Wellesley is well represented at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Orlando.
Category: Community (Page 1 of 2)
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!
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
Following in the footsteps of SCI Lip Sync greats Eni Mustafaraj and Takis Metaxas, the CS 240 Spring 2017 faculty team debuted at the 2017 Science Center Faculty Lip Sync with Callq Me Maybe (a.k.a., Conditional Recursive Procedure Call). Video courtesy of Deborah Nickerson and the Science Center, Eni Mustafaraj, and Jamie Yip ’18.
CS 240 vocalists Ashley DeFlumere (also on fan-and-heatsink cowbell), Jean Herbst (also on hand-tuned disassembled computer guts and keyboard), and Ben Wood (also on DEC VT100 keytar), were honored to be joined by Lip Sync MVP Rita Purcell (on beat-the-bugs-out-of-it PC drums), who found time among her other acclaimed performances to round out the band at the last minute with no rehearsal!
Rumor has it latent talents are hiding among other CS faculty and will debut next year…
CS majors in the class of 2017 presented at the 2017 Wellesley Computer Science Seniors Summit, featuring a poster fair, talks, and a panel of distinguished alumnae working in technology (captured in video here).
The student-run Wellesley CS Club hosted the latest hackathon in their Wellesley Hacks! series, WHACK: Hacking the Glass Ceiling, on February 11-12.
The new Wellesley CS Systems Reading Club, sponsored by Ashley DeFlumere, Ben Wood, and Christine Bassem (a.k.a. “ABC systems”) drew a range of students and faculty who met weekly to read and discuss classic or cutting-edge research papers in the area of computer systems, broadly defined. Each week, one or two students led discussion about the week’s paper. Topics included operating systems and virtualization, NASA hardware, quantum computing, distributed network protocols, reasoning about concurrency, voting system security, and more. Hopefully we will be back for more in future semesters!
The student-run Wellesley Computer Science Club’s Fall 2016 WHACK hackathon drew 80 participants to hack for social good in partnership with several Boston area organizations.
Several Wellesley students, alums, and faculty converged in October for the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Jenny Wang ’17 also caught up with C of CLRS.
