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.
Visit the event’s Facebook page for more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/274153432996878/
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.
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.
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.
For more information about SIGCSE 2017: http://sigcse2017.sigcse.org/
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 info sessions will be held as follows:
* Wednesday 3/8, 4:30 – 5:30 PM, Forcina 408
* Wednesday 3/22, 5:30 – 6:30 PM, Forcina 409
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 information sessions will highlight departmental policies regarding internships. In preparation for the session, please review this informational web page and bring your questions.
On Friday, February 3 the Computer Science Department will host its first colloquium of the Spring 2017 semester. Dr. Steven Skiena, a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, will give a talk entitled “Applications of Word Embeddings“. 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.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Abstract:
Distributed word embeddings (word2vec) provides a powerful way to reduce large text corpora to concise features readily applicable to a variety of problems in NLP and data science. I will introduce word embedings, and review several of our recent efforts in my talk, including:
(1) Multilingual NLP — Our Polyglot project employs deep learning and other techniques to build a basic NLP pipeline (including entity recognition, POS tagging, and sentiment analysis) for over 100 different languages. We train our systems over each language’s Wikipedia edition, providing unified data resources in the absence of explicitly annotated data, but substantial challenges in interpretation and evaluation.
(2) Detecting Historical Shifts in Word Meaning — Words like “gay” and “mouse” have substantially shifted their meanings over time in response to societal and technological changes. We use word embeddings trained over texts drawn from different time periods to detect changes in word meanings. This is part of our efforts in historical trends analysis.
(3) Deep Learning for Feature Extraction from Graphs — We present DeepWalk, a novel approach for learning latent representations of vertices in a network. DeepWalk uses local information on truncated random walks to learn embeddings, by treating walks as the equivalent of sentences in a language. It is suitable for a broad class of applications such as network classification and anomaly detection.
This is joint work with Rami al-Rfou, Bryan Perozzi, Vivek Kulkarni, Yanqing Chen, and Charles Ward.
Bio:
Steven Skiena is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. His research interests include the design of graph, string, and geometric algorithms, and their applications (particularly to biology). He is the author of five books, including “The Algorithm Design Manual” and “Who’s Bigger: Where Historical Figures Really Rank”. He was co-founder and Chief Scientist at General Sentiment, a media measurement company based on his Lydia text analysis system.
Skiena received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1988, and the author of over 150 technical papers. He is a former Fulbright scholar, and recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award and the IEEE Computer Science and Engineer Teaching Award. More info at http://www.cs.stonybrook.edu/~skiena/.
Article written by Dr. Deborah Knox
“Have you considered advanced work in programming languages?” began the email Angela Huang, Class of 2017, received in September. Our faculty are always on the lookout for opportunities for TCNJ Computer Science students, and this particular email encouraged and guided Angela to prepare an application to attend the 6th ACM SIGPLAN (Special Interest Group on Programming Languages) Mentoring Workshop. After writing her essay on what she hoped to gain from the workshop and working through some editing suggestions from Dr. Knox to strengthen her impact statement, Angela submitted her application in mid-October.
She received an invitation to attend the workshop and professional conference with a full scholarship, including registration fees, travel, and accommodations. The Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop (PLMW) will be held in Paris, France, immediately before the Principals of Programming Languages Conference (POPL) during January 2017. PLMW encourages senior undergraduate students to explore careers in programming language research. The workshop will provide Angela mentoring for a research career in order to help her imagine how she might contribute to the research community. Last year, the Workshop included sessions focused on topics such as how to succeed as a graduate student, how to write research papers, and how to decide on a research career in academia or industry.
In addition, during PLMW, Angela will listen to presentations given by world leaders in programming language research and engage in professional discussions. PLMW is sponsored by NSF, ACM SIGPLAN, Amazon, Facebook, Jane Street Capital, Microsoft, and Google. During the technical POPL conference, Angela will gain new insights as both theoretical and experimental papers will be discussed, with topics ranging from formal frameworks to experience reports.
Angela looks forward to the workshop: “I believe that when trying to get a sense of a particular research area, nothing can replace the impact that face-to-face interaction with real researchers in the field can have. Getting my questions answered by some of the field’s experts, receiving advice from current graduate students, and meeting with students at similar stages in their research careers are all valuable interactions that this workshop openly offers.”
Congratulations, Angela, for being selected to participate in this international opportunity!
We look forward to hearing about your experiences at the workshop and conference.
Attention students: The Spring 2017 wait-list is now closed. We will be working through the list of students who have already signed up on the wait list and have begun signing students into seats where possible. Once we have finished, we will release any available seats.
If you have signed up for the wait list, please continue to check your email this week in case we need to contact your regarding your submission.
The registration period for Spring 2017 courses is November 1 – 11, 2016. 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 Spring 2017.
After your registration window opens, if the class you need is closed, put yourself on the wait-list using the Qualtrics form below.
Be sure read all directions and to enter all the information requested.
We will not be signing students into courses until Monday, November 14, 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.
CS seniors Kevin Bohinski, Matthew Rasa, and David Vassallo, along with CS minor Patrick Monaghan, won two awards at the hackathon held at Rutgers University on October 22 and 23.
Their team, which competed against 47 other teams, won “Best Health Hack sponsored by Merck” and “Best Kiosk Hack sponsored by the New Brunswick Office of Innovation”. Together, they created an Amazon Alexa Skill named “Medecho” using Amazon’s Alexa platform, a voice only intelligent personal assistant. This skill connected to the FDA’s open source data API and the Twilio API to create an all voice medical assistant.
New Brunswick’s Office of Innovation has asked the team to iterate upon the project and to work with Robert Wood Johnson to implement the functionality in information kiosks across the city.
Each student received an Amazon Echo and a monetary prize of $256.
More information on the team’s Medecho project can be found here: https://devpost.com/software/med-echo
Photos from HackRU can be found on the Major League Hacking facebook page.