Short presentations of research carried out by Sonoma State Computer Science Students.

Please join us for the SSU Biology Colloquium for a presentation by Kevin Munroe, The Nature Conservancy.

Featured Speaker: Sudhir Shresta, Dept. of Engineering Science, Sonoma State University

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Featured Speaker: Scott Gordon, Dept. of Computer Science, Sacramento State University

Video games today are built using engines such as Unity, Unreal, Lumberyard, CryEngine, and dozens of others.  The engine handles the basic tasks common to all games: 3D real-time rendering, object and scene-graph management, lighting, cameras, animation, etc.  Perhaps you've used an engine to make your own game, but have you ever thought of building your own engine?  It's a fun and challenging project that appeals to aspiring hard-core coders.  Dr. Scott Gordon is a professor at Sacramento State University, where students in his Game Architecture course build video games atop his own game engine "TAGE".  But a few of his most ambitious students opt instead to first build their own engine from scratch.  In this talk, Dr. Gordon describes how game engines are organized, and how to build your own.

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Featured Speaker: Theresa Migler, Dept. of Computer Science, Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Featured Speaker: Jennifer Waldo, Ochs Labs, Sebastopol, CA

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Featured Speaker: Dr. Cody Ross Pitts, UC Davis

Please join us for the Chemistry Seminar series with speaker Dr. Cody Ross Pitts from UC Davis. All attendees must complete a Wellness Screening before attending in person. For more information about the Chemistry Seminar, contact farmers@sonoma.edu.

Featured Speaker: Dusty Brooks, Sandia National Labs

A general survey of uncertainty quantification and risk topics, with examples from nuclear waste, fire risk, and space launch systems.

Featured Speaker: Jairo Valasco Jr, UC Santa Cruz

All lectures are free and open to all. For more information about this lecture series, contact PAdept@sonoma.edu.

C.A.A.S.E. and the Financial aid office are hosting an event, where students can stop by if they want assistance filling out their FAFSA or CDAA application. All SSU students are welcome to attend. We are asking folks to bring their laptops if they can. We will be accommodating students who need laptops. 

Featured Speaker: Kim Bishop, Mechanical Engineer (Retired)

What types of female STEM role models do girls see in television, film, and other forms of media today? Are they represented at all? What types of roles do they play? Which fields are represented? We will explore what the current STEM media landscape looks like, what plans are for the future, and how STEM and media professionals can work together to expand female STEM roles in media.

Feaured Speaker: Hao Yue, Associate Professor Dept. of Computer Science, San Francisco State University

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Please join us for the SSU Biology Colloquium for a presentation by Christina Toms, San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Featured Speaker: Dr. Arunkumar Sharma, CSU Monterey Bay

Please join us for the Chemistry Seminar series with speaker Dr. Arunkumar Sharma from CSU Monterey Bay. To find out more about his research visit her Group website www.sites.google.com/wagner.edu/sharmalab/home. All attendees must complete a Wellness Screening before attending in person. For more information about the Chemistry Seminar, contact farmers@sonoma.edu.

Featured Speaker: Sayonita Ghosh, Sacramento State University

The concept of area is one of the foundational tools widely used in the mathematics curriculum that supports mathematical thinking in elementary schools, such as the four basic operations, to algebraic and calculus concepts in later grades. Despite its importance in the K–16 curriculum, studies over the last four decades have shown that students of all ages struggle with the concept of area. To investigate, we examined 18 prospective teachers' written work on three area measurement tasks involving non-square and square units. In this presentation, we will discuss different ways prospective teachers use area-units in area measurement tasks, their challenges in relating area measurement with area-units, and the implications of this work in teacher preparation courses.

Feaured Speaker: Mustafa Hajij, Assistant Professor University of San Francisco

Over the past decade, deep learning has been remarkably successful at solving a massive set of problems on data types including images and sequential data. This success drove the extension of deep learning to other discrete domains such as sets, point clouds, graphs, 3D shapes, and discrete manifolds. While many of the extended schemes have successfully tackled notable challenges in each particular domain, the plethora of fragmented frameworks have created or resurfaced many long-standing problems in deep learning such as explainability, expressiveness and generalizability. Moreover, theoretical development proven over one discrete domain does not naturally apply to the other domains. Finally, the lack of a cohesive mathematical framework has created many ad hoc and inorganic implementations and ultimately limited the set of practitioners that can potentially benefit from deep learning technologies. In this talk I will talk about a generalized higher-order domain called combinatorial complex (CC) and utilize it to build a new class of attention-based neural networks called higher-order attention networks (HOANs). CCs generalize many discrete domains that are of practical importance such as point clouds, 3D shapes, (hyper)graphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. The topological structure of a CC encodes arbitrary higher-order interactions among elements of the CC. By exploiting the rich combinatorial and topological structure of CCs, HOANs define a new class of higher-order message passing attention-based networks that unify existing higher-order models based on hypergraphs and cell complexes. I will demonstrate the reducibility of any CC to a special graph called the Hasse graph, which allows the characterization of certain aspects of HOANs and other higher order models in terms of graph-based models. Finally, the predictive capacity of HOANs will be demonstrated in shape analysis and in graph learning, competing against state-of-the-art task-specific neural networks. All lectures are free and open to the public.

You might not know who I am talking about if I ask if you know who Heather Matarazzo is, but when I tell you that she was Anne Hathaway's best friend, Lily , in The Princess Diaries, or that she was in SCREAM, Welcome to the Doll House, SAVED! or The L Word, then you might be like, "oh I love her, she does the Shut up and Listen show (and now Podcast)!"  Yes, Heather had a webcast on The Princess Diaries and has a podcast now, called Shut Up and Listen, and believe me, she has a lot to talk about. For two decades she has graced the screens of some of your favorite movies and tv shows, but its her work off screen that really has affected and impacted so many as she tours around talking about Mental Health,  experiences with her own suicidal thoughts, and the challenges she faced coming out and starring in her most recent project,  HBO Max Docuseries, Equal . In honor of Mental Health Awareness Day, Suicide Prevention day and Coming Out Day, Heather will be on campus to talk about these issues and more.  

In addition, 15 lucky campus community members will be able to have dinner with her before the show. Watch your Seawolf Living emails on Sundays for more info on how to be considered for this added bonus. This is going to be a great conversation about all the places she has been and the importance of being present for yourself and others. 

For more information, contact mo.phillips@sonoma.edu

Want to join a FREE dinner with Heather Matarazzo? The first 15 people to email Mo Phillips will be able to join! 

Featured Speaker: Nicholas Nelson, CSU Chico

All lectures are free and open to all. For more information about this lecture series, contact PAdept@sonoma.edu.

Please join us for the SSU Biology Colloquium for a presentation by Dr. Jackie Lebenzon , UC Berkeley - Department of Integrative Biology.

Featured Speaker: Ellen M. Sletten, UC Los Angeles

Please join us for the Chemistry Seminar series with speaker Ellen M. Sleten from UC Los Angeles. All attendees must complete a Wellness Screening before attending in person. For more information about the Chemistry Seminar, contact farmers@sonoma.edu.

Feaured Speaker: Barry Rountree, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Please join us for the SSU Biology Colloquium for a presentation by Dr. Neil Hunter, UC Davis - Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics.

Filmmaker Pablo Miralles’ documentary, Can We All Get Along?: The Segregation of John Muir High School explores how Pasadena’s John Muir High School went from a model of integration to raising questions on the current future state of diversity in public education. 

Pablo Miralles is a writer, director, and producer and a graduate of John Muir High School (1982). His documentary about his high school alma mater has received accolades and will be part of New York’s New Filmmakers Fesival, a Semi-Finalist in the DUMBO Film Fesival, was nominated for Best Documentary Short by the Burbank Inernational Film Festival as well as honors from the Telly Awards, the IndieFest Film Awards, Accolade Global Film Competition, and the Toronto Lift-Off Film Festival. He earned his BA from Sonoma State University and an MFA from UCLA Graduate Film Program.

Please join us for the SSU Biology Colloquium for a presentation by Dr. Alyssa R. Frederick , UC Davis Bodega Marine Lab.

Online zoom link: https://SonomaState.zoom.us/j/82515070689

Join the Women in Computer Science (WiCS) club for our meeting this Friday at 1 P.M.! We will discuss personal projects, programming topics, job hunting tips, and more. The club is dedicated to empowering all in computer science, so the club is not restricted to only women. Hope to see you there!

Person Lawn

Come meet the employers of County of Sonoma! Ask questions and learn more about the company at Person Lawn today.

Darwin 103 or Join On Zoom

Presenter: Sung-Jin Oh, UC Berkeley

Dr. Oh will introduce two problems in the context of nonlinear equations that resemble the wave equation, explain how they (amusingly) come together in the mathematical study of singularities of the Einstein gravitational field equation inside rotating black holes, and survey some recent progress.