The Spring 2022 registration newsletter is now available.
Registration for Spring 2022 courses will begin on Tuesday, November 2. Please review the registration newsletter (linked below) for information on next semester’s options courses, a link to the registration wait-list, and a general listing of CS courses.
On September 20, Dr. Papamichail presented research co-authored by three CS Department students and alumni at the the 13th International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (IWBDA), held virtually this year. The presentation, entitled “Decodon Calculator 2: Codon-Optimized Degenerate Codon Set Design Tools” synthesizes work completed by Dr. Papamichail and Akira Takada (Class of 2021), Tomer Aberbach (Class of 2020) and Nicholas Carpino (Class of 2018) during their mentored research experiences.
Synthetic biology researchers often pursue the creation of novel proteins with improved properties. Toward this endeavor, researchers design and synthesize libraries of variants of existing proteins to isolate the changes that confer improved properties of interest. Akira, Tomer, and Nicholas have implemented successive versions of web-based tools that enable synthetic biologists to create large but specific protein variant libraries, allowing them to balance synthesis cost with protein library quality.
Congratulations to Dr. Papamichail, Akira, Nicholas, and Tomer!
Dr. Bikram Pal Turka, Senior Lecturer in the CS Department, has authored a chapter titled “Obstacles in Information System Succes” that has been published in Digitising Enterprise in an Information Age, a book published by CRC Press Taylor and Francis Group.
An abstract of the chapter can be found below:
To gain a better competitive advantage in the market, the organizations are using information systems. Most of the organizations either have established the information system or they upgrade their information system. But still there are lots of hurdles for gaining information system success. There has been a large number of analyses of critical success factors of information system projects in the literature, but there is a shortfall in research efforts in studying failures globally and particularly in India. Therefore this chapter attempts to study empirically the obstacles coming in Information system success. A questionnaire survey has been conducted to know the failures factors for not updating the information system timely. The survey has been done on two prominent telecommunication organizations, one having successful IS (Reliance Communication) due to its continuous updation with respect to time, industry and executives whereas other (Puncom, Mohali) did not. As India is the second largest country in terms of mobile users in the world, therefore, the study of this industry is strategically and economically important due to its high potential for the growth of the country.
Congratulations to Dr. Turka!
Congratulations to the seven CS MUSE students who shared their summer research projects on Tuesday, September 14, as part of the campus-wide presentation event.
Jenna Stiesi, Kiera Gill, and Matthew Hannum, mentored by Dr. Monisha Pulimood, presented their MUSE project titled “CABPortal: Leveraging Collective Intelligence to Improve
Sustainability of Web-Based Portals”.
Andrew Michael and Kyla Ramos, mentored by Dr. Sharif Ferdous, presented their MUSE project titled “Investigating the Effectiveness of a Visual Cybersickness Questionnaire”.
Michael Giordano and Vihan Patel, mentored by Dr. Michael Bloodgood, presented their MUSE project titled “Varying Validation Set Size to Improve Machine Translation”.
Students’ presentation posters are now on display on the CS Department bulletin boards across from STEM 103, the Research Lab. Congratulations again to all of our presenting students!
This summer, CS sophomore Leah Kazenmayer completed a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the University of Central Florida.
Leah shared her experience with the CS Department:
“This summer, I participated in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program for the University of Central Florida (UCF). This program incorporated Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the programming language Python, and machine/deep learning. Specifically for the project I worked on with my partner Gabriela Ford, we were given datasets from the Automated Traffic Signal Performance Measures (ATSPM) database that detailed events that occurred on roadways in Seminole County, Florida, such as vehicle volume at intersections, timestamps of traffic light changes, timestamps of pedestrian sign flashes, and so forth. We particularly focused on obtaining hourly vehicle volume within a specific corridor in Seminole County, and utilized machine/deep learning to predict the next hour based on the previous 6 hours of traffic volume.
This 8-week REU was an invaluable experience where I met new people, networked with faculty members and graduate students, and was exposed to the everyday routine of graduate school. It taught me more about Python and machine/deep learning, subjects I was completely inexperienced with; after those 8 work-intensive weeks, I can now say that I have an abundance of knowledge in both fields.
I will take all of this knowledge I have gained from this experience and use it as a resource for all future endeavors related to the computer science field, whether it be in academia or in the industry.”
Leah has also received a scholarship to attend the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration, which begins next week.
Congratulations again to Leah and thank you for sharing your summer REU experience at UCF!
Dr. Sharif Ferdous has been awarded a $174,835 grant from the National Science Foundation for his research project studying virtual reality sickness.
In recent years, Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have become more affordable and accessible to a diverse population, including children. Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges for VR technologies is virtual reality sickness, also known as cybersickness. The most common cybersickness symptoms include eyestrain, headache, sweating, fullness of head, disorientation, vertigo, nausea, etc. While much research focuses on cybersickness for adults, very little research has been conducted for children. In this project, we will focus on understanding cybersickness in children.
The Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) is the most popular method of measuring cybersickness, even though some of the questions can be harder for children to comprehend. At the beginning of the project, TCNJ undergraduate student researchers will develop a web application that augments the existing SSQ with animation that makes it easier for children. In addition, student researchers will be trained on recording and analyzing electroencephalography (EEG). In the next step, student researchers will develop a VR roller coaster simulation to study cybersickness using subjective (SSQ) and objective (EEG and heart rate variability) measures in children and compare them with adults. Finally, student researchers will investigate the conditions of different virtual environment (VE) conditions (e.g., speed, angular speed, rotation, acceleration, change in lighting, change in contrast etc.) and their effect on cybersickness in children. Ultimately, the student researchers will formulate the very first guidelines for developing VR content for children.
More details about Dr. Ferdous’s courses and research can be found on his website.
Congratulations again to Dr. Ferdous!
The Computer Science Department faculty & staff offer congratulations to Dr. Michael Bloodgood and Dr. Sejong Yoon on earning tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. Dr. Bloodgood and Dr. Yoon joined the Department in Fall 2016.
For more information on Dr. Bloodgood and Dr. Yoon’s courses and areas of research, review their faculty websites (below):
Dr. Bloodgood’s Faculty Website
Interim Dean Norvell Congratulates School of Science Faculty on Their Promotions and Retirements
A generous donation from CS alumna Jennifer Gandolfo (class of 1997) makes it possible for the Computer Science Department to offer a limited number of scholarships to current women CS majors at TCNJ who would like to attend this year’s Virtual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
Registration for the 2021 vGHC is now open for student attendees.
The GHC conference is holding virtual events again this year and eligible CS majors would be reimbursed for the Academic Registration fee of $199. Students who have already registered for the conference are also eligible to apply for the scholarship.
If you are interested in applying for the scholarship, please complete the Department’s application and also email cs@tcnj.edu to notify CS Department faculty and staff of your application submission. Applications are due by Monday, August 2. Please email Dr. Pulimood if you have questions or need additional information.
See the vGHC 21 Registration webpage for more information on the Grace Hopper Celebration and learn how to register.
Read more about Jennifer Gandolfo’s donation and the scholarship here: CS Alumna Donation Will Support Scholarship for Grace Hopper Celebration Attendee | Department of Computer Science
The Department of Computer Science is excited to feature our summer research groups and take a look at what they are working on! Today, we are highlighting the work of Dr. Michael Bloodgood’s research group.
Dr. Bloodgood’s group includes Michael Giordano (‘23) and Vihan Patel (‘22). The research team is investigating new methods for optimizing the usage of data for building machine learned NLP (Natural Language Processing) systems. The goal is to enable NLP systems to be trained and tested with lower cost and time, while maximizing performance. Applications of their research include text classification, information extraction, and machine translation.
The research team is using TCNJ’s ELSA (Electronic Laboratory for Science and Analysis) high performance computing cluster to conduct their experiments. This cluster is funded by the National Science Foundation under NSF Award #1828163. The research project is supported by TCNJ’s MUSE (Mentored Undergraduate Summer Experience) program.
REMINDER: All CS Majors are required to attend one internship information session before they can apply for internship (CSC 399) for credit.
Be sure to check Dr. Papamichail’s website and come prepared with any additional questions you might have.
Wednesday, March 3 (6:00 – 6:45 PM)
Tuesday, March 16 (7:00 – 7:45 PM)
Zoom session link: https://tcnj.zoom.us/j/98358115019?pwd=eFFqVzB3Smw3TzlWN3E4V1BtMkI0Zz09
