W&L Robots Rock the Spring Term Fair

Twenty-three students from CSCI 250 presented six different projects at the annual W&L Spring Term Fair in Leyburn Library — so many projects that they were given their own floor of the library for the demos!  W&L innovations included using Python to fly an AR.Drone via Kinect hand gestures and to navigate a Neato XV-11 LIDAR robot around an obstacle, as well as the cool projects depicted below (Steve Goryl photo credits).

Deirdre  and Haley used a Raspberry Pi to add sonar capability to their Brookstone Rover ‘bot.

Sam, Drew, Jok, and Darren built and programmed a robotic arm.

Michael, Stephen, and Hank built an R/C plane with remote pan-tilt camera and laptop controller.

Lee, James, and Colin programmed an AR.Drone to follow a moving ground vehicle.

Junior Olivier Mahame Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa

Computer Science major Olivier Mahame ’14 is being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, which means that Olivier is in the top 5% of his class by grade point average.  Phi Beta Kappa is a national academic society that promotes excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.  Congratulations, Olivier!

Computer Science Students Wow at SSA 5

At SSA 5, Computer Science students represented themselves, their projects, and the department quite well.

Alicia Bargar ’13 started the day off with a presentation about her summer research project, focused on improving the abilities of human-robot interaction, specifically in its use in therapy of children with autism spectrum disorders.

Richard Marmorstein ’14 was the computer science representative in a panel on digital humanities projects at W&L.  While the other projects were presented by humanities students, Richard presented his work with Professor Paul Gregory (philosophy) and Professor Sara Sprenkle (computer science) on developing an online symbolic logic tutorial, which is used in Professor Gregory’s Philosophy 170: Introduction to Logic course.

The final poster session featured six computer science students.

Suraj Bajracharya ’14 presented “Simultaneous Localization and Mapping in an Inexpensive Wheeled Robot”, his independent study project with Professor Simon Levy.  Audience members could drive the robot and see how the robot visualized obstacles.

Haley Archer-McClellan ’15 and Deirdre Tobin ’15 presented their summer research project, entitled “Exploring a Text-Based Analysis of Persistent-State Dependencies in Web Applications”.  They presented their methodology for finding relationships between web application resource names using textual clues.  Their work is  supervised by Professor Sara Sprenkle.

Three computer science students presented projects based in other departments: Lee Davis ’13 presented a poster on the results his independent study with Professor Natalia Toporikova from biology: “Computational Model of Pre-Botzinger Complex”, while Ginny Huang ’14 and Cathy Wang ’15 presented “Zeckendorf’s Theorem, Tiling Proofs, and the 3-bonacci Sequence”, supervised by Professor Gregory Dresden of the Math Department.

Beyond these presenters, many computer science students also participated in book colloquiums and performances and supported their friends by attending their sessions.

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!

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.

W&L at Grace Hopper: Are We There Yet?

Six students and one faculty member represented Washington and Lee at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Baltimore, MD.   The student-focused conference features both technical and professional development sessions.

Haley, Sam, Cory, and Deirdre at the entryway for the conference

Alicia Bargar ’13, Samantha O’Dell ’15, and Cory Walker ’15 were awarded ultra-competitive scholarships to attend.  Having three scholarship winners from W&L–out of 300 scholarships awarded and many, many more applicants–is quite impressive!  Haley Archer-McClellan ’15, Deirdre Tobin ’15, and Wenda Tu ’14 were generously supported by the Provost’s Office.

All students agreed the conference was an inspiring and motivating experience and the career fair opened their eyes to a lot of opportunities.

Some highlights:

• Cory won a Ninja Coder t-shirt from Amazon for programming the Fibonacci sequence in Python
• Wenda met an executive from GE and had an enlightening conversation that covered some diverse topics, including material for Wenda’s Feminist Social and Political Philosophy course.

Haley, Alicia, and Deirdre at the Inner Harbor. The RockIT Science and Systers 25th Anniversary Celebration was held at the Maryland Science Center.

Professor Sprenkle attended the conference as a representative of the GHC Academic Advisory Board, helped lead the Faculty Speed Networking session, helped organize the Faculty Lightning Talks, and served as a judge of the undergraduate student research competition.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Are We There Yet?”  While the answer seems to clearly be “no”, W&L is definitely making strides in the right direction.

Theodore J. Sjoerdsma, Founder of Computer Science at W&L, Dies at 83

W&L News Story: Theodore J. Sjoerdsma, Founder of Computer Science at W&L, Dies at 83