple and Efficient Compact Graph Generation for Geochemical Data." The goal of her project was to write software that would facilitate viewing geochemical trends in large volumes of rock data.
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