Upcoming Events:
- 2016-2017 Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series - Next lecture March 6
- CV2R Demo Day - March 7
- Pi Your Professor - March 8
In This Issue:
- Tar Heel Reader reaches 10 million books read
- Researchers Demonstrate 100° Dynamic Focus AR Display With Membrane Mirrors
- AI Predicts Autism From Infant Brain Scans
- Politics Aside, Counting Crowds Is Tricky
- Pearl Hacks 2017 unites more than 300 women for overnight hackathon
- Kompa named Churchill scholar
- Grant Awards
- Department News
Triangle Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series
We invite you to attend these upcoming TCSDLS lectures. Each TCSDLS lecture is either hosted or broadcast live in 011 Sitterson Hall.
Christos Papadimitriou
University of California, Berkeley
The Algorithm as a Scientific World View
6 March 2017
Broadcast live from Duke in 011 Sitterson Hall (SN011)
4:00 p.m.
Susan Athey
Stanford University
Machine Learning for Policy Evaluation: Prediction,
Causal Inference, and Personalization
20 March 2017
Broadcast live from Duke in 011 Sitterson Hall (SN011)
4:00 p.m.
Yuanyuan Zhou
University of California, San Diego
Title TBA
27 March 2017
Hosted in 011 Sitterson Hall (SN011)
4:00 p.m.
Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title TBA
3 April 2017
Broadcast live from NC State in 011 Sitterson Hall (SN011)
4:00 p.m.
Please visit cs.unc.edu/tcsdls for abstracts, lecturer biographies, location information, and more.
CV2R Demo Day
We are excited to announce the Consortium for Vision and Virtual Reality (CV2R) Demo Day on March 7! We invite you to join us for this event to see the research being done in the department and to connect with students and faculty.
We will provide lunch to kick off the day, and students will give demos throughout the afternoon. We will finish with a graduate student poster session and a reception.
The schedule is as follows:
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. Check-in and Lunch
1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. CV2R Student Demos
3:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. Department Poster Session and Reception
If you would like to attend, please register here. Feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you think would be interested.
Pi Your Professor
In honor of Pi Day, UNC CS faculty have volunteered to be pied by students in order to raise money for student clubs. Since Pi Day (3/14) falls during Spring Break, this event will be held on March 8 instead. Students can purchase pies to throw at their professors as well as volunteer to be pied themselves in exchange for a donation by faculty members. Pie can also be bought to eat at $2 per slice.

Tar Heel Reader reaches 10 million books read
Tar Heel Reader, an online library of free, accessible books for beginning readers of all ages, reached 10 million books read less than a decade after its launch in 2008.
Read More
Watch the Video

Researchers Demonstrate 100° Dynamic Focus AR Display With Membrane Mirrors
Researchers from UNC, MPI Informatik, NVIDIA, and MMCI built an augmented reality display that uses membrane mirrors to mimic natural changes in the eye's lens when viewing objects at varying depths.
Read More

AI Predicts Autism From Infant Brain Scans
A UNC collaboration involving Associate Professor Martin Styner and the NIRAL lab has developed an algorithm to predict diagnoses of children at risk for autism with more accuracy and at a younger age than previously possible.
Read the article in IEEE Spectrum
Read the research publication in Nature

Politics Aside, Counting Crowds Is Tricky
In the aftermath of the 2017 Presidential Inauguration, NPR's Jon Hamilton spoke to Professor Dinesh Manocha about what makes estimating crowd size difficult.
Read or Listen to the report on All Things Considered
Watch a behavioral analysis of the Inauguration crowd

Pearl Hacks 2017 unites more than 300 women for overnight hackathon
Pearl Hacks, an annual 24-hour coding competition for women in high school and college, was held for the fourth time at UNC. Participants came from all over the East Coast to write code, learn new skills, and build community with their peers.
Read More

Kompa named Churchill Scholar
Computer science and mathematics double-major Benjamin Kompa was one of only 15 awardees of the prestigious Churchill Scholarship, which funds a year of master's study at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in England.
Read More
Don't forget to visit our alumni page!
There, you will find news and updates from your fellow alumni, job listings specifically targeting UNC CS alumni, upcoming alumni events in Chapel Hill or around the country, and other ways to stay connected.