CS 195

Week 2 Activity: State of the College Address (or alternate talk)

This is a special week because our new college president, President Harriet Nembhard, will be giving a State of the College address in our usual Colloquium timeslot and location.

Unfortunately, rather than beginning at 4:15 in alignment with the normal academic schedule, the State of the College address will begin at 4:00 PM as it was arranged by the President's Office following their own scheduling constraints. We recognize that this timing may make it impossible for some students to attend synchronously, so we have different-from-usual rules this week.

We still hope that those who can attend synchronously will do so, but we will not require students in Section 1 to attend synchronously or have a swipe-in system this week. (But Morgan will be present with the swipe system so that anyone whose card didn't work last week can try again and troubleshoot.)

Thus, you have four options this week:

  • Attend the State of the College address (in person—preferred if you can make it)
  • Watch the State of the College address (on Zoom when it occurs)
  • Watch the recording of the State of the College address (after it occurs)
  • Watch an alternate CS-related talk (details below)

Regardless of which option you choose, you must complete the assessment below to receive credit for attending this week's colloquium.

Abstract

President Harriet Nembhard will share important news and information, including updates on the strategic planning process.

When and How to Attend

  • Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024, 4:00–5:00 PM
  • Galileo, Harvey Mudd College (or on Zoom, see below)

(You must be logged in to view this link.)

The President's office has provided this Zoom link for those who cannot attend in person but would like to watch the address live. Note that this link should probably not be shared with others outside of the HMC community.

Recording for Section 2 and those who have a class conflict

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This video is provided for students in CS 195 only. This is a private video, so please do not share it with others.

Alternative Option

If you would prefer something more CS-focused than the State of the College address (e.g., because you are an off-campus student for whom the state of Mudd is less relevant), you may instead watch the following talk by Pokey Rule at the 2023 Strange Loop conference.

Cursorless: A spoken language for editing code

Abstract

If you could design a spoken language from scratch for editing code, how would it look? What would be your nouns? Would they be tokens? Functions? Lines? What would be your verbs, your adjectives, and your adverbs?

Cursorless is one answer to these questions: a spoken language designed for maximally efficient code editing by voice. Cursorless leverages the tree-sitter real-time parser to enable high-level, "smart" code manipulations while retaining the flexibility to use "dumb" primitives like tokens, lines, delimiter pairs, and regexes when necessary.

Learn how a handful of simple abstractions - actions, modifiers, marks, and scopes - empower Cursorless users to create powerful and concise command chains that would leave even the most seasoned vim user drooling on their keyboard.

About Pokey Rule

Pokey Rule is the creator and lead maintainer of Cursorless. He releases all of his code under the MIT license and relies on donations from users to sustain the project. Prior to working on Cursorless, Pokey managed a machine learning team at Globality. He studied programming languages and human-computer interaction at Stanford University.

Video

The video is available on YouTube here.

Required Assessment

To receive credit for attending this week's colloquium, complete the assessment:

Please do so at your soonest convenience, within 24 hours of seeing the talk.

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