Middlebury College
Department of Computer Science Seminar
Senior Thesis Presentations
Monday, May 8th at 12:00 PM:
McCardell Bicentennial Hall 538
How to Fit All Seventeen Seasons of The Simpsons
on Your Hard Drive
12:00 p.m. - Peter Lubans
Many cutting-edge technologies such as video and audio compression achieve incredible results using a very old mathematical technique called the Fourier Transform. Named after Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician from the late eighteenth century, the transform takes a waveform signal as its input and gives the frequency content of that signal as its output. In this talk, we describe the mathematics of the Fourier Transform and present an efficient algorithm for its computation. Finally, we show how to make the algorithm run faster using some cutting-edge technologies.
12:30 p.m.- Delia Neacsiu
Elliptic and Public: An Enhanced Cryptosystem
With the boom of the Internet, cryptography has become indispensable. The El Gamal cryptosystem is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm used in public-key cryptography. Due to its high levels of security, it is used extensively in real-world encryption, from message transmission to the implementation of digital signatures. El Gamal can be defined over cyclic groups, its security depending upon the difficulty of computing discrete logarithms as part of the cyclic group. The system contains three primary components: key generation, encryption, and decryption. In key generation, a cyclic group and a root are chosen. The main part is the selection of the cyclic group. Using elliptic curves to determine the cyclic group improves the security of the system and expands its capacity to withstand attacks. We will assess the importance of using elliptic curves incryptography, especially in the construction of an El Gamal system.
1:00 PM- Timothy Bahls
Multicolor Ramsey Numbers and Other
Computational Nightmares
The Ramsey numbers are so fiendishly difficult to compute that very few precise values are known. In this
talk, you will see someone fly in the face of the odds and try nonetheless on a slightly modified problem.
We will cover the definition of the problem, the approach to solving it, the algorithm, and the data
structures used.
Lunch will be provided.
All are welcome to attend!