Laurens Bakker
Graduate student, School of Computing Science
Theory Lab, Algorithms and Optimisation
E-mail: first name underscore last name at the School of Computing Science or Simon Fraser University, in Canada
Phone: +1 604 345 7840
This home page is not updated very frequently. It just tries to give you an idea of who I am and what my interests are. Should you find this interesting, then feel free to contact me, preferably via E-mail.
- Calendar
- TA work
- 1087 - Fall 2008
- 1091 - Spring 2009
- Programming Projects
- Film Festival Schedule Convertor. For an annual film film festival I wrote a small programme in JAVA. The timetable for the Film Festival is designed by an employee of the school. This process cannot be automated because the requirements are too complex and too costly to make explicit. The timetable is a spreadsheet that shows in which timeslot (cells) the students (rows) watch which film (columns). This data needs to be transposed to schemes per timeslot and per film. This has been automated using an in-place algorithm with a terrible time complexity, because time is not limiting, but programming time was. Later, the algorithm was improved to run approximately 20 times faster, but it is no longer in-place.
- Huijbergen Guillemite Museum Collection. This project is still in the exploration/design phase. The Huijbergen Guillemite Museum made an inventory of their entire collection (2,000-2,500 pieces) in 1991. This inventory is basically an MS Word table with for each piece a reference number, its name, possibly its author, a classification of the materials it's made of, its dimensions, an (approximate) date of creation, its physical location in the collection and its estimated value. In 2005 the entire collection was digitised. Now the friars maintaining the collection want to bring the attribute data and the images together and make them available for a broader public.
- Programming Practice. During a certificate course for web-based instructions I sketched the design of an on-line tool that would help students practice their knowledge and understanding of a programming language. The tool does not require any parsing of the programming language it is used for, and could therefore be implemented generically. The general idea is that the instructor (or anyone who can be considered an "expert") provides code fragments that may contain an error. If a code fragment does not contain an error the student should report its outcome. If it does the student should pinpoint the error, if possible down to the character. Errors are classified to be able to give the student feedback on what are their strong and weak points. This project is still very much conceptual and needs thorough discussion with experts in both the field of programming languages and pedagogics.
- Publications
- L. Bakker. ``Feature-Solution Graphs,'' Bachelor Thesis, Roosevelt Academy (Middelburg), Utrecht University, Netherlands, January 2008.
- J. Resovsky, L.F.L.M. Bakker, J.J.G. Karreman, L.L.Ngwa, S.A.J.G. Nijsingh, G. Schout, F. Sulu-Gambari, T. van Wijck and R.D. van der Weijden. ``Prioritizing R\&D for seven radioactive waste disposal options \textemdash\ an independent, interactive approach,'' Proc. Int. Conf. Radioactive Waste Disposal in Geological Formations (RepoSafe-07), Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit (GRS), 2007.
- L. Bakker. ``Qubits: A Possible Way Forward,'' ContRA vol. 1, 2008; http://www.roac.nl/contra/270.phtml.
- Academics
- Miscellaneous