A view of the world from the fourth floor of Parmly Hall
The Computer Science Department’s annual Halloween Party took place on October 30, 2025, at Professor Matthews’ house—and it was a great success! Students, faculty, and friends enjoyed an evening of costumes, good food, and plenty of laughs.
Here are a few photos from the night—thanks to everyone who joined and helped make it a memorable event!
The Summer Research Scholars (SRS) program provides support for students engaged in collaborative research under the guidance of W&L faculty. It is designed to foster the development of discipline-specific research skills, encourage active knowledge acquisition, and spark student interest in scholarly inquiry.
Below are the 2025 Computer Science SRS students, along with their faculty mentors and summaries of their research:
Professor Kefu Lu:
Professor Lu had two SRS students over the summer – Janeet Bajracharya ’26 and Slsabil Hassan ‘28
Janeet Bajracharya ’26
Slsabil Hassan ‘28
Research Synopsis:
The research topic for Professor Lu’s students was algorithm design in online scheduling. Online scheduling is the study of designing the best order for a machine to run programs (commonly referred to as jobs or tasks) in order to provide the best possible service. The online in the name refers to the fact that the algorithm does not have knowledge of which programs might arrive in the future and must adapt on the fly. Online scheduling is a well-studied topic, and it is a major area of algorithm design. Often, different algorithms are necessary depending on the goal of the schedule. Specifically, we studied a problem where the jobs that arrive to the machine can be parallelized and each have a deadline, with the goal of determining a schedule that maximizes the number of jobs completed before their deadlines elapse.
Professor Liz Matthews:
This summer, Professor Matthews mentored two SRS students—Sanjog Basnet ’27 and Trey Custodio ’26—who gathered data related to video game enjoyment.
Sanjog Basnet ‘27
Trey Custodio ‘26
Research Synopsis:
In academic research involving video game factors, such as enjoyment, frequently participants are divided into demographic groups based on their skill level, e.g. an “Expert Gamer” versus not. While these demographic distinctions are important, the metrics used for this distinction is not standardized across research and limits the demographic to a linear scale of perceived “skill”. Sanjog Basnet and Trey Custodio are working with Dr. Matthews to develop a new demographic metric to determine nonlinear gaming demographic categories to further improve other academic research. The process involves collecting a large amount of multi-variate data and then performing clustering algorithms on the responses.
Professor Sara Sprenkle:
Professor Sprenkle had 3 SRS students this summer — Elias Dakhoul, ’26, Teddy Ross ’26 and Micah Tongen’26
Elias Dakhoul, ’26
Elias’s project:
Elias’s research project investigates anomaly detection in web applications by user sessions to identify anomalous behavior based on behavioral features. Working with datasets from real-world applications, the project examines how various feature combinations impact the performance of unsupervised clustering algorithms. The sessions are characterized by 19 hand-engineered features, and two data combinations are employed: vectors (created by generating feature vectors per session) and unions (combinations of decisions from individual features). The key goals for this summer are to dive deeper into the literature and feature selection. The primary task is to compare a manual approach (selecting high-precision features) with an automated selection method. Preliminary results and subsequent analysis indicate that automating feature selection facilitates the identification of balanced combinations, which correctly identify anomalous behavior without excessive false positives.
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SessionClassificationColorGraph”
Teddy Ross ’26
Teddy’s project:
This summer, Teddy investigated the use of metaheuristic algorithms—including genetic algorithms, hill climbing, and simulated annealing—to automatically generate test cases for web applications. His approach is designed to produce cost-effective test suites that achieve high coverage with minimal length. He further analyzed the effects of various genetic algorithm selection strategies, such as tournament and roulette wheel selection as well as probabilities for various mutation operators, on the effectiveness and efficiency of test suite generation. Experimental results on diverse web applications demonstrated that these evolutionary and heuristic techniques can successfully balance coverage and suite size, offering practical strategies for optimizing web application testing.
Micah Tongen’26
Micah’s project:
Micah wrote a script that creates a search system for ancient inscriptions by converting Latin and Greek texts into numerical representations capturing meaning. The system combines traditional keyword matching with this semantic understanding and uses a large language model to re-rank results, allowing researchers to discover conceptually connected ancient texts that would be missed by conventional search methods. Micah then wrote a paper explaining my results and submitted it to the Computational Humanities Research conference.
Congratulations to all the 2025 SRS students on their outstanding achievements!
Congratulations to the Computer Science Class of 2025 — majors and minors alike — for their outstanding achievements!
Below are their accomplishments, listed along with those of select CS undergraduates, as they appear in the Commencement Bulletin.
Majors:
What happens when artificial intelligence tries to stand in for your political voice? Can a machine represent your values, your choices, your vote?
Washington and Lee senior Ignas Volcokas, Class of 2025 who is majoring in Computer Science and Economics and minoring in Poverty and Human Capability Studies, explored these questions in his honors thesis, “AI in the Voting Booth: Analysis of AI-driven Representation and the Public’s Response,” which he presented on April 10, 2025.
His research examines the intersection of machine learning, political identity, and democratic participation. His project combined predictive modeling and personal interviews to investigate the future of democracy in the age of artificial intelligence.
Naka Assoumatine, Class of 2025, is double majoring in computer science and economics and minoring in data science.
During Summer 2024, Naka had the incredible opportunity to give back to her community by introducing coding, and programming to kids at the middle school she attended in Togo—Menelik2. Her goal was to inspire these young minds to see computer science as a path for creative expression and a field with promising job opportunities—an area still largely unfamiliar to many people in Togo.
Washington and Lee University, in partnership with the Johnson Program, is proud to support this initiative.
Congratulations, Naka, on your exciting achievements!
Jenna is a computer science major and a philosophy minor and is highly interested in all things coding!
Coding, the process of assigning a code to something for classification or identification, is also known as computer programming. It’s how we communicate with computers and tell them what to do.
Since declaring as a computer science major and discovering a real passion for technology, Jenna has actively pursued every opportunity to engage with tech on campus.
The Computer Science Department has played a key role in her academic journey. Jenna is deeply appreciative of the support and guidance she’s received from her CS professors. W&L has provided Jenna with a wide range of experiences that has allowed her to learn and develop skills she might not otherwise have gained.
Click on the link to read Jenna’s Columns article.
The 2024 CS Halloween Party was held on October 29 @ Professor Matthews’ house. Check out these party pics!
The Summer Research Scholars (SRS) program supports students participating in collaborative research supervised by W&L faculty. The program aims to encourage the development of research techniques within a particular discipline, to promote the active acquisition of knowledge, and to stimulate student interest in inquiry.
Here are the 2024 Computer Science SRS students, their faculty supervisors and descriptions of their projects:
Professor Taha Khan:
Professor Khan had 2 SRS students this summer — Allison Badeaux ’28 and Nabil Youssef, ’26. The topic for their research was “Internet Censorship: A Self-Destructing Prophecy”.
The internet is a crucial medium for communication, information sharing, and freedom of expression. However, internet censorship poses significant challenges to these aspects. The study explores the multifaceted impacts of censorship on users’ behaviors, attitudes, and strategies to bypass restrictions.
Allison and Nabil’s research examined the effectiveness of censorship and its potential counterproductive effects. While censorship aims to control information flow and maintain social order, it often leads to unintended consequences like increased efforts to circumvent restrictions and the spread of alternative information channels. By analyzing user reactions, the study seeks to determine whether censorship achieves its goals or inadvertently promotes greater resistance and innovation in information dissemination.
Professor Simon Levy:
Professor Liz Matthews:
Professor William Tolley:
Professor Tolley had two projects with a total of four students this summer. The objectives, goals and direction for each project, along with the student research students are listed here.
Jackson Jacobs, a recent graduate of W&L, double majored in Computer Science and Politics. He is employed as a Software Engineer at RVO Health– a joint venture between Red Ventures and Optum, part of UnitedHealth Group.
Jackson is featured in this Columns article, which focuses on how his educational background shaped his current professional journey.
Congratulations to the Class of 2024 Computer Science Majors and Minors for their outstanding achievements! Their accomplishments, along with the accomplishments of certain CS undergraduates are listed here, as they appear in the Commencement Bulletin.
Majors: