Can you hear that? The CS department is buzzing! There are over 200 CS and MAS majors and minors, and the majority of all Wellesley students take one or more CS classes. The CS Club is bustling, with its organization of talks, workshops, social activities, and other CS related events, including the bi-annual hackathon, WHACK, that is always hugely popular.
Our curriculum continues to evolve rapidly in response to the changing landscape of the field. The ever popular CS 110 has been redesigned into a new course, CS 115 Computing for the Socio-Techno Web, that is the gateway to the MAS major. Further, we have introduced a number of other new courses this year, including Scientific and Parallel Computing, Introduction to Front-End Web Development (think of this as a more advanced version of CS 110), Distributed Computing, Machine Learning, and together with the Neuroscience program a new seminar for first-year students only called Brains, Minds, and Machines: The Science of Intelligence.
This year, we were thrilled to welcome new faculty member, Dr. Ashley DeFlumere, with expertise in parallel scientific computation. Beloved professor, Takis Metaxas, is on sabbatical leave at the moment, but fear not, he is not far away as he has taken on the role of Director of the impressive Albright Institute at the College. And as I write this, the department is conducting a search and interviewing candidates for multiple new faculty positions so that it can continue to provide exciting novel curricular offerings and meet the growing demand from students for research opportunities, outreach, and extracurricular engagement.
The capstone CS Poster Fair has morphed this year into the CS Senior Summit, which now includes short talks as well as poster sessions of seniors presenting their work, and it culminates in a distinguished alumnae panel. There are even rumors afoot about a possible renovation / new building addition to the Science Center, which is bursting with activity. Keep your eyes and ears open for further updates.
As always, one of our favorite things is hearing from alumnae. So please, please, please, stay in touch, drop us a line, or best of all, come visit!!!
Brian Tjaden
Chair, Computer Science Department
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.
