Wellesley CS News

Eni Mustafaraj Receives NSF CAREER Grant on Signals for Evaluating the Credibility of Web Sources and Advancing Web Literacy

On May 12, 2018

In Awards/Honors, Faculty/Staff, News, Research

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Eni Mustafaraj was awarded the highly competitive National Science Foundation CAREER grant for early-career faculty in support of her work on “Signals for Evaluating the Credibility of Web Sources and Advancing Web Literacy.” The 5-year $460,610 grant will support Eni’s work with several student researchers under her leadership in the Wellesley Cred Lab.

Eni’s project will identify and implement signals about online sources that will help users assess their credibility (should you believe what this source is writing about climate science or gender equality?) These signals can be used to augment search results, for example in Google. A concrete example in one of Eni’s blog posts uses the metaphor of “nutrition labels” to explain this augmentation.

Wellesley Cred Lab, Spring 2018 outing

Denae Ford: Paradise Unplugged

By Editor

On May 1, 2018

In Talks

On April 30, Denae Ford, PhD candidate in CS at NCSU, gave a talk titled Paradise Unplugged.

Abstract:

Online question-and-answer (Q&A) communities, like Stack Overflow, have norms that are not obvious to all users. For example, novice users create and post programming questions without feedback, and the community enforces site norms through public downvoting and commenting. This can leave users discouraged from participating due to community barriers such as posting is hard, friends are easy; fear of negative feedback; and onboarding hoops.To determine how to increase participation, we investigate two mechanisms relating to 1) identity-based signals and 2) mentorship. First, we investigate peer parity and find that women re-engage significantly sooner after receiving answers from other women on their first question. Then, we conduct a month-long study in which we redirect Stack Overflow novices in the process of asking a question to an on-site Help Room. In the Help Room, novices received feedback on their question drafts from experienced Stack Overflow mentors. We present examples and discussion of various question improvements including question context, code formatting, and wording that adheres to on-site cultural norms. We find that mentored questions are substantially improved over non-mentored questions, with average scores increasing by 50%. These results suggest we can challenge socio-technical communities to recreate onboarding experiences across domains to increase participation.

Bio:

Denae Ford is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University where she is a member of the alt-code lab, advised by Dr. Chris Parnin. Her research identifies cognitive and social barriers to participation in online socio-technical ecosystems. A few of these ecosystems include remote technical interviews, Stack Overflow, and GitHub using biometric sensing through eye movements and nonverbal cues. Her most recent work dismantles barriers to participation taking advantage of identity deployment, peer parity, and community mentorship.

During her tenure at North Carolina State University, she has collaborated with researchers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Microsoft Research, Stack Exchange, Carnegie Mellon, University of Rochester and others. These collaborations have resulted in ACM and IEEE publications which have been presented at international conferences in software engineering and human-computer interaction.

Denae is a recipient of the National GEM Consortium Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship. She holds a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University where she also minors in Cognitive Science.

Hannah Murphy won “Outstanding Student Poster” at the Stanford Research Conference 2018

By Christine Bassem

On April 16, 2018

In Awards/Honors, Conferences, Research, Students

According to the SRC website:

“Held every spring, SURA’s annual conference serves as a forum where undergraduates from all over the country can present their work, connect with other researchers, and hear from distinguished leaders in the research community. Students who share their findings accordingly will receive valuable feedback from the students, alumni, and faculty members in attendance—feedback that will help them develop their interests further or redirect their efforts altogether. Students currently not participating in research may find a project that inspires them to explore an idea of their own. In this fashion, the conference will facilitate the exchange of information that is necessary for intellectual advancement in today’s highly interconnected society.”

This year about 10% of the posters at the conference won that award. We are very pleased to have Hannah’s poster picked out of about 100 posters this year!

Christine Bassem Receives NSF Grant on Mobility Coordination of the Crowds in Mobile Crowd Sensing Platforms

By Editor

On March 28, 2018

In Awards/Honors, Faculty/Staff, News, Research

Christine Bassem, Lecturer in Computer Science, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study “Mobility Coordination of the Crowds in Mobile Crowd Sensing Platforms.” The grant of $154,434 will support Christine’s work with student researchers on the intersection of algorithms, systems, mobile computing, and social computing.

Coordinated mobility depends on two areas: the mechanisms via which tasks/routes are assigned to agents; and the mechanisms via which agents are compensated for conformance, creating a rich set of problems in the fields of optimization problems, graph and data mining, and crowd economics. This project contributes towards the advancement of mobile crowd sensing for solving larger problems, with a great impact on smart cities initiatives, and the advancement of Internet of Things solutions.

A note from the chair

By btjaden

On January 5, 2018

In News

Hello CS! As the new year starts, I wanted to share a few thoughts and provide some updates on the past year.

The department is bigger than ever, with 58 CS and 26 MAS majors in the graduating class. Wow! We are full of life in the E-wing of the Science Center, and constantly evaluating how best to ensure inclusive excellence. A number of student groups have been doing terrific work in helping us identify ways to continue to strengthen our academic program and ensure its inclusiveness so that all members of the community feel a strong sense of belonging. It’s great to see the wonderful engagement of students making a difference both in the world and in our smaller CS community at Wellesley!

In terms of expanding our curriculum, we’ve added new courses this year, such as Introduction to Front-End Web Development (CS 204) and Logic in Computer Science (CS 312), as well as enlivened and modernized a dormant Operating Systems course (CS 341).

On the faculty and staff side of things, the department was sorry to say good bye to three wonderful members of our family. Lab Instructor Susan Buck and Hess Fellow Sravana Reddy left to pursue terrific opportunities elsewhere. During their time at Wellesley, they were excellent educators, thoughtful mentors, deep thinkers, consummate professionals, and close colleagues. We will miss them at Wellesley and we wish them the best in their pursuits. Our long-time administrative assistant, Rita Purcell, also left as she and her husband coordinated their retirement together. Rita was the hub of the CS department for nearly two decades, being the first person we went to when we had questions and the last person still in the room with us when we needed help. Rita’s retirement is well earned. We hope she has a wonderful time and, importantly, that she visits us often.

We have also been busy in welcoming new members of our community. We are delighted that Susan Lange joined us in the fall as our administrative assistant. Susan knows the College well, having worked previously with the Africana Studies Department and the Provost’s Office at the College. She’s been off to a quick start and we are grateful for all of her help. We welcomed three new faculty members this fall, as well. Dr. Cibele Freire received her PhD from U. Mass Amherst and does work in theoretical computer science, such as database theory and complexity problems. Dr. Freire is our new Hess Fellow and is teaching Languages and Automata (CS 235) this year along with a new course in Logic. Dr. Ada Lerner received their PhD from the University of Washington and does work in computer security and privacy. Dr. Lerner is teaching Data Structures (CS 230) and the popular Computer Security and Privacy (CS 342). Dr. Catherine Delcourt received her PhD from Georgia Tech and does work in human-computer interaction and social computing. Dr. Delcourt is teaching Computing for the Socio-Techno Web (CS 115) and knows the College well as an alumna! We are thrilled to have these excellent scholar-educators join us!

If you happen to be reading this and you are not on campus, please be in touch! Nothing makes us happier than connecting with students, alumnae, and other members of the community who share our interest in CS. We would love to hear from you. We wish everyone a wonderful new year!

Brian Tjaden
Chair, Computer Science Department

Valerie Zhao ’18 recognized in CRA Undergrad Researcher Awards

By Editor

On December 19, 2017

In Awards/Honors, News, Research, Students

Valerie Zhao ’18 was recognized with an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards. Valerie’s summer research was previously featured here. Valerie is currently pursuing research on the design of dynamic binary instrumentation tools for analyzing software at the machine code level, advised by Ben Wood.

“Rewriting History” Presented at ACM CCS 2017

By alerner

On December 6, 2017

In Conferences, Faculty/Staff, News, Research

Ada presented their recent paper, “Rewriting History: Changing the Archived Web from the Present” at ACM CCS 2017 in Dallas, TX in early November. In this paper, Ada studied web archives, which are websites such as the Wayback Machine that allow anyone on the web to time travel and see what the web looked like decades ago. Through analysis of the design of web archives and their interactions with other web technologies, this paper demonstrated a number of techniques by which malicious parties could modify the web of the past, injecting their own deceptive content so that anyone visiting a web archive will see not the historical contents of the pages they view, but an attacker’s deceptive content. The work was performed with attention to ethics, and the results were disclosed to the staff at the Wayback Machine, who quickly deployed several effective defenses against the vulnerabilities discovered, giving this paper real world impact.

The website of Wellesley College Circa 2000. You can visit it live at: http://web.archive.org/web/20000304134343/http://www.wellesley.edu:80/

Wellesley at SPLASH 2017, Valerie Zhao ’18 places 3rd in Student Research Competition

By Editor

On November 2, 2017

In Awards/Honors, Conferences, Faculty/Staff, News, Research, Students

Valerie Zhao ’18 and Ben Wood participated in SPLASH 2017, the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming Languages, Applications: Software for Humanity, in Vancouver, BC, in late October. SPLASH is an umbrella for several conferences and workshops in the area of programming languages.

Valerie won 3rd prize in the undergraduate category of the Student Research Competition, where she presented a poster and talk on her summer research work, Abstracting Resource Effects, undertaken at Carnegie Mellon University with Darya Melicher, Jonathan Aldrich, and Alex Potanin. Valerie’s collaborator Darya Melicher, a PhD student at CMU, presented more of their work at the OCAP workshop. Their work introduces a novel effect system that supports rigorous checking of how programs use system resources in a security-focused programming language.

Ben gave a talk on his OOPSLA paper, Instrumentation Bias for Dynamic Data Race Detection, with collaborators from Google, The Ohio State University, and the University of Washington. Their work introduced a software system for accurately detecting data races, a problematic type of concurrent programming error. The analysis helps eliminate a source of performance overhead in error detection by exploiting properties of common program patterns.

Earlier in October, Ben’s collaborator gave a talk on their paper, PARSNIP: Performant Architecture for Race Safety with No Impact on Precision, at the 50th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), in Cambridge. This work, with collaborators at U. Penn, designed efficient hardware support for data race detection that, combined with software techniques, could eventually provide always-on concurrency error detection much like modern memory-safe languages provide explicit runtime exceptions for null dereferences or array bounds errors.

Wellesley at Grace Hopper 2017

By btjaden

On October 5, 2017

In Alumnae, Community, Conferences

Wellesley is well represented at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Orlando.

The Coordinated Crowdsensing research group to present their work in HCOMP’17

By Christine Bassem

On September 27, 2017

In Faculty/Staff, News, Research, Students

Congratulations to Christine Bassem, Hannah Murphy’19, Megan Shum’19, and Amy Qui’17 on having their Work-In-Progress paper accepted in the AAAI Conference for Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP’17)!

Hannah and Christine will be presenting their work at HCOMP this October.