The first ever W&L SOLVE Hackathon was held in the IQ Center, May 12-13, 2024.
A hackathon is an event where individuals or teams come together to collaboratively work on solving problems or creating innovative projects within a limited time frame. The SOLVE 2024 event was an interdisciplinary student-focused gathering for any undergraduate student from W&L.
A grand prize of $1,000 was awarded to three separate teams judged to have created the best products or for embodying the spirit of the competition. Danish Bokhari ’24, Lakpa Sherpa ’25 and Mohamed Soliman ’27, who created EcoEats, a food app designed to revolutionize the way we eat and live sustainably, were one of the three winning teams.
This paper talks about how people who make videos on TikTok are starting to use special language called “algospeak” more and more. They do this to get around rules that they think are unfair about what they can and can’t post. These video creators frequently come up with new words or change existing ones, or they might use emojis or hand gestures instead of words. They do this to stop TikTok’s algorithm from removing their videos.
Yurechko, who double majors in computer science and philosophy with a minor in poverty and human capability, is dedicated to backing marginalized groups and advocating for diversity within the field of computing.
Ford Scott, Class of 2025, is majoring in computer science and minoring in digital culture and information. He was featured in a Columns article highlighting his educational interests and personal pursuits.
One of Ford’s most significant experiences at W&L has been serving as a founding member of the Cybersecurity Club, an organization dedicated to helping students understand and promote online security. The club has grown to 60 members and continues to explore the complexities of cybersecurity.
Ford has also worked closely with two of his computer science professors, Professor Taha Kahn and Professor William Tolley, both of whom specialize in privacy and security—fields that closely align with his own interests. Recently, Ford worked with Professor Tolley on an independent study where they analyzed different samples of malware. Professor Tolley’s guidance was invaluable, helping Ford navigate specialized topics while also providing focused career advice.
Ford Scott, Class of 2025, is majoring in computer science and minoring in digital culture and information. Ford is featured in a Columns article showcasing his educational experiences at W&L.
Noteworthy accomplishments are his founding the Cybersecurity Club and his summer internship with Input Output Global organization.
Professor Matthews’ W23 Computer Graphics course completed ray tracer images for their final project. Ray tracers use reversed light rays and linear algebra to simulate the real world, including mirrored objects and refractive objects. While pretty, images rendered by a ray tracer take a very long time to finish. These images took DAYS to complete!
Ray tracer images
CSCI 340 Ray Tracer Projects are on full display at the entrance to the Computer Science Department.
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 2023 Computer Science Department SRS students, their faculty supervisors and descriptions of their projects:
Professor Taha Khan:
Professor Khan had 3 SRS students this summer — Bianca Pham ’26, Sarah Lathrop ’25 and James Xia ’26. All three worked on the same project that focused on understanding how Internet users perceive what should happen to their data post bereavement. They also supported my AIM cybersecurity experience.
Bianca Pham ’26James Xia ’26
Sarah Lathrop ’25
(L-R) Sarah, Bianca, James and Professor Khan
Professor Sara Sprenkle:
Professor Sprenkle also had 3 Summer Research Scholars — Petra Ilic ’24, Lakpa Sherpa ’25 and Ignas Volcokas ’25. Below are the details about their projects.
Petra Iliac ’24
Petra Ilic ’24, “Paying Down Technical Debt in the Ancient Graffiti Project” The Ancient Graffiti project began in 2013 as an online tool to study the lives of the common people in ancient Rome. In the ten years since then, new features and content have been added—as well as technical debt. Petra focused on making the application easier to develop and maintain for the next ten years.
Lakpa Sherpa ’25
Lakpa Sherpa ’25, “Detecting Anomalous Behavior through Clustering WebApplication User Sessions”. More than 30% of web traffic is bots trying to collect data or perform attacks to prevent the smooth delivery of services. Lakpa developed an automated framework to explore clustering to identify anomalous behavior.
Ignas Volcakas ’25
Ignas Volcokas ’25, “Generating Cost-Effective Test Cases for WebApplications using Genetic Algorithms.” Web applications are popular and must be reliable and therefore must be thoroughly tested before every release. Since testing takes time, we want to execute the most cost-effective test suites. Ignas explored a variety of test-suite generating algorithms, with a focus on genetic algorithms, and compared the effectiveness of the generated test suites.
The 2023 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference took place in Austin, Texas on April 30-May 4. This conference is considered the most recognized forum to showcase and discuss progress in research, development, standards and applications of web-related topics. Katie, along with collaborators Carnegie Mellon professor Daniel Klug and student Ella Steen of Gordon College, presented their research findings, on “How Algorithm Awareness Impacts Algospeak Use on TikTok” .
In addition to being a Johnson Scholar, Yurechko double majors in computer science and philosophy. She is also minors in poverty and human capability. Katie is dedicated to supporting marginalized communities and promoting diversity in computing, stating that “computer science is not solely about creating technical advances; it is also about critically analyzing those advances from interdisciplinary perspectives.”
Congratulations to Katie on her accomplishments and achievements!
On Thursday, April 6, Abdul AboEitta, Class of 2023, presented his Honors Thesis “Hyperdimensional Computing for Gesture Recognition using a Dynamic Vision Sensor”
Abdul’s thesis introduced a novel neuromorphic approach that exploits two biologically-inspired technologies: (1) Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) and (2) Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC). By integrating technologies inspired by the human brain, the primary goal of his research is to develop more efficient and adaptable Al systems that can handle various real-world problems, overcoming the constraints faced by CNNs and backpropagation.
Professor Levy and Abdul
Abdul’s presentation
For additional details, here’s the flyer of Abdul’s presentation.
Congratulations to Professor Matthews for her latest online publication “Consistent Gaming Skill Demographics in Academic Research” !! The paper has been published in the IADIS International Journal on Computer Science and Information Systems – Volume 17, Issue 2, 2022 (online journal)
and is available at http://www.iadisportal.org/ijcsis/
This publication is also noteworthy because it was co-authored by W&L students — Irina Koleva ’22 and Sujana Basnet ’23.
This paper highlights this problem of inconsistent gaming terminology, collects demographic questions in existing research, and showcases the data collected from a user study with these questions. The results show that self-chosen categories are a statistically significant metric and are recommended as an easy-to-obtain value.
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.
