“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.

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.

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!

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, 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!

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.

Jan met with students and faculty at an informal reception before her talk and answered many questions throughout the afternoon.

Some highlighted sites and programs:

• Dot Diva
• BPC Portal

Jan’s visit was sponsored by Women in Math and Science and Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant.

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.