Cobb ’12 a Finalist in ACM Student Research Competition 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.

Camille presents her research along with the four other finalists.

CS Major Lee Davis Represents TN in MockCon Parade

Lee Davis '13 (yellow hat) waves from Tennessee's float in the MockCon parade. Photo courtesy of Kevin Remington.

Guest Speaker: Andrew Danner of Swarthmore College

Andrew Danner, Ph.D., of Swarthmore College will talk about his work on developing efficient techniques to process large GIS data sets–a topic of interest to both computer scientists and geologists.

“TerraStream: From Elevation Data
to Watershed Hierarchies”

Monday, January 30 at 11:15 a.m.
Parmly 307 in the Science Center

Abstract: Modern remote sensing and mapping technologies generate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that often exceed several Gigabytes or Terrabytes in size. Processing such huge data sets poses a number of computational challenges. Portions of the data must reside on large but slow hard disks, while computation can only occur in the smaller but faster internal memory of modern computers. In these cases the transfer of data between disk and main memory becomes the primary bottleneck rather than internal CPU computation.

This talk will describe the I/O model of computation in which we can develop scalable algorithms for processing large data sets. I will also present TerraStream–an implementation of several I/O-efficient algorithms for processing large point clouds of elevation data, creating digital surface models, extracting river networks, and constructing watershed hierarchies. TerraStream performance scales efficiently to input data sets containing over 300 million points and over 20GB in size.

W&L Women in Computer Science Continue to Buck National Trend

Link to the W&L news article

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.

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!

Students Present Research at Tapia Conference

Lucy, Anna, and Camille (left to right) at the Tapia Conference

Camille Cobb ’12, Anna Pobletts ’12, and Lucy Simko ’11 were awarded scholarships to attend the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing in San Francisco in early April.  At the conference, they presented posters of their research on automated web application testing.  Their research projects were funded by the CRA-W/CDC Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, which had an informal gathering at the conference.

Anna, Lucy, and Camille (left to right) in a Redwood forest the Sunday before the conference.

Professor Whaley Retires after 24 Years of Service

Professor Whaley, third from right, being recognized at commencement with other retiring faculty members.

Dr. Tom Whaley is retiring after 24 years at W&L.

Professor Whaley joined the Computer Science Department as a full professor in 1987, after holding academic positions in mathematics and computer science and positions as head of ITS at several other institutions. Professor Whaley’s teaching, research, and service as department head were critical in the growth of the department into one of the national leaders among liberal arts colleges. His interest in database management, formal development of algorithms, parallel computing, and digital libraries produced several new curricular and research initiatives in the department. Professor Whaley helped to develop the department’s introductory survey course, which became a model for courses of this type in liberal arts colleges. He worked with dozens of student research assistants on problems in graph theory, parallel algorithms, and Web access to databases. Many of these research projects were interdisciplinary and resulted in published papers and journal articles, as well as honors theses for computer science majors.

The capstone of Professor Whaley’s research activity was as a co-principal investigator of the ALSOS project, a digital library for nuclear issues, which was sponsored by two major NSF grants and which supported interdisciplinary research experiences for numerous computer science students.

While at Washington and Lee, Professor Whaley also became an accomplished mandolin player, often performing with local old-time music groups.

We will miss him!

Spring-Term CSCI ‘bots invade Leyburn Library

This year’s W&L Spring-Term Festival took place in Leyburn Library, and the Computer Science Department was there in force: the twelve students enrolled in CSCI 250: Introduction to Robotics demonstrated robots that flew over obstacles, followed their creators around like a pet, played a game of Tron, and obeyed commands issued from an XBox Kinect sensor.  There was even some cross-project interference, as the Kinect-driven bot tried to steal the Rovipet’s beloved green ball.

CSCI 250 also featured a field trip to the Areva Nuclear Power facility in Lynchburg, where we got to see some bigger robots in action.

               

Sprenkle and Simko’s Research Paper Wins Award

Professor Sprenkle and Lucy Simko ’11‘s paper at the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) won the Best Research Paper Award. ICST is a prestigious conference in software testing (21% acceptance rate) with over 300 attendees. The paper entitled “A Study of Usage-Based Navigation Models and Generated Abstract Test Cases for Web Applications” was done in collaboration with Dr. Lori Pollock of the University of Delaware. The paper was selected out of 35 accepted papers.

The Best Research Paper Award. It's tricky to get a good picture of it because of how reflective it is.

Professor Sprenkle presenting at the ICST conference