Category: Student Successes

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Computer Science senior recognized as January General of the Month

Shannon McGovern ’13 was recognized as January General of the Month: “Generals of the Month is coordinated by the Celebrating Student Success (CSS) initiative and sponsored by the Division of Student Affairs to inspire engaged citizenship at Washington and Lee University.  CSS seeks to recognize students who are not typically or sufficiently touted for the depth and breadth they add to our campus community.”

Check out the details here:
http://news.blogs.wlu.edu/2013/01/22/wl-seniors-shannon-mcgovern-keaton-fletcher-are-january-generals-of-the-month/

Congratulations, Shannon!

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W&L CS students compete at Longwood Programming Contest

Nine W&L students competed in the annual Longwood University Programming Contest, with one of our teams (the “Direct Executioners”) placing second out of the twelve teams who competed. Students spent six grueling hours solving tricky programming problems, fueled by doughnuts, soft drinks, and team spirit. Congratulations to Onye Ekenta and Paul Jang ’15 for defeating so many tough competitors!

Left: Suraj, Anton, and Connor in full hacker mode.

Right: Garrett, Alex, and Richard set a new CS fashion standard while working on a coding problem.

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Class of 2012

Most of our class of 2012 (from left to right): Camille Cobb, David Margolies, Charles Gould, Joey Brown, Anna Pobletts, and Mike White.

We are quite proud of the class of 2012 graduates from computer science!

A picture of the class of 2012 on graduation day. Back, left to right: Andrew Bennett, Joey Brown, David Margolies, Charles Gould, Mike White Front (left to right): Camille Cobb, Anna Pobletts
A picture of the class of 2012 on graduation day.
Back, left to right: Andrew Bennett, Joey Brown, David Margolies, Charles Gould, Mike White
Front (left to right): Camille Cobb, Anna Pobletts
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Cobb ’12 a Finalist in ACM Student Research Competition at SIGCSE

Cobb '12 at SIGCSE
Camille at the "welcome gate" to SIGCSE

Camille Cobb ’12 was a finalist in the ACM Student Research Competition held at SIGCSE 2012 in Raleigh, NC.  Camille presented her poster on “Exploring Text-Based Analysis of Test Case Dependencies of Web Applications” in a four-hour session to unknown judges, which placed her in the top five student researchers.  She gave a well-received 12-minute presentation two days later with tough competition–by all accounts, the finalists were all very strong.

The official W&L story

Camille presents her research along with the four other finalists.
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Cobb ’12 Receives Honorable Mention in CRA Undergraduate Research Award

The CRA announced their list of Undergraduate Research Awards, which included an honorable mention for Camille Cobb ’12. Camille has worked on automatically testing web applications with Professor Sprenkle for two years and worked this past summer on visualizing medical processes with Professor Lori Clarke from the University of Massachusetts. Camille has presented her work in poster sessions at several conferences and has a conference paper under submission.

From the announcement:

This year’s nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of our nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts. It is quite an honor to be selected for Honorable Mention from this group.

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CS Teams Impressive at Longwood Programming Contest

Organized by Richard Marmorstein ’14, two teams of W&L computer science students competed at Longwood University’s programming contest on Oct. 22 in Farmville, VA.  Despite limited practice the teams placed 2nd and 4th out of 16 teams.  The competition included teams from Longwood, Lynchburg, William and Mary, Randolph-Macon, Bridgewater, and others.  The 4th place team, ‘Syntax Errors to the Thrown Exception,’ consisted of Richard, Alex Baca ’14, and Suraj Bajracharya ’14, while the 2nd place team, ‘Direct Executioners,’ had Lee Davis ’13, Garrett Koller ’14, and Anton Reed ’14. Their nominal coach Dr. Stough attended with the teams and helped judge the competition.

The teams are now preparing to take their talents to Shippensburg, PA and the 2011 ACM Regional Programming Competition, with an opportunity to compete in the Nationals at stake. Go Syntax Errors and Direct Executioners!

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Students Present Research at SSA

Several computer science students participated in W&L’s student conference SSA: Science, Society, and the Arts.

At the second poster session of the day, David Margolies ’12 presented his work with Professor Levy in an independent study he did in the fall. The poster’s title was “Robot Vision and Object Tracking”.

David is in the top right of the picture, in a dark coat and blue tie.

Also in that session, Lucy Simko ’11 and Anna Pobletts ’12 presented their poster on their automated web application testing research with Professor Sprenkle called “An analysis of the relationship between parameter characteristics and data model factors to automatically create effective test suites for web applications”. Whew! What a title!

In the picture below, Anna (teal) and Lucy (to the right) explain their project to curious minds.

Will Richardson ’11 and Chen Zhong ’12 presented their summer research project that was advised by Professor Stough: “Visual Object Class Recognition”.

At the afternoon poster session, Camille Cobb ’12 presented her research poster on “Toward a User-Session-Dependency Model for Automatically Testing Web Applications” that she is working on with Professor Sprenkle. Camille will be presenting a similar poster at the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing at the beginning of April.

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Senior Simko to be Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa

Senior computer science and classics double major Lucy Simko will be inducted into Phi Beta Kappa on Thursday, March 10.  Convocation is at 11:45 in Lee Chapel and induction happens later that day.

From the Phi Beta Kappa site: “Phi Beta Kappa celebrates and advocates excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Its campus chapters invite for induction the most outstanding arts and sciences students at America’s leading colleges and universities. The Society sponsors activities to advance these studies — the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences — in higher education and in society at large.”

Update: A photo of convocation, courtesy of Professor Stough:

Lucy is on the far right.

 

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Women in Computer Science at W&L

Sophomore journalism and computer science double major Shannon McGovern created a feature about women in computer science at W&L for a journalism course.