A view of the world from the fourth floor of Parmly Hall
The Computer Science Department celebrated Halloween in style at Professor Matthews’ home on Thursday, October 29. Professor Matthews had awesome decorations and treats — it was an evening of fun, food and good company.
Check out these party pics ! 🎃👻🍬
The Summer Research Scholars (SRS) program provides support for students engaged in collaborative research under the guidance of W&L faculty. It is designed to foster the development of discipline-specific research skills, encourage active knowledge acquisition, and spark student interest in scholarly inquiry.
Here are the 2026 Computer Science SRS students, along with their faculty mentors and summaries of their research:
Professor Sana Habib:
This summer, Professor Habib had three SRS students: Saad Ahmed Khan Ghori ’27, Slsabil (Zazo) Hassan ’28 and Taeyun Kim ’29.
Research Synopsis:
This summer’s research projects explore critical challenges in cybersecurity, privacy, and trustworthy computing—from securing future 5G/6G network architectures and protecting user privacy in cloud-native systems to developing hands-on educational tools for teaching secure software development. Together, these projects contribute to creating more secure, resilient, and privacy-conscious digital technologies.
Saad Ahmed Khan Ghori ‘27
Saad has been working on Metadata Leakage in 5G-Based Service Architectures: A Cloud-Native Measurement and Analysis. His research examines how metadata generated within cloud-native 5G networks may inadvertently reveal sensitive information. By measuring and analyzing these potential information leaks, the project seeks to better understand privacy risks in modern telecommunications infrastructure and identify opportunities to strengthen user privacy.
Slsabil (Zazo) Hassan ‘28
Slsabil has been developing the Security & Privacy Dojo, an interactive educational platform that teaches secure programming through hands-on exercises based on core data structures. By identifying and fixing realistic vulnerabilities in code, students gain practical experience with secure software development while learning the security and privacy challenges that can arise from incorrect implementations.
Taeyun Kim ‘29
Taeyun has been conducting research on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) at the Service Layer: Trust Graph Analysis for Federated FutureG Networks. The project explores trust relationships in next-generation mobile networks, investigating how service providers can securely communicate and collaborate in future federated 5G and 6G environments. The research aims to identify potential trust vulnerabilities and contribute to the design of more secure and resilient network architectures.
The students have made excellent progress on their projects so far, and it has been exciting to see their ideas develop over the course of the summer.
Professor Sara Sprenkle:
This summer, Professor Sprenkle mentored three SRS students: Alan Liu ’28, Takunda Mawere ’28 and Danilo Sindric ’29. These students worked on The Ancient Graffiti Project (AGP) which is a digital scholarly resource for searching, studying and analyzing ancient Roman inscriptions.
Alan Liu ‘28
Alan’s research investigates how to accurately and efficiently represent the archeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum on a digital map that grants access to 3500+ different types of graffiti. He worked on developing more features for AGP’s mapping such as seamless canvas rendering, permanent labels, map aesthetics, and numerous bug fixes and simplification of the development code. Effectively, the maps received a complete overhaul that significantly boosts the productivity of the user skimming through dozens of graffiti.
Takunda Mawere ’28
Takunda’s research project involves developing new features to continue improving the AGP website. His work this summer was mainly focused on improving the search functionality. He upgraded the system from Elasticsearch 7 to Elasticsearch 8/9 API. Takunda also leveraged the new API to improve the pipeline for searching and sorting results.
Danilo Sindric ‘29
Danilo’s research this summer began with improving the filtering system on the main AGP website. He then transitioned to the VESTA project, where he worked on a variety of development tasks. Danilo’s primary contributions included building an evaluation tool that enables comparisons with similar digital humanities projects, as well as developing several analysis tools.
Congratulations to the Computer Science Class of 2025 — majors and minors alike — for their outstanding achievements!
Below are their accomplishments, listed along with those of select CS undergraduates, as they appear in the Commencement Bulletin.
Majors:
Naka Assoumatine, Class of 2025, is double majoring in computer science and economics and minoring in data science.
During Summer 2024, Naka had the incredible opportunity to give back to her community by introducing coding, and programming to kids at the middle school she attended in Togo—Menelik2. Her goal was to inspire these young minds to see computer science as a path for creative expression and a field with promising job opportunities—an area still largely unfamiliar to many people in Togo.
Washington and Lee University, in partnership with the Johnson Program, is proud to support this initiative.
Congratulations, Naka, on your exciting achievements!
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 2024 Computer Science SRS students, their faculty supervisors and descriptions of their projects:
Professor Taha Khan:
Professor Khan had 2 SRS students this summer — Allison Badeaux ’28 and Nabil Youssef, ’26. The topic for their research was “Internet Censorship: A Self-Destructing Prophecy”.
The internet is a crucial medium for communication, information sharing, and freedom of expression. However, internet censorship poses significant challenges to these aspects. The study explores the multifaceted impacts of censorship on users’ behaviors, attitudes, and strategies to bypass restrictions.
Allison and Nabil’s research examined the effectiveness of censorship and its potential counterproductive effects. While censorship aims to control information flow and maintain social order, it often leads to unintended consequences like increased efforts to circumvent restrictions and the spread of alternative information channels. By analyzing user reactions, the study seeks to determine whether censorship achieves its goals or inadvertently promotes greater resistance and innovation in information dissemination.
Professor Simon Levy:
Professor Liz Matthews:
Professor William Tolley:
Professor Tolley had two projects with a total of four students this summer. The objectives, goals and direction for each project, along with the student research students are listed here.
Congratulations to the Class of 2024 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.
Majors:
The Computer Science Dept. Halloween party took place on Nov. 7. The party, held at Professor Matthews’ house, was fun and festive!
Check out these party pics!
Computer Science Major, Katie Yurechko, ’24, provides a unique and compelling perspective on the use of social media in her feature “Step Away from Your Screen”.
Since this article was created exclusively for the Alumni Magazine, it does not yet exist on the W&L website. A “go” link has been created that goes directly to Katie’s story via the ISSUU online platform flipbook.
Happy reading!https://columns.wlu.edu/in-the-lead-step-away-from-your-screen/
The CS Department completely renovated and refurbished its main computer lab over the summer. This “active-learning first” classroom is designed to maximize the educational experience!
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.
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 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, “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 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.