Friday Five for June 2, 2023

June 02, 2023
Friday Five

This Week's Stories:

1. BruinTech Spring Conference

We want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your participation at the recent UCLA IT Conference. Your presence and active involvement made the event a tremendous success. Together, we are committed to fostering a supportive environment for all Bruins. The presentation slides will be available soon.

2. How to Cross a Desert of Unknown Width, RICHARD KORF, UCLA – Computer Science Department

Jun 8, Thursday, 4:15 pm - 5:45 pm

3400 Boelter Hall, 420 Westwood Plaza Los Angeles California 90095

ABSTRACT: The classic jeep problem concerns crossing a desert wider than the range of the jeep, with the aid of preplaced fuel caches. One version of this problem is over a thousand years old, and it was solved optimally over 75 years ago. All previous work assumes that we know the width of the desert in advance, but we consider the case where we don’t know the distance. The answer ends up being rather surprising.

BIO: Richard Korf is a professor of computer science at UCLA. He received his B.S. from M.I.T. in 1977, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980 and 1983, respectively. From 1983 to 1985, he was an assistant professor at Columbia University, and has been at UCLA since 1985. His research is in the areas of problem solving, planning, and heuristic search in artificial intelligence. In his free time, he enjoys applying both gradient ascent and gradient descent methods in the physical world.

3. Business Continuity Town Hall

July 10, Monday, 10 AM-11AM PST

Join us for our summer Business Continuity Town Hall. This year, UCLA has faced disruptions to our usual work environment from a surprise snowstorm to changes in teaching.

This session will touch upon:
- Lessons learned from events of the past year
- Teaching Continuity
- Campus Data Center: Service levels and your department’s role in recovery of its applications and systems

Register here