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
CS and MAS faculty and senior majors and minors gathered at a luncheon in the Alumnae Ballroom to celebrate the red Class of 2016. This year, we look forward to graduating 43 CS majors, 11 CS minors, and 18 MAS majors!
The CS department presented awards to seniors. Jenny Wang received the Spirit Award for promoting CS community. Tiffany Ang and Jenny Wang were recognized for their co-leadership of the student CS Club. Sam Mincheva received the Academic Award. Kim Asenbeck and Naomi Day received the Rhys and Laurel Price Jones Team Leadership Award, established by former colleague Rhys Price Jones and his wife Laurel.
Congrats Class of 2017!
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…
A new interactive website developed by CS major Andrea Jackson ’18 enables interactive exploration and analysis of data about 20 years of Ruhlman Conferences and was featured in the announcement of this year’s Ruhlman Conference. Andrea’s work is based on foundations developed by students in Eni Mustafaraj’s Data Analysis and Visualization course and students in Orit Shaer’s HCI Lab. Eni’s students presented results from a class project last year at Ruhlman 2016.
Andrea carried the work further during the 2016 Summer Research Program with advisor Eni Mustafaraj. She presented work on the website at Tanner 2016 and launched it ahead of Ruhlman 2017.
Congrats on the launch!
Wellesley CS, MAS, and Cinema & Media Studies hosted a panel on Women and Game-Making featuring demos of student work and perspectives on the future of gaming from panelists from industry and academia.
Our colleague Takis Metaxas was appointed the next faculty director of the Albright Institute. This January’s Institute featured an extensive computer science presence with 2 Wellesley CS alumnae speakers, 2 Wellesley CS faculty speakers, plus 2 other talks on topics in technology.
Navigating a Global Internet
Heather West ’07, Senior Policy Manager, Mozilla
Policy in a Bits + Atoms World
Betsy Masiello ’03, Senior Director, Public Policy & Economics, Uber
Biotechnology in the World Today
Brian Tjaden, Professor and Chair of Computer Science, Wellesley College
Building a Better World: Engineering, Leadership, and the Liberal Arts
Amy Banzaert, Director of Engineering Studies and Lecturer in Engineering, Wellesley College
(with Lyn Turbak, Associate Professor, Computer Science)
Anonymity and Reason
Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Fake News, Real Consequences
Craig Silverman, Media Editor, BuzzFeed News
The Wellesley Daily Shot highlighted the media and education impacts of TwitterTrails, the work of Takis Metaxas, Eni Mustafaraj, and several student researchers.
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!
Clara Sorenson ’18, Anne Schwartz ’18, and Eni Mustafaraj traveled to Niagara Falls in November, where Clara and Anne presented a poster on their work on Habitat Explorer at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. Habitat Explorer is a collaborative educational game for large-screen multi-touch displays that introduces children to basic concepts of data collection and data science. Clara and Anne developed the game for the MultiTaction displays in the Wellesley HCI Lab during the 2016 Summer Research Program.
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.
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