Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) was founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary. Its motto is “Love of learning is the guide of life.” The Gamma of Virginia Chapter was chartered at W&L in 1911.
The PBK chapter at Washington and Lee University welcomed 49 members of the junior and senior classes at the Phi Beta Kappa/Society of the Cincinnati Convocation on March 31. Of those initiates, the following computer science majors are from the Class of 2023 and 2024:
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.
Lakpa and Ignas came in second for best education hack at Hoo Hacks 2023 with their EsyLearn project.
During the hackathon, Lakpa and Ignas were inspired to produce a personal learning assistant that would accept and adjust to the learning needs of its user.
Welcome to HooHacks!
EsyLearn
EsyLearn communicates with users via a web interface where the users can easily speak and get responses back, just like talking to another human being. Through natural language processing, it provides responses both in text and audio for better understanding. Within 24 hours, Lakpa and Ignas essentially created a virtual assistant that is as smart as Jarvis in the Iron Man Movies.
W&L’s Alpha Circle of Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK), the national leadership honor society, held its spring induction ceremony on March 16. Computer Science major, Katie Yurechko ’24, was among the 50 new members.
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.
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.
