As part of the Science Center renovation and construction project, the Microfocus lab (and the rest of Sage Hall) will soon close to make way for new parts of the building. The class of 2019 decorated the Science Center for the last day of classes of the 2018-2019 year (and the last day ever in much of the Science Center).
Just another (last) day (ever) of classes in the Microfocus, CS 301.
The Microfocus beehive was also featured in the Daily Shot.
Distinguished alum and computing pioneer Mary Allen Wilkes ’59 (also recently featured in NYT Magazine) gave a CS colloquium talk to a standing-room-only crowd on Tuesday, 9 April 2019. She spoke about her work developing the operating system and programming environment of the LINC, an early personal computing system that revolutionized biomedical research, as well as the history of women in computing.
The talk was recorded (available here, talk starts at 2:40) and Mary Allen prepared a handout with recommended reading for the audience.
The Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC), created in the early 1960s at MIT, constituted a sea change from computing using large, off-line, remote, centrally-controlled computers to computers that were small, interactive and operated under the direct control of their individual users. The LINC revolutionized biomedical research, and was the gateway to personal computing. Mary Allen Wilkes was a member of the LINC development team. She will describe the dramatic transformation in biomedical research caused by the LINC, and its foreshadowing of the personal computers of today. She will also give a brief summary of the history of women in the computer field, and her experience in it in the 1960s. Ironically, the field may have been more open to women then than it is today.
Mary Allen Wilkes worked in the computer field for 11 years before turning to a career as a lawyer. As a computer programmer in the 1960s at MIT, she participated in the development of the LINC computer and wrote its system software, including its interactive operating system LAP6, one of the earliest such systems for a personal computer. Her work was recognized in Great Britain’s National Museum of Computing‘s 2013 exhibition “Heroines of Computing” at Bletchley Park, and by the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, Germany, in its 2015-16 exhibition, Am Anfang war Ada: Frauen in der Computergeschichte (In the beginning was Ada: Women in Computer History).
Wilkes is a graduate of Wellesley College and the Harvard Law School. She practiced law in the Boston area for over 35 years, including practice as a trial lawyer, an Assistant District Attorney for Middlesex County, an arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association, and an instructor in the Trial Advocacy Workshop at the Harvard Law School. She also served for eight years as a judge of the Annual Willem C. VIS International Commercial Arbitration Moot competition in Vienna, Austria, organized by Pace University Law School.
Wilkes is the author of “Conversational Access to a 2048-Word Machine” about the LINC operating system (Comm. of the Association for Computing Machinery 13, 7, pp. 407–14, July 1970) and “Scroll Editing: an On-line Algorithm for Manipulating Long Character Strings,” which describes the LAP6 document editing function (IEEE Trans. on Computers 19, 11, pp. 1009–15, November 1970).
Mimi Onuoha, currently a creative in residence at Olin College, visited Wellesley on 23 April 2019 and gave a talk, What is Missing is Still There, sponsored by CLCE,Computer Science, Media Arts & Science, Peace & Justice,
Philosophy, and Women & Gender Studies.
Mimi Onuoha is a Nigerian-American, Brooklyn-based new media artist and
researcher whose work deals with the missing and obscured remnants forged
from a society based on automation. Through layerings of code, text,
interventions, and objects, she seeks to explore the ways in which people
are abstracted, represented, and classified. Onuoha is fascinated by how
metrified societies require the fluid, organic, messiness of people to be
secured, tagged, categorized, and abstracted. In a world mediated by
computers, everything begins to look like data, and that which doesn’t fit
the mold is at risk of being forgotten.
Senior CS majors presented at this year’s CS senior poster fair, April 17.
The National Science Foundation recognized 4 Wellesley CS+ Alumnae in the Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Madeleine Barowsky
Madeleine Barowsky ’18 was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She was also awarded the National Physical Science Consortium Graduate Fellowship. Madeleine was a CS major at Wellesley and has since been working at Google. She will join the Harvard University PhD program in CS.
Senior CS majors Jennifer Chien ’19 and Emma Lurie ’19 and alum Isabelle Rosenthal ’16 were recognized with Honorable Mentions in the NSF Graduate Fellowship Program.
Emma Lurie
Jennifer will attend the CS PhD program at University of California, San Diego. Emma will attend the PhD program in information sciences at University of California, Berkeley. Isabelle, who took a few CS courses at Wellesley while majoring in neoroscience, is a graduate student in Computation and Neural System at the California Institute of Technology.
Mary Allen Wilkes ’59 and her pioneering work on the early LINC personal computer were featured in the New York Times Magazine article, The Secret History of Women in Coding, in the February 13, 2019 issue. She will give a CS colloquium talk at Wellesley on April 9.
Emma Lurie ’19, a CS and Chinese language and culture major at Wellesley, was recognized as a Runner Up in the Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher awards. Emma’s work in the Cred Lab with CS faculty member Eni Mustafaraj was previously featured here.
On Friday 16 November, MaryBeth Kery ’15, PhD student at the CMU HCI Institute, returned to campus to give a CS colloquium talk on her research in new interfaces and software engineering tools for data scientists and discussed the PhD research experience.
On Thursday 15 November, Wellesley’s Blended Learning Initiative hosted Jessica Linker ’03, director of the History of Women in Science Project at Bryn Mawr, returned to campus to speak about Women in the Virtual Lab: Using 3D Tech for Historical Inquiry.
With the start of the Fall 2018 semester, the Wellesley Computer Science Department is (belatedly) delighted to welcome and re-welcome 5 new and continuing faculty.
Our continuing colleague 
Christine Bassem, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, initially joined Wellesley as a Lecturer in Computer Science after completing her PhD at Boston University in 2015. Her current research interest is on the design and analysis of incentive-compatible mechanisms for socially-aware networking, specifically in the domains of crowd sensing and opportunistic networks. She enjoys reading, doodling, and spending time with her family.
Shikha Singh, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, is a theoretical computer scientist who does research in the area of algorithmic game theory and algorithms for big data. As part of her dissertation research, she worked extensively on designing mechanisms for incentivizing correct behavior from service providers in internet marketplaces. Shikha is also interested in the area of online algorithms, secure data structures, combinatorial optimization and complexity theory. Her research work has been recognized by multiple fellowships such as the John Marburger III Fellowship for Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, Chateaubriand Fellowship and Renaissance Technology Fellowship. Shikha joins us from Stony Brook University where she completed her PhD. She is teaching CS235 this fall. Come say hi to Shikha in SCI E114.
Andrew Davis, Lecture in Computer Science, examines the relationships between computer science and music. Trained as a composer, Andrew’s research looks at how computer coding can be used to digitally create music. His background is in music where he earned a PhD in music composition from the University of Pennsylvania. Most recently he completed his graduate work in computer science from Stanford University. This semester, Andrew is excited to be teaching CS111!
Peter Mawhorter, Instructor in the Computer Science Laboratory, does research on generative AI, with a special focus on computational narrative and implicit generative algorithms. His work overlaps with psychology, cognitive science, and literature, and part of his dissertation developed a theory of choice poetics. He comes to Wellesley from MIT, where he did a postdoc studying virtual identity systems, and before that from Pomona College, where he was a visiting professor for a year, and from UC Santa Cruz, where he got his PhD. Peter is teaching labs for CS 111 and CS 115 in both the Fall and Spring semesters this year, and you can stop by his office to say hi at SCI E128.
Sam McCauley joins us during the Fall 2018 semester as a Postdoctoral Fellow. He completed his PhD at Stony Brook University, and attended Tufts University as an undergraduate. Sam is interested in algorithms and data structures, particularly in problems that come up when querying large databases. He focuses largely on external-memory algorithms, data structures for similarity search, and scheduling algorithms. Part of what he finds exciting about these areas is that structural insights from theory can lead to significant speedup in practice. Sam is teaching CS 115 this fall.
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