This summer, the Computer Science Department will be hosting a mobile app development and technology entrepreneurship program for middle school girls.The program, funded by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), is free to participants and will be held during the weeks of June 19th – 23rd and June 26th – 30th on Forcina Hall’s fourth floor. Registration is required.
A team of five TCNJ students – including two freshmen CS majors – won second place at the Google Games event held in New York City on Sunday, April 9. Tomer Aberbach (Computer Science), Ethan Zeigler (Computer Science), Ursula Widocki (Mathematics & Statistics), Darshan Kalola (Biology), and Varun Taruvai (Biology) attended the event along with 19 other teams from tri-state area institutions, including TCNJ, NJIT, NYIT, Manhattan College, Ramapo, Stevens, Vassar, and Marist.
The Google Games are held yearly and are open to first, second, and third year students attending these colleges and universities. Competing students work together to solve logic puzzle and coding challenges according to each year’s theme.
Congratulations to the team on their achievement!
CS Major & Teammate Receive 2nd Place Prize in Mayo Business Competition
CS Major Spencer Viviano (Class of 2019) and his teammate, marketing major Neophytos Zambas, were awarded second place in the Mayo Business Plan Competition last week. The two students built an app called NeoBook that could serve as a platform for college students to buy and sell textbooks and other items with students at TCNJ and at other institutions.
NeoBook was announced as one of the three finalists projects, and the final awards ceremony was held on Wednesday, April 5 in Education Building 212. As a prize, Viviano and Zambas received an award of $14,000 for their work on the prototype.
Dr. Pulimood Receives Honors from RedHat, Participates in GitHub Panel
RedHat, the North Carolina-based open source coding company, recently recognized Dr. Monisha Pulimood and twenty other Computer Science faculty who are at the forefront of teaching open source at their institutions. Dr. Pulimood utilizes open source in CSC 415: Software Engineering, which she teaches every semester. Please see RedHat’s news posting about the event for more information.
Dr. Pulimood also served on a panel on implementing GitHub in the classroom at the SIGCSE conference in early March. See the video below for a record of the panel. Dr. Pulimood’s talk begins at time marker (11:45).
Hunterdon County Software Academy Visits Department
On Wednesday, March 29, the Computer Science Department was visited by 19 high school freshmen from the Hunterdon County Computer Science and Software Engineering Academy. The students, escorted by two high school personnel – including their vice principal, the academy’s CS teacher – visited the department to learn more about CS @ TCNJ.
Current CS majors gave the visiting students a tour of the department’s facilities, demonstrated their research and class projects, and shared information about the CS program at TCNJ, as well as their internship and mentored research experiences within the department. A representative from the Office of Admissions also spoke with the visiting students about the process of applying to TCNJ.
On February 25 & 26th TCNJ’s chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) finished its 5th annual hackathon which featured around 200 talented student developers from several colleges, universities, and high schools from the tri-state area.
During this 24 hour event, student engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs came together to work on innovative software projects. HackTCNJ gives students of all levels the opportunity to learn additional skills outside the classroom, and to discover recruiting opportunities from great companies.
TCNJ’s ACM chapter hosted this hackathon with MLH, Linode, JHC Technology, McCarter & English, SRI International, Particle, Bloomberg, and Dodge Data. TCNJ’s ACM chapter is incredibly thankful to have such great sponsors to help make this event a great success.
HackTCNJ’s judges selected winners based on the following categories: Best Technical Achievement, Best User Experience, Funniest Hack, Best Social Good Hack, Best First Hackathon Project, Best use of IoT, and Best Hardware Hack.
Category
Winners
Project
Prizes for each team member
Best Technical Achievement
Ridhwaan Anayetullah, Darshan Kalola, Noor Syed, Daniel Zhou
Exposed: An app designed to encourage friends and group members to arrive promptly at events with a novel twist. (https://devpost.com/software/exposed-yc7tni)
Echo Dot
Best User Experience
Christopher Beyer
Text Me in an Emergency: a simple chatbot program to assist a user when a friend is in need if you cant call 911 from where you are. (https://devpost.com/software/text-me-in-an-emergency)
Keyboard
Funniest Hack
Henry Shen, Jabari Brown
Stack Overflow Counter: Measures how many times you go to Stack overflow (https://devpost.com/software/stack-overflow-counter)
Chromecast + Netflix Gift Certificate
Best Social Good Hack
Thomas Giulianelli, Sam Chang
HereToStay: A handy resource for those who want/need information to help them resist oppression. (https://devpost.com/software/heretostay)
Bluetooth Speakers + What if? (book)
Best First Hackathon Project
Kristen Crasto, Ethan Crasto, Elisa Idrobo, Mun Kim
Shoot for the Mun: A GUI for Twitter Sentiment Analysis: https://devpost.com/software/shoot-for-the-mun
Sony MDR V6 Headphones
Best use of IoT
Ryan Rosenberger, Sean Kelly, Jacob Douglass
gitHug: Get some hugs with the Photon Particle Board! (https://devpost.com/software/githug)
Particle Photon Kit
Best Hardware Hack
Hunter Dubel, Richard Levenson, Dan Sarnelli, Jeremy Leon
Harassment Monitor: Fighting harassment on string array at a time! (https://devpost.com/software/harassment-monitor)
Particle Photon Kit
Thanks again to the hackers and sponsors for a great weekend!
Computer Science sophomore Ananya Srinivasan (Class of 2019) has been awarded a prestigious research fellowship for an 11-week summer program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Through a national and highly competitive application process, and with the guidance of Dr. Deborah Knox, Ananya was selected to participate in the NIST Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. The SURF program is sponsored by NIST and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
During her fellowship during Summer 2017, Ananya will be working with Dr. Ram Sriram. Ananya’s project, Extracting Terminology and Ontologies from Documents, will focus on building an infrastructure to generate metadata and taxonomy for data sharing to support data analysis and project development. She will use a “root” and rule-based approach, one that’s used in many Indo-European languages (Latin and Sanskrit), to build such an infrastructure. Ananya will be working to apply this method to on-going projects at NIST.
Ananya will be working in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at NIST. The fellowship program is designed to provide hands-on research experiences in a number of areas, including computer security, information access, software testing, networking, and communications technologies. ITL has the broad mission to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology through research and development in information technology, mathematics, and statistics.
Ananya shares her thoughts about the SURF Opportunity: I am very happy to participate in the NIST SURF Program this summer and share my interest in technology with likeminded peers. The SURF Program appealed to me since the Information Technology Lab at NIST offers many opportunities to learn more about Natural Language Processing and other areas of computer science. I believe that working under the guidance of the experienced researchers in the lab will help me improve as a computer scientist. I intend on going to graduate school so I believe the knowledge I will gain from this experience will guide my future research interests.
In addition to her mentored research work completed within the department, Ananya is a member of TCNJ’s Honors Program and participates in the Women in Learning and Leadership (WILL) Program.
Congratulations to Ananya for being awarded a NIST SURF fellowship!
Dr. Andrea Salgian will serve as a panel member at the Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary event being held at Rutgers University on Tuesday, April 11 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM.
This event features presentations from panel members, a Q&A session, and interdisciplinary dialogue. Dinner will be served. All interested students are encouraged to attend.
The registration period for Fall 2017 courses is April 4 – 14, 2017. Some seats have been reserved for CS majors in all CSC courses. Please review the registration newsletter for additional information on options courses offered in Fall 2017.
After your registration window opens, if the class you need is closed, put yourself on the wait-list using the Qualtrics form below.
The Fall 2017 registration wait-list is now closed. If you have signed up for the wait-list, please continue to check your emails in case the department needs to contact you regarding you. submnission
Be sure read all directions and to enter all the information requested.
We will not be signing students into courses until Monday, April 17, after the registration window closes. Please do not email the department for updates before this time. We will enroll students into any unfilled seats in order, based on their registration times and time they registered on the wait list.
Please be sure that your intended course does not conflict with a course in your current schedule, and that you are willing to drop conflicting courses to make the change. If you have a full course load or time conflict and do not indicate courses to drop on your wait-list submission, your submission will be disregarded.
As always, please have a back-up plan in case you are not able to get into your preferred courses.
On Tuesday, April 18, the Computer Science Department will host its final colloquium of the Spring 2017 semester. Mr. Andy Keep, a technical lead from Cisco Systems, Inc., will give a talk entitled “Writing Compilers in Industry“. An abstract of his talk can be found below.
Please join CS faculty and students in Forcina 408 from 12:30 – 1:30 PM for this talk.
There will be pizza!!!
Abstract: Compilers are an important tool for working programmers, but few realize the important role compiler researchers and developers continue to play. Having a basic understanding of how a modern compiler works, and what it can (and cannot) do, can help any programmer better understand the performance characteristics of a program. Compilers, both for new languages and existing ones, continue to be developed in industry. Clang has replaced GCC as the C compiler for macOS, and new general purposes languages like Swift and Rust are building on a similar platform. Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are another important area where compiler technology is brought to bear in industry. In addition to new languages, compilers are also being used to target new devices, including Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), which is making these traditionally task specific devices into the realm of everyday use.
In this talk I will discuss my experience learning about compilers as a graduate student at Indiana University, and describe how I continue to apply that skill set at Cisco Systems, where I have spent the last three years working on compilers for networking oriented DSLs, most recently P4, a language for specifying the operation of a networking data plane.
Bio: Andy Keep is a Technical Lead at Cisco Systems, Inc. where he has spent the better part of the last three years as a compiler engineer, working on compilers for networking related Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). His most recent efforts have focused on a compiler for P4, a DSL for programming network data planes. He is also a maintainer for Chez Scheme, a compiler for the Scheme programming language, originally developed by Andy’s Ph.D. advisor Kent Dybvig, which Cisco released as an open source project in April, 2016. Prior to joining Cisco, Andy spent a year as a post doctoral researcher at the University of Utah, working for Matt Might on static analysis. Andy started working with Matt after finishing his Ph.D. at Indiana University, where he re-wrote the compiler for Chez Scheme, along with his advisor Kent Dybvig, using the nanopass compiler framework.
Four CS majors attended this year’s SIGCSE conference in Seattle, Washington last month. The conference, which was held from March 8 – 11 this year, hosts presentations and panel sessions given by CS educators, experts, and students from across the country.
CS freshmen majors Michael Altschuler and Derek Kneisel, and seniors Sean Anukweum and Evan Melquist attended this year’s conference as part of a networking experience. All four students have been working on research with Dr. Monisha Pulimood this year.
As an annual conference, SIGCSE provides a forum for CS educators to discuss issues related to the development, implementation, and/or evaluation of computing programs, curricula, and courses, as well as syllabi, laboratories, and other elements of teaching and pedagogy.
Congratulations to senior CS majors Angela Huang and Dylan Wulf, and junior CS major Stephen Klein on their acceptance into TCNJ’s highly selective chapter of Phi Beta Kappa!
Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s oldest academic honors society and celebrates excellence in the liberal arts and sciences. Phi Beta Kappa advocates for and sponsors activities to advance study in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences in higher education and the global community.
Congratulations again to Angela, Dylan, and Stephen on this achievement!
Two informational sessions will be held this semester regarding the CSC 399 – Internship in Computer Science course. The majority of the content presented concerns the for-credit experience, though Dr. Papamichail, internship coordinator, will touch on material relevant to non-credit-bearing experiences.
This semester, the two infosessions will be held as follows:
Students MUST attend ONE informational session at any time in their curriculum prior to applying for an internship for credit. If you don’t plan to do an internship for credit you need not attend.
The informationsessions will highlight departmental policies regarding internships. In preparation for the session, please review this informational web page and bring your questions.
This summer, the Computer Science Department will be hosting a mobile app development and technology entrepreneurship program for middle school girls.The program, funded by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), is free to participants and will be held during the weeks of June 19th – 23rd and June 26th – 30th on Forcina Hall’s fourth floor. Registration is required.
On February 25 & 26th TCNJ’s chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) finished its 5th annual hackathon which featured around 200 talented student developers from several colleges, universities, and high schools from the tri-state area.
