Congratulations to Professor Matthews for her published paper “Gaming Skill Demographics: An Analysis of Consistency in Video Game Research”!
An important fact about this paper is it’s based on the work of two SRS students from last summer. It was also selected as one of the best papers. Although it didn’t win, this paper was extended for publication in another journal which should be accessible in another month or so.
Here is an image of the first page of the paper along with links to the title page and the website where the full paper will eventually be available.
Joe Salerno who graduated in May 2022 with a B.S. in computer science, set the season pin record for W&L wrestling . Joe’s win means he had 21 pins on the season, breaking his own school record of 20 set during the 2019-20 season. Joe has 59 career pins, –another school record! This wrestling success was featured in the 2021-22 Conference Athletes of the Week article. Congratulations, Joe!
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 2022 Computer Science Department’s SRS students, their faculty supervisors and descriptions of their projects:
Professor Liz Matthews:
Sarah Martin, ’23:
-Sarah is implementing statistical analysis using nonparametric methods on data collected about gamer skill levels and features.
Danish Bokhari, ’24:
-Danish is studying design and data collection about video game enjoyment metrics for games containing procedural generation.
Professor Simon Levy:
Matt Stock ’23 Matt and Prof. Levy are working on adding a RaspberryPi (“Internet of Things”) project to enable a RealAnt robot to move about wirelessly and learn some interesting behaviors.
Professor Sara Sprenkle:
Grace MacDonald ’23:
Grace is developing new features and functionality for The Ancient Graffiti, a perfect fit for a computer science major with a classics minor! She is improving AGP’s usability on mobile devices and will work on a variety of projects to make more graffiti available for public viewing.
Armando Mendez-Anastasio ’24:
Armando is developing ChemTutor, an online chemistry tutorial to help students transition to college-level chemistry. He will add new functionality to the site and work on making ChemTutor more easily deployed to the cloud.
Lakpa Sherpa ’25:
Lakpa is exploring how to automatically identify anomalous behavior in accesses to web applications. He will be running automated experiments and analyzing lots of data.
Professor Cody Watson:
Abdelrahman AboEitta ’23: Abdul and Professor Watson are working on a deep learning model that can identify and automatically fix security vulnerabilities in java source code methods.
Bennett Ehret, ’24: Bennett and Professor Watson are working on a deep learning solution to automatically generate code documentation, specifically code comments, for source code methods that implement machine learning models.
Mohamed Elhussiny
Mohamed Elhussiny’24 and Leyti Ndiaye ’26: Along with Professor Watson, Mohamed and Leyti are building a variety of machine learning methods to automatically identify negative in-game behavior within the popular video game League of Legends.
Professor Taha Khan:
Jack Bosco ’24:
Jack is working on better understanding how Internet users perceive what should happen to their data post bereavement. Jack is developing a user study over the summer.
Mohamed Elhussiny’24:
Mohamed is working on a project that involves analyzing at GitHub repositories to understand the significance of class methods are semantically similar and investigate their security and usability implications.
Congratulations to the Class of 2022 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.
2022 Graduates:
Luke Patrick Alli –Bachelor of Science
Theodore C. Bentley – Bachelor of Science
Samuel Thomas Bluestone – Bachelor of Science, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude
Dominique Nicole Broomfield – Bachelor of Science
August Spencer Donovan – Bachelor of Arts
Ana Sophia Estrada Hamm Jackson Mark Gazin – Bachelor of Arts, Honors in Mathematics (Thesis: “Linear Algebraic Methods in Data Science and Neural Networks”)
Bryan Lawrence Hadley – Bachelor of Science
Jae-Ung Jung – Bachelor of Science
Tara Krishnadas Kakkaramadam – Bachelor of Science
Laurie A. Lee – Bachelor of Arts, cum laude
Elyssa M. McMaster – Bachelor of Arts, Honors in Art History (Thesis: “Florence + The Machine: A Computational Approach to Florentine Liturgical Manuscript Illuminations from the Late Trecento”)
Walter Ellis Millwood – Bachelor of Science
Garrett Montgomery Mize –Bachelor of Science, cum laude
Evan Lewis Phaup – Bachelor of Science
Joseph Paul Salerno – Bachelor of Science
Yoseph Mandefro Tamene – Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude
Finn Ellis Thorne – Bachelor of Science
Haochen Tu – Bachelor of Science, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude
(Alyssa) Trang Thuy Vu –Bachelor of Science, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, Valedictorian
Scott Kenneth Walters – Bachelor of Arts
Taylor Ryan Witherell – Bachelor of Science
Fellowships Received:
Elyssa M. McMaster –Fulbright U.S. Student Program, Italy
Ana Sophia Estrada Hamm – U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship, Arabic
Scholarships, Awards, and Prizes:
(Alyssa) Trang Thuy Vu – The Robinson Award in Mathematics and Science
Departmental Awards:
Samuel Thomas Bluestone –The Computer Science Department Award
Ana Sophia Estrada Hamm –The Computer Science Department Award
Yoseph Mandefro Tamene – The Computer Science Department Award
(Alyssa) Trang Thuy Vu – The Computer Science Department Award
Dominique Nicole Broomfield –The Linda Cooper and Bobby Henderson Prize
Haochen Tu – International Education, Certificate of International Immersion
Samuel Thomas Bluestone – Office of Jewish Life, The Jewish Learning Fellowship
Nicholas Ranson Steinert ’23 – The Economic Academic Excellence Award
Sujana Basnet ’23 – The Griffith Scholarship
Jackson J. Jacobs, ’24 – Richard Miller Cross Country Award
CSCI 257-01: “A Walk Through the Ages: Using Artificial Intelligence to Understand the Evolution of Exercise,” . in this S22 course, students monitor movements on exercise trackers and examine patterns of exercise, movement and health impacts while researching the evolution of human exercise.
This course is co-taught by assistant professor of computer science Cody Watson and assistant professor of biology Natalia Toporikova.
Washington and Lee’s Office of Lifelong Learning has a podcast “W&L After Class” where you can hear from various faculty members about a wide variety of topics they have expertise in.
In Season 3, Taha Khan, assistant professor of computer science at W&L, discusses his research on computer security, privacy and human-computer interaction — including cybercrime.
Professor Taha Khan published 2 papers in AY 2020-21. Both papers were published in the same conference, USENIX Security. The USENIX Association is a nonprofit organization, dedicated to supporting the advanced computing systems communities and furthering the reach of innovative research. Professor Khan’s papers were entitled “Helping Users Automatically Find and Manage Sensitive, Expendable Files in Cloud Storage” and “Blind In/On-Path Attacks and Applications to VPNs”.
Abdelrahman AboEitta ’23, CS Major Abdel developed the latest version of ChemTutor (https://chemtutor.wlu.edu/), an online tutorial to help prepare students for college-level chemistry. ChemTutor was developed by faculty and students at 4 small, liberal arts institutions and is funded by the Associated Colleges of the South. Beyond developing new functionality for instructors, Abdel used Docker to deploy ChemTutor on Amazon Web Services so that it is easier for other institutions to deploy.
Sujana Basnet, ’23, CS Major Irina Koleva, ’22, Neuroscience Major Sujana and Irina completed a survey of academic research on video game experience categories, designed and conducted a user study to collect data based on the survey, and ran statistical analysis of the user study data. Also, they began work on an academic paper to be submitted to an appropriate venue in the Fall.
William Xue ’24 Will’s project name was: Cloudsweeper: A Tool for Personal Cloud Management. The personal cloud is a convenient and affordable way to retain and share files over time. However, as time passes, some files lose their relevance. Crucially, some files that are no longer useful may still contain sensitive information, creating risks due to data breaches, lost devices, and account takeovers. During the Summer of 2021, Will used his Python and web design skills to work both on the front and backend of the design of Cloudsweeper, a web application which incorporates machine learning to highlight potentially sensitive and useless files in individuals’ cloud accounts. The current version is live at: https://cloudsweeper.app. Currently, the app only supports the Google Drive cloud platform. Will plans to continue work with the team to integrate the app with support across multiple cloud platforms and conduct future research studies by using the app as a data collection tool.
Billy Tobin ’24 Billy’s project name was : An Empirical Evaluation of Method Signature Similarity in Codebases. Modern programming languages have revolutionized the way in which software developers design and develop computer programs. These languages provide individuals with user-friendly capabilities that enhance the productivity of developers while ensuring minimal code redundancy. One such feature of programming languages is method overloading.Billy spent the summer of 2021 empirically evaluating the pervasiveness of overloaded methods in large-scale repositories understanding their relationship over time, as repositories grow. Based on the initial results, Billy plans to extend his work to understand the usability aspects of overloaded methods and determine where they may have correctness, security, performance, and complexity implications.
