Amin ’17’s Greener Alternative
Sophomore computer science major Azmain Amin ’17’s entrepreneurial idea for better grocery bags, called PolyGreen Bags, is featured on the W&L home page. Amin’s idea won first place in W&L’s Social Entrepreneurship Summit. You make us proud, Amin!
T-Shirt Design Feedback
We got two t-shirt designs! What do you all think?
Pride shirt:
Code!
Hot pink (or other neon color, we aren’t picky) with “CODE CODE CODE” down the front, courtesy of the Nerdbin.
2014 T-Shirt Design Competition
The Computer Science Department is having a t-shirt design competition! Put on your thinking caps, recall your favorite puns and slogans, and create a new shirt!
Rules:
- short or long-sleeve t-shirt
- one color printed on a solid color t-shirt
- options for printing are front/back/sleeve (probably only 2 of those 3)
- keep it clean and original (we don’t want to worry about trademarks)!
Submission (subject to change): Send the images (in some commonly used format, like jpg, png, tiff) to Sara Sprenkle (sprenkles@wlu.edu). Include explanation, if necessary, such as which image is on the front and which is on the back.
Deadline: Friday, September 12.
Valerie Barr of Union College to Speak Dec 11
Valerie Barr, Professor of Computer Science at Union College, will be speaking at the Winter 2013 Fall Academy (Wed, Dec 11 at 12:30 p.m. in the IQ Center) about her experience encouraging faculty across discipines to pursue computing topics in their courses. Her talk is entitled “Blake, Biofuel, and Bribery: Interdisciplinary Applications of Computing”.
W&L Alumnus Quoted in the News
Computer Science alumnus Sam Reed ’10 interviewed in the NBC News article “Open-source advocates to government: Let us help you fix healthcare.gov.” Also, see the story on W&L’s news blog.
W&L Students, Faculty, and Alumna Attend Grace Hopper 2013
Three W&L students, one faculty member, and one alumna attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The conference was the largest in GHC’s history with over 4800 attendees!
Sam O’Dell ’15 and Cory Walker ’15 were awarded scholarships to attend the conference. Ginny Huang ’14 was waitlisted for a scholarship, but W&L provided some funding to help defray the cost for her attending. All three students had interviews with a variety of companies at the conference and were inspired and learned a lot from the various sessions.
Alumna Camille Cobb ’12–now a graduate student at the University of Washington–attended the conference through a scholarship that she earned as a Google intern this past summer.
The first time attending the conference is always an amazing experience–just ask Huang, who said, “I think the two best things about the conference are that 1) You get access to a lot of Computer Science opportunities! I always know that there is a great need for programmers in the market, but I never got a lot of actual access to companies that are looking for them and 2) I love all those gifts! My advice for people who attend in the future is only bring one shirt in your luggage to attend the first day of the conference. Grab the rest in the conference! It’s a good way to reduce the weight you’re carrying.”
The second time attending isn’t too shabby either, according to O’Dell, “Going to Grace Hopper again this year was absolutely incredible. I loved going to the sessions and learning about the industry I hope to work in when I graduate. In addition, I had the chance to interview with a few companies at the conference and was fortunate enough to come away with an internship for next summer. The conference is definitely a great experience and full of opportunities for women hoping to go into computer science after they graduate.”
Photo Courtesy: Anita Borg Institute
Professor Sara Sprenkle served as the co-chair of the poster session with Kaoutar El Maghraoui from IBM. Their work included organizing the Student Research Competition, which involved 28 student participants–6 of whom became semi-finalists and presented their work in another session–and over 30 judges. Sara and Kaoutar were quite pleased with the quality of the posters and presentations and the feedback the judges gave the students.
Walker summarized the experience: “The GHC offers the unique experience of having thousands of experienced women in technology gathered in one place, all willing to share their experiences and advice with one another. The opportunity to learn from technical women of all different backgrounds was to me the most worthwhile part of the Celebration.”
CSCI335 Students Demo Their Web Applications at Spring Term Fair
Thirteen students in CSCI335: Software Engineering through Web Applications demonstrated their three team projects at the Spring Fest. In teams of four or five, the students gathered requirements for their project, created a static prototype, and developed a dynamic, user-friendly prototype–all in four weeks.
Each student worked on one of three projects:
- The Collegium Project – a digital humanities project in collaboration with Professor Sarah Bond, a history professor at Marquette University and a former Mellon Fellow at W&L.
- Corsola – a tool for visualizing course schedules and conflicts. W&L students may be able to use a version of Corsola as early as this fall.
- The Ancient Graffiti Search Engine Project – a digital humanities project in collaboration with classics professor Rebecca Benefiel
Junior Olivier Mahame Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa
Computer Science major Olivier Mahame ’14 is being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, which means that Olivier is in the top 5% of his class by grade point average. Phi Beta Kappa is a national academic society that promotes excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Congratulations, Olivier!
Computer Science Students Wow at SSA 5
At SSA 5, Computer Science students represented themselves, their projects, and the department quite well.
Alicia Bargar ’13 started the day off with a presentation about her summer research project, focused on improving the abilities of human-robot interaction, specifically in its use in therapy of children with autism spectrum disorders.
Richard Marmorstein ’14 was the computer science representative in a panel on digital humanities projects at W&L. While the other projects were presented by humanities students, Richard presented his work with Professor Paul Gregory (philosophy) and Professor Sara Sprenkle (computer science) on developing an online symbolic logic tutorial, which is used in Professor Gregory’s Philosophy 170: Introduction to Logic course.
The final poster session featured six computer science students.
Suraj Bajracharya ’14 presented “Simultaneous Localization and Mapping in an Inexpensive Wheeled Robot”, his independent study project with Professor Simon Levy. Audience members could drive the robot and see how the robot visualized obstacles.
Haley Archer-McClellan ’15 and Deirdre Tobin ’15 presented their summer research project, entitled “Exploring a Text-Based Analysis of Persistent-State Dependencies in Web Applications”. They presented their methodology for finding relationships between web application resource names using textual clues. Their work is supervised by Professor Sara Sprenkle.
Three computer science students presented projects based in other departments: Lee Davis ’13 presented a poster on the results his independent study with Professor Natalia Toporikova from biology: “Computational Model of Pre-Botzinger Complex”, while Ginny Huang ’14 and Cathy Wang ’15 presented “Zeckendorf’s Theorem, Tiling Proofs, and the 3-bonacci Sequence”, supervised by Professor Gregory Dresden of the Math Department.
Beyond these presenters, many computer science students also participated in book colloquiums and performances and supported their friends by attending their sessions.