Several CS students participated in this year’s summer research program. Khonzoda Umarova ’20 and Emma Lurie ’19 won the best CS/Math poster prize for their work, “Stop falling for fake news: Three Easy Steps,” advised by Eni Mustafaraj. Emma was interviewed for a front page Daily Shot article.
Author: Editor (Page 4 of 9)
Three members of the Wellesley CS faculty moved on to new positions this summer.
Susan Buck, Instructor in the Science Laboratory, web programming expert, instructor at the Harvard Extension School, and co-founder of the Women’s Coding Collective among a wealth of other things, joined the department in Fall 2014 and was instrumental in developing successful infrastructure and pedagogy in the popular CS 110 and CS 111 courses for three years. The 2017 senior class rated her as “single-handedly fixing the CS pipeline.” Susan is now expanding her ongoing pedagogical and development work at the other Boston-area institutions.
Sravana Reddy, Hess Fellow and natural language researcher, joined the department in Fall 2015 and introduced popular (and highly over-enrolled!) courses on natural language processing and machine learning. Sravana’s research recently investigated gender (and its obfuscation) in writing on social media. She was also a regular member of the CS 111 team, where she led development of Otter Inspector, a user-facing testing tool for CS 111 programming assignments that has now been used by multiple new crops of CS 111 students. Sravana continues her work in natural language processing, now at Spotify.
Anna Loparev ’10, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the HCI Lab, joined the department in Spring 2016 and made countless contributions to the research output of the HCI Lab, including leading the TangiBac research project creating novel playful interactions that engage young children in bio-design activities. The fun and dynamic interfaces she created were presented at multiple venues including the Tech Museum of Innovation, the New England Science Museum, and the TEI conference in Japan. Anna also taught CS110 and CS231, an enormous help to the department in times of high enrollment demand and tight staffing. Anna is now leading user interface development for the flagship product at Waters Corporation, a major scientific instrumentation company.
Fortunately, our colleagues remain Boston-area neighbors. Stay in touch, and best wishes beyond Wellesley!
Wellesley CS Lecturer Ashley DeFlumere (#28) played goalkeeper for Ireland in the 2017 Women’s Lacrosse World Cup. Go Ashley! This fall she’ll be back teaching CS 240 and leading our peer mentoring program, hopefully with fewer fast-moving projectiles to stop.
Administrative Assistant Rita Purcell retired as of June 1, 2017, after 19 years at Wellesley. Here’s Rita with the department back in 2001 (left) and again in her final academic year with us, 2016-2017 (right):
Rita writes:
I greatly enjoyed working with the CS faculty and CS/MAS students during my years at Wellesley. We had a lot of fun together and I will miss you. Much happiness to you always!
Lip Sync MVP
Rita marked her last month at Wellesley by debuting to great acclaim at the 2017 Science Center Faculty Lip Sync. She starred with a runaway success in “Another Day of Sun” (below) and featured prominently in 5 other numbers, including with the CS 240 faculty. The senior CS majors cited her as Lip Sync MVP of 2017. Brava!
Check out Rita’s performance in this video of “Another Day of Sun” (requires Wellesley login), featuring Rita Purcell, Ophera Davis (Africana Studies), Elaine Igo (Science Center), Lauri Wardell (Physics), and Julia Miwa (Chemistry), with video courtesy of Deborah Nickerson and the Science Center, plus Nick Doe (Chemistry).
CS Department Sendoff
Rita has been a fixture (and magician) in the department for longer than many of our faculty. The CS department gathered in May to celebrate her years with us and congratulate Rita and her husband Dixon on their simultaneous retirement. We will miss you Rita, but we wish you both all the best in new adventures!
Madeleine Barowsky ’18, a rising senior majoring in CS and Math at Wellesley, is one of this year’s winners of the Computing Research Association‘s competitive Scholarships for Women Studying Information Security (SWSIS). Madeleine plans to attend graduate school to pursue her passion for computer security and cryptography.
Congratulations Madeleine!
Wellesley students have a good track record with this honor: Nick Manfredi ’15 received the award in 2014.
Members of the Wellesley HCI Lab demonstrated their HoloMuse application at a Venture Cafe Foundation event on augmented reality.
Several members of the Wellesley community traveled to Denver in May for ACM CHI 2017. The Wellesley HCI Lab presented several papers, including:
- Communicating Personal Genomic Information to Non-experts: A New Frontier for Human-Computer Interaction.
- Designing for Uncertainty in HCI: When Does Uncertainty Help?
- Understanding Gaming Perceptions and Experiences in a Women’s College Community
Wellesley participants included HCI Lab director Orit Shaer, HCI research programmer Lauren Westendorf ’15 (pictured presenting), alumnae Johanna Okerlund ’14 (now a grad student at University of North Carolina Charlotte) and Veronica Lin ’15 (now a grad student at Stanford), professor Takis Metaxas, and others.
Despite a strong showing by CS and a close game, Math somehow managed to prevail during the annual CS-Math Frisbee game. The proof was in the pulling, so to speak, but proofs are just programs and fun was had by all.
Photos by Lyn Turbak
On the last day of Spring Reading Period, a crowd of Cserious Scientists gathered for CSICSOCS 2017: the Second Annual Wellesley College Completely Serious International Conference and Symposium on Computer Science, disorganized by returning general chair Ben Wood. Illustrious and extinguished speakers delighted the intellects of all present with scintillating accounts of their research breakthroughs, both prepared and karaoked.
Photos by Lucy Shen ’17
