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”.
Kefu Lu, an assistant professor with W&L’s Computer Science Department, has recently published a paper. This paper will be showcased, in September, at the International European Conference for Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par), one of the premier venues in parallel computing. The paper is titled “A Scalable Approximation Algorithm for Weighted Longest Common Subsequence” and focuses on designing an accurate and fast algorithm in the context of distributed systems for a fundamental process most notably utilized for sequence alignment in bioinformatics.
Congratulations, Professor Lu!
Click on the link the see the paper in its entirety.
Cody Watson, an assistant professor of W&L Computer Science Department, has published a paper in the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) . ICSE is the top conference in software engineering.
Learn more about Prof. Watson’s paper — “On Learning Meaningful Assert Statements for Unit Test Cases” here.
Liz Matthews, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at W&L, was selected for the Outstanding Paper Award at the 13th International Conference on Game and Entertainment Technologies. The paper, which was co-authored by Juan Gilbert (University of Florida) is entitled “ATLAS CHRONICLE: DEVELOPMENT AND VERIFICATION OF A SYSTEM FOR PROCEDURAL GENERATION OF STORY-DRIVEN GAMES”.
The Conference Committee, taking into account the blind review process, considers this paper of the highest standard.
Alexus McGriff ’18, Karishma Patel ’18, and Professor Sara Sprenkle attended the 2016 Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference, in Houston, Texas, October 18-22. The primary focus of the Conference was technical and professional development with a highlight being that Alexus was awarded a scholarship to attend. The conference has grown over the years to about 15,000 attendees–this one being the biggest GHC conference yet. This was Prof. Sprenkle’s 9th Hopper Conference and she attended, in part, as Co-Chair of the Faculty Track. Her first one, in Vancouver, had about 600 attendees. With GHC expanding to 15,000–it’s a completely different experience now!
Alexus provided a wonderful observation about the conference: “In short, I feel that it was a great opportunity to be put into contact with a lot of powerful women, and not solely for networking reasons, but to simply be inspired by them. It was such an amazing feeling to be able see a great woman in computing every where I turned for four straight days. It was my first GHC, and I totally plan to go again next year!”
Alexus in a Google carAlexus met Latanya Sweeney after Latanya’s keynote speechProf. Sprenkle excited (perhaps a little too much?!) to get her picture taken with a cartoon version of Grace Hopper!
Starting from the left: Cory Walker, Madeline Forrestel, Gabi Tremo, Sam O’Dell, Paul Jang and Alicia Bargar ’13
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Earlier this fall, W&L’s Computer Science Department was fortunate to have five senior computer science students attend the GHC in Phoenix, Arizona for the 14th Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC). The W&L attendees starting from the left (Cory Walker, Madeline Forrestel, Gabi Tremo, Sam O’Dell Paul Jang and Alicia Barger ‘13) are all senior computer science majors who presented projects at the poster session on Wednesday night of the conference. This is a record number of attendees from W&L, a trend we hope will continue because the conference is such a valuable experience for attendees.
Madeline received a scholarship from GHC and Paul received a scholarship from his summer research program to attend the program. The other attendees received funding from the Provost’s Office and the Computer Science department.
Of the conference attendees, 483—or approximately 6 percent—were men, including Paul Jang, the first W&L man to attend GHC. While the conference focuses on celebrating the achievements of incredible women in computing, this year the celebration incorporated the first ever male keynote and plenary Male Allies panel.
The students even met up with Alicia Bargar, a 2013 graduate and current graduate student at Georgia Tech.
Here is a story from Cory Walker about her experience at the GHC in October:
One of my favorite talks was the one by Jo Miller, on overcoming office politics. Her talk was so crowded that it was in one of the largest ballrooms, she held two sessions, and we were turned away from the first one because it was overcrowded. She talked about different ways to think of office politics in a positive light and use it to get ahead. She also used a technique called a Shadow Organization map to identify key areas for improvement.
The most interesting person to come by my poster was a man whose brother (now deceased) went to W&L before women were even admitted. He said his brother was against the integration, but then we talked about how much the school has improved since that time. It was interesting hearing this perspective of W&L at a women’s computer science conference in Phoenix, AZ.
It was my third year going to the conference, and as always, I had a wonderful time and got many interviews from the companies there. And of course, I’m very grateful to W&L and our Computer Science Department for helping pay our way.
Attendee Madeline Forrestel had this experience.
“It was truly a privilege having the opportunity to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration this year. I was wonderfully overwhelmed by the number of brilliant women, young and old, who surrounded me. I have never left an event feeling more inspired than I did leaving Phoenix. One of the most outstanding elements of the conference was the career fair. It was truly motivating to see just how many opportunities are out there and how enthusiastic and supportive companies are toward welcoming women into the industry”.
Please contact the computer science department if you would be interested in helping to sponsor future attendance of W&L students at the conference.
It’s the middle of finals week, and everyone is in their own headspace. As a student body, we’re over-caffeinated, we’ve had too little sleep, and I think it’s safe to say we aren’t busy thinking a lot about how beautiful the world around us is (although with the improved weather these past few days, that isn’t as true as it could be). However, all I can think about is this time a year ago. I was so excited to finish my second semester of Real Analysis, and little did I know I was about to get an email that would begin easily the best year of my life so far.
The night after finals ended, I got an email from a research lab offering me a position in their Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program for the summer. If you don’t know about the REU program, it’s a National Science Foundation-funded program aimed at, as the name implies, making research experience possible for undergraduate students who may be interested in graduate-level research. In particular, the program aims to provide opportunities for students from smaller liberal-arts colleges to experience research at larger research institutions. In my case, this was the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), an Army-funded University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
A position in the Narrative Group at ICT seemed right up my alley – investigating how people experience, interpret, and narrate the events of their lives. I got to work with Andrew Gordon and Melissa Roemmele, two researchers in the Narrative Group, who are working on modeling behavior interpretation and narrative-generation. The program took about ten undergraduates and ICT also hosted many graduate interns and international research students. Over the ten weeks of the internship, I saw research more intimately than ever before, met some of the most intellectually passionate students I could imagine, and got to experience the bizarre transition from Lexington, Virginia to Los Angeles, California.
For some students who participate in REUs, the experience ends with the summer. However, I was lucky enough that Andrew and Melissa allowed me to help with a conference submission- a short paper describing the findings so far, as well as the methods we used in the first steps of generating narrative based on behavior. As an undergraduate still not really sure whether I was hoping to do research in the future, I wasn’t at all expecting the paper to be accepted into the conference. I had emailed my advisor, Professor Levy, about the possibility of department funding for conference travel, but I worked actively to keep my hopes down. When the date on which authors were supposed to be notified came and went, I was disappointed to be sure, but I figured it was for the best in the grand scheme of things.
A day or two later, I got an email from Andrew – the paper had been accepted. I was simultaneously stunned and excited, and emailed Professor Levy once again as a shot in the dark. “Professor Levy, is there any possibility that funding would still be possible for the conference? The paper was accepted.” With both department support and a scholarship for travel from the Association of Computer Machinery, I registered for the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces and booked my first international plane ticket, trying to figure out how I would make it from Lexington, Virginia all the way to Haifa, Israel during a school week.
Melissa and I acted out a quick game of Charades to convey the idea of interpreting behavior automatically.
The conference on Intelligent User Interfaces is focused on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction. This takes a host of different meanings, from recommendation systems and intuitive map interfaces to multitouch typing, layered stereoscopic displays, and interface adaptation for users with impaired dexterity. If technology is becoming ubiquitous, how do we make it as intuitive as possible? Can we simulate the way we already think about and interact with the world?
Before this February, the farthest that I’d ever been from my hometown of Austin, Texas was the ski town of Whistler, British Columbia in 2003. The most indispensable part of this conference for me was the experience of being so far from home, meeting people from around the world who have written in the same field as me, and scheduling my time out of the conference so I could see as much as possible of Israel.
Standing in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem!
Because neither of us had ever been to Israel, Melissa Roemmele and I travelled together. We arrived in Tel Aviv a day early and, over the course of our time there, managed to see what we could of Jerusalem, Haifa, Akko, and Tel Aviv. The entire duration of the conference, I felt for the first time in quite a while that I truly knew what I was doing. Everything I had done up until then led me to a demo session meeting a graduate student whose father and sister both went to W&L; to sitting across from a graduate student from Japan who that night won Best Paper at the conference; to hearing about the potential of the Heider-Simmel Interactive Theater project from Wolfgang Wahlster, that day’s keynote speaker. I have never felt so continuously starstruck as I did talking over lunch to people I had earlier that day heard speak eloquently, hopefully about the future of intelligent interface design. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as hopeful or as inspired as I did that week, and in the time following the conference.
In under a week I managed to see more of the world than in my twenty years combined. While it was a sharp change coming back to Lexington, back to classwork and short writing assignments and club meetings, I’ve never before felt like I know what I’m doing, like anything is possible and the future is right ahead of me. I’m not a sentimental person, but I can’t help but muse on how beautiful a year it’s been, on how far I’ve come and how much further there is to go.
As I go into my first final of the term today, for Women’s and Gender Studies, so many perspectives we’ve discussed this term revolve around the necessity of narrative. Everything we experience in life comes down to how we frame it. How we narrate the events in our lives says a lot about those events, but it also determines how we interpret those events. Sooner or later, everything connects. What a year and what a world.
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!
From left to right, Ginny Huang ’14, Professor Sara Sprenkle, Sam O’Dell ’15, Cory Walker ’15, and Camille Cobb ’12 pose outside the Minneapolis Convention Center under the Grace Hopper welcome sign.
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.”
Poster co-chairs Sara Sprenkle (left) and Kaoutar El Maghraouri (right) pose with Barbara Gee, ABI Vice President of Programs, (left) during the opening session. 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.”
Rebecca Benefiel, associate professor of classics at Washington and Lee University, and Sara Sprenkle, assistant professor of computer science at W&L, will present their prototype of a new web application involving the ancient graffiti of Pompeii at the Linked Ancient World Data Institute (LAWDI) later this month
Six students and one faculty member represented Washington and Lee at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Baltimore, MD. The student-focused conference features both technical and professional development sessions.
Haley, Sam, Cory, and Deirdre at the entryway for the conference
Alicia Bargar ’13, Samantha O’Dell ’15, and Cory Walker ’15 were awarded ultra-competitive scholarships to attend. Having three scholarship winners from W&L–out of 300 scholarships awarded and many, many more applicants–is quite impressive! Haley Archer-McClellan ’15, Deirdre Tobin ’15, and Wenda Tu ’14 were generously supported by the Provost’s Office.
All students agreed the conference was an inspiring and motivating experience and the career fair opened their eyes to a lot of opportunities.
Some highlights:
Cory won a Ninja Coder t-shirt from Amazon for programming the Fibonacci sequence in Python
Wenda met an executive from GE and had an enlightening conversation that covered some diverse topics, including material for Wenda’s Feminist Social and Political Philosophy course.
Haley, Alicia, and Deirdre at the Inner Harbor. The RockIT Science and Systers 25th Anniversary Celebration was held at the Maryland Science Center.
Professor Sprenkle attended the conference as a representative of the GHC Academic Advisory Board, helped lead the Faculty Speed Networking session, helped organize the Faculty Lightning Talks, and served as a judge of the undergraduate student research competition.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Are We There Yet?” While the answer seems to clearly be “no”, W&L is definitely making strides in the right direction.
