IAP 2017 Activities by Sponsor - Student Information Processing Board

Manasi Vartak, PhD Student at CSAIL, Maggie Makar, Grad Student CSAIL

Enrollment: Unlimited: Advance sign-up required
Sign-up by 01/10
Attendance: Participants must attend all sessions
Prereq: Basic ML, Python, basic calculus

Machine learning (ML) is clearly the coolest kid on the block right now, and everyone wants to be friends with ML! However, ML as a field has so many areas and sub-areas, and so much jargon that it is hard for a beginner (or even a grad student in ML) to place all of the problems and techniques in context.

This 4-part class will provide brief overviews of diverse ML areas and discussions comparing and contrasting techniques. Each session will consist of MIT grad students giving 1/2 hr talks on particular topics and a discussion putting those topics in context.

Tentative topics per session are:

- Overview of supervised and unsupervised learning

- Inference

- Bayesian Methods

- Neural Nets

 

Class is geared towards advanced undergraduate and graduate students. It assumes a basic familiarity with ML.

Please sign up here by 1/10: https://goo.gl/forms/ZGAaq3qKtrqATEJC3

 

Sponsor(s): Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Student Information Processing Board
Contact: Manasi Vartak, 32-G904B, MVARTAK@MIT.EDU

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Session 1

Jan/24	Tue	03:00PM-05:00PM	36-156
Jan/25	Wed	03:00PM-05:00PM	36-156
Jan/26	Thu	03:00PM-05:00PM	36-156
Jan/27	Fri	03:00PM-05:00PM	36-156

Manasi Vartak - PhD Student at CSAIL, Maggie Makar - Grad Student CSAIL

Rajiv Aaron Manglani

Jan/18

Wed

05:00PM-07:00PM

4-237

Enrollment: Unlimited: Advance sign-up required
Sign-up by 01/18
Prereq: Familiarity with HTTP and TLS.

SSL and TLS are the protocols which provide the foundation for securing internet traffic. We will explore current topics and issues facing the industry including SHA-1 to SHA-2 certificate migrations, ECDSA, post-quantum cryptography, Certificate Transparency, OCSP and Stapling, HTTP/2, free DV certificates from Let's Encrypt, and TLS 1.3.

Details at https://sipb.mit.edu/iap/ssl-tls

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board
Contact: Rajiv Aaron Manglani, sipb-iap17-ssl-tls@mit.edu

Ron Chaney

Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
Prereq: one MIT programming class or equivalent; 6.006 useful

Ever wanted to work at a company like Akamai, Facebook, Google, or TripAdvisor? There's just one thing standing in your way: the interview.  Whether you're a beginning programmer or a seasoned expert, this class can help you prepare for a technical interview. The class will focus on computer science topics that frequently come up in programming interviews.  We will cover topics like time complexity, hash tables, binary search trees, and some other things you might learn in 6.046. Most of the time will be spent teaching participants how to formulate responses to technical questions during an interview. Real life examples will be used.  If you have any interest in working at a computer science company, make sure you don't miss this class!

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Contact: Jaime Perkins, jperkins@akamai.com

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Part I

Jan/18

Wed

05:30PM-07:00PM

32-155

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Part II

Jan/19

Thu

05:30PM-07:00PM

32-155

Jakob Weisblat

Jan/17

Tue

07:00PM-09:00PM

4-231

Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Prereq: Familiarity with python; matplotlib a plus.

iPython (or "Jupyter notebook") is a very nice interactive python environment that makes it really easy to do interactive computation and data visualization. We'll demo a few useful features, and then we'll build a thing together to interactively compute a thing.

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board
Contact: Jakob Weisblat, sipb-iap17-ipython@mit.edu

Tristan Naumann

Jan/31

Tue

08:00PM-10:00PM

4-237

Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Prereq: Basic shell familiarity is helpful

Version control systems are essential for the organization of multi-developer projects. Likewise, familiarity with such tools can greatly simplify even small projects. This short course will discuss version control as a problem and focus on how it can be managed with Git. Further, we will discuss how to share code using GitHub and some common workflows.

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects. GitHub is a web-based hosting service for projects using Git which has quickly become one of the most popular code repository sites for open source projects.

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board
Contact: Tristan Naumann, sipb-iap17-version-control@mit.edu

Jakob Weisblat

Jan/24

Tue

07:30PM-09:00PM

4-237

Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up

We hear it over and over again:

"Make your passwords at least 20 characters!"

"Use a letter and a number and 5 special characters in all your passwords!"

"Change your password every 3 days!"

"Never write down your passwords!"

"Always run antivirus software!"

We'll examine some common cybersecurity claims, determining which are worth following and which are possibly miscalibrated. Then we'll look at some low-effort solutions you can use to increase the security of your computing environment while not decreasing convenience. In particular, we will cover password managers, 2-factor authentication, and the importance of keeping software up-to-date.

This talk is aimed at those who are computer-literate but not security experts - if your goal is an impenetrably secure computing environment, this talk is not for you; it aims to help you spend a small amount of time wisely in order to reduce the probability of spending a lot of time in the future dealing with a compromise.

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board
Contact: Jakob Weisblat, sipb-iap17-practical-security@mit.edu

James Koppel

Jan/20

Fri

05:00PM-07:00PM

1-115

Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Prereq: Familiarity with C and assembly very helpful

Is something on your computer hiding something from you? Is it refusing to run unless you do something? Do you want to know exactly what someone else's software is doing? Or perhaps you even want to "open" up some closed-source software and make it do something else. This course will cover the basics of reverse-engineering binaries, as well as some of the ideas of binary modification.

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board
Contact: James Koppel, sipb-iap17-reverse-engineering@mit.edu

Baian Chen

Jan/19

Thu

05:00PM-07:00PM

1-115

Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Prereq: Familiarity with Python

ROS (robot operating system) is super cool and useful for robotics and computer vision but seldom taught in class in most of the cases. In this class, we will go through the basic (but powerful) idea of ROS system, have a taste on how it works, and write a simple ROS system in python.

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board
Contact: Baian Chen, sipb-iap17-ros@mit.edu

Chelsea Voss

Feb/01

Wed

07:00PM-08:00PM

4-237

Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Prereq: Familiarity with Python

If you've learned Python, it's a simple jump from there to being able to create websites! Come learn how to get started on web programming from the very basics; we'll assume zero knowledge of anything but Python. We'll cover how to set up a Django website using both MIT Scripts and Heroku; feel free to bring your laptop and follow along with setup yourself as I demonstrate.

Sponsor(s): Student Information Processing Board
Contact: Chelsea Voss, sipb-iap17-django@mit.edu