This is the first month of our new format, based on discussion following the survey: The first half will be geared toward beginners, and the second half will be geared toward more advanced material.

For the next several months the beginner material will be a series of lessons in the Haskell programming language. We will be following Brent Yorgey's CIS 194 syllabus (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html). So bring a laptop, or just follow along. Between months you are encouraged to work on the assignments and we will review them. Lyle will be leading the lecture this month.

This month's advanced talk will be delivered by Leif, who will be following up his discussion of data parallelism in Spark (Scala) and Haskell.