Colgate University
Computer Science

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  Summer research students at the summer research poster session

Nine students conducted research with faculty in computer science this summer. Also, several computer science majors used their CS skills to conduct research in other disciplines. The research topics included data privacy, Internet measurement, access controls, network verification, and news sentiment.

Prof. Elodie Fourquet's research and the creative work of the students in her First-Year Seminar "From Paintings to Pixels" in Fall 2018 has been featured in Colgate's quarterly research newsletter.

http://news.colgate.edu/researchmagazine/2019/03/renaissance-masters-offer-insights-into-3d-computer-graphics.html/

On March 8th, 2019, Prof. Hay presented a talk titled "Making Privacy Technology Accessible: Benchmarks and Platforms" (https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tba-58) at the Data Privacy: From Foundations to Applications Workshop held at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, Berkeley, CA.

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  (From left) Prof. Aaron Gember-Jacobson, Ruchit Shrestha '20, and Xiaolin Sun' 20 presenting a poster a NSDI 2019

Ruchit Shrestha '20 and Xiaolin Sun '20, along with Prof. Aaron Gember-Jacobson, presented a poster on their research at the 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi19).

The research focuses on localizing errors in the configurations of network routers. Router configuration errors are unfortunately common and difficult to localize using current network verification tools. Consequently, repairing a network--either manually or automatically--can be ...

Prof. Joel Sommers was recently awarded a three-year grant from the NSF for a project that seeks to develop methods for automatically capturing and analyzing metadata collected during Internet performance experiments.

The extraordinary growth of Internet connectivity and bandwidth has helped to fuel economic activity, educational opportunities, and social connections around the world. The network research community has continued to play a critical role in assessing current Internet performance and ...

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  Colgate students and Professor Hay at GHC 2018

Eleven Colgate students and Professor Hay attended Grace Hopper Celebration (https://ghc.anitab.org/), the world's largest gathering of women technologists.

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  Amazon software development panel

The club hosted two department alumni, Karen Kelley '13 and Anindya Guha '15, to talk about their experiences in the tech industry. Both Karen and Anindya current work at Amazon and discussed specifically their work as software development engineers at Amazon. Turnout for the event was great, with more than 40 students. Look out for other student-organized events in the future!

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  A packed research lounge for the student internship panel discussion

A department tea recently featured several students who spoke about their experiences finding and participating in summer internships. The research lounge was well-packed with CS students who came to hear about the experiences of their peers.

Thanks to the students who participated in the panel!
- Ryan Burczak '21, who interned at General Electric Global Research and the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland
- Liam Emmart '19, who interned at IronNet Cybersecurity ...

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  A representation of the proposed network repair system

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  A representation of the internal functionality of the proposed network repair system

Prof. Aaron Gember-Jacobson was recently awarded a four-year grant from the NSF for a project that seeks to automatically repair computer networks. Congratulations!

Modern computer networks must satisfy increasingly complex security, availability, and performance objectives to meet the diverse needs of users and applications. Consequently, programming a network to satisfy these requirements has become extremely challenging, even for highly skilled network operators. While previous work has helped operators generate policy-compliant ...

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  Summer research poster session 2018

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  Summer research poster session 2018

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  Summer research poster session 2018

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  Summer research poster session 2018

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  Summer research poster session 2018

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  Summer research poster session 2018

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  Summer research poster session 2018

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  Summer research poster session 2018

The department hosted (a new record number!) 18 students for summer research this past summer. Students participated in a wide range of projects, including:

- Differentially Private Histograms with the Exponential Mechanism
- Differentially private streaming data analytics
- Design of a Web Application for Food Allergens and Dietary Restrictions
- The Dilemma of the Horizon
- Finding Errors in Network Configurations

The photos here are of our students participating in the annual summer research ...

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  Example image from Fourquet's work

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  Example image from Fourquet's work

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  Example image from Fourquet's work

Assistant Professor Elodie Fourquet conducts research in the area of computer graphics, and was recently awarded a Colgate Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute grant with her collaborator Flip Phillips, Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Skidmore College. The grant is for $101,262 over two years for their project "Representing and Perceiving Depth in Digital Images". Congratulations, Elodie!

Read more about the award here: https://www.colgate.edu/centers-and-institutes/picker-interdisciplinary-science-institute

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  2018 UPE induction

Students were inducted to the Upsilon Pi Epsilon computer science honor society Monday evening.

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  Student entrepreneurs receive alumni funding

Students in Colgate's http://www.colgate.edu/distinctly-colgate/entrepreneurship">Thought Into Action entrepreneurship program pitched their ventures at the 7th annual E-Weekend. Four groups, including a group with several CS students, received alumni funding. http://news.colgate.edu/2018/04/student-ventures-receive-funding-during-entrepreneur-weekend.html">Read more at Colgate News.

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  Halligan aims to improve first responder safety

Halligan is a cloud based SaaS (Software as a Service) platform for first responders, created by Colgate alumni and students with the help of Colgate's Thought Into Action entrepreneurship institute. Adam Pratt '18 writes about the story behind the service. http://blogs.colgate.edu/tiainstitute/2018/01/24/halligan-works-to-improve-the-lives-of-first-responders/">Read more on the TIA Blog.

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  Observed number of occurrences of language subtags on the Alexa top 1 Million websites

The Internet is a global phenomenon. To support broad use of Internet applications such as the World Wide Web, character encodings have been developed for many scripts of the world's languages and there are standard mechanisms for indicating that content is in a particular language and/or tailored to a particular region.

In a paper to be presented at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference in Berlin in March ...

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  Leo Ascenzi '19 presenting

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  Leo Ascenzi '19 with a poster describing the research project

Leo Ascenzi '19 and Prof. Madeline E. Smith traveled to Sanibel, Florida to present at the 2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork (GROUP)

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  Audience at Portilla talk

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  Portilla speaking about Microsoft AI

On Wednesday, November 29, Pedro Portilla, Global Managing Principal in Financial Services at Microsoft, visited the department to speak about the use of AI in both technical and business aspects of the company. The event was sponsored by the Colgate Coders, one of our undergraduate clubs in computing and computer science.

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  Professor Vijay Ramachandran advises students during the Prep for Tech coding challenge at the Coop. Photo by Andrew Daddio.

An article by Emily Daniel '18 in the Autumn 2017 edition of the Colgate Scene describes Prep for Tech, a two-day workshop sponsored by the Colgate Professional Networks, Career Services, and the CS department. It brought alums in person and remotely back to campus to work with students on interview practice and mentoring for future careers in technology. Read the story at http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2017/11/stay-connected-15 ...

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  An entropy map of User-Agent strings from Android and iOS devices.

Prof. Joel Sommers has two papers in the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in November 2017 (https://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2017/), in London, UK. The papers are co-authored with colleagues from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Oregon, and the Internet analytics firm comScore.

One paper (http://cs.colgate.edu/~jsommers/pubs/imc17_ua.pdf), which will be presented by a colleague from comScore, analyzes a large corpus of User-Agent ...

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  Overview of CPR

Modern computer networks must satisfy a complex and evolving set of security, availability, and performance requirements to meet the diverse needs of users and applications. Configuring a network's routers to satisfy these policies is a daunting task due to the low-level of abstraction exposed by a router's control plane, the intertwined nature of requirements across traffic classes, and the desire to maintain policy-compliance under a range of network ...

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  Welcome sign outside convention center

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  The career fair at GHC.

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  Career fair at GHC.

Three students from the department attended the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) for Women in Computing this past October, which was in Orlando, Florida. All three students were sophomores, and one had attended as a first-year student. Two of our students applied for and received CRA-W (Computing Research Association: http://www.cra.org) research scholarships to attend, with partial support . GHC is a *celebration* — there were roughly 18,000 attendees, and ...

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  Photo by Mark DiOrio

Computer-science major Ryan Diew '17 pitches his app, http://trippie.co/">Trippie, developed through Colgate's Thought Into Action (TIA) program, on ABC's Shark Tank. http://news.colgate.edu/2017/09/alumnus-ryan-diew-dives-into-shark-tank.html/">Read the full story on the Colgate News website.

17 students (likely a record number!) participated in research projects over this summer, in conjunction with 7 faculty in the department. Many of them participated in the poster session, held in late July (http://calendar.colgate.edu/event/summer_research_poster_session_2017).

The students in the photo here are taking a break by playing a board game in the research area.

Saw Lin '17 presented the paper "Balancing Overhead-Minimization Objectives in Network Probing-Path Selection" co-authored with Tinotenda Zinyama '18 and Prof. Vijay Ramachandran at IEEE ISCC 2017 in Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

The CS department held its 20th annual http://upe.acm.org">UPE honor society induction ceremony. Congratulations to all the inductees!

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  Stephanie Tortora ‘17, Prof. Madeline E. Smith, Prof. Aaron Gember-Jacobson, Bria Vicenti ‘17, Lauren Henske ‘20, and Zoila Rodriguez ‘18 representing Colgate Computer Science at the 2016 Grace Hopper

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  Nearly 15,000 people attended the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration in Houston, TX.

Six members of the Colgate University Computer Science Department traveled to Houston, TX last week to participate in the 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Students Lauren Henske ‘20, Zoila Rodriguez ‘18, Stephanie Tortora ‘17, and Bria Vicenti ‘17 and Professors Aaron Gember-Jacobson and Madeline E. Smith were among nearly 15,000 attendees of the conference this year.

The three-day conference celebrates the contributions made by women to ...

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  Prof. Aaron Gember-Jacobson

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  Prof. Madeline E. Smith

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  Prof. Darren Strash

Three new faculty members joined the department in Fall 2016:

Aaron Gember-Jacobson, (BS Marquette University; MS, PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison) comes to Colgate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he recently completed his PhD. His dissertation title is “Novel Abstractions for Data Center Network Management.” Aaron’s teaching specialties include computer science, specifically networking and operating systems; and his research interests center on software-defined networking, network management, and cloud computing ...

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  CS major Rohan Chaudhari '19 participates in bootcamp

Colgate University's Fox Leadership Program supported a group of students, including several computer-science majors, participate in a winter break business accelerator bootcamp formed by a partnership between Colgate's career services and General Assembly. http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2016/05/students-at-general-assembly-business-accelerator.html">Read more in the Spring 2016 issue of the Colgate Scene.

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  UPE induction photo by Ryan Diew '17

Twenty-seven computer-science students are members of the http://upe.acm.org/">Upsilon Pi Epsilon honor society, and we welcomed new inductees at a ceremony on April 27. Congratulations to all our successful students!

Four computer-science students and two computer-science alumni were among the 10 winners of this year's http://www.colgate.edu/distinctly-colgate/entrepreneurship/colgate-entrepreneurs-fund">Colgate Entrepreneurs Fund, providing seed funding, incubator space, and support for their ventures. http://blogs.colgate.edu/tiainstitute/2016/04/20/congratulations-to-the-2016-colgate-entrepreneurs-fund-winners/">Read more about the projects here.

Colgate was a silver-level sponsor at the New York Celebration of Women in Computing conference held April 8-9, 2016 in Lake George, NY. Students and faculty attended various events at the conference including presenting their work at a poster session.

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  Samantha Braver ’18 helps teach computer coding at Hamilton Central School as a member of the Colgate Women in Computer Science club. (Photo by Andrew Daddio)

Three volunteers from Colgate's Women in Computer Science Club will run a computer-science club offered for students in grades 3 through 5 at the local Hamilton school. For more information, see http://news.colgate.edu/2016/03/colgate-students-teach-coding-at-local-elementary-school.html/">this Colgate news story and http://m.uticaod.com/article/20160227/NEWS/160229517">this article from the Utica Observer-Dispatch.

Lillie Pentecost '16 presented the research paper that she co-authored with visiting Prof. John Stratton at the Second International Workshop on Hardware-Software Co-Design for High Performance Computing (Co-HPC 2015) (http://codaash.org/co-hpc). Lillie did the research under Prof. Stratton's supervision this past summer.

The Women in CS club ran an outreach program for grades 3-5 at Hamilton Central School for CS education week (first week of December, every year).

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  Assistant Professor Michael Hay (photo by Susan Kahn)

DARPA awarded Prof. Hay nearly $500,000 to participate in Project Brandeis, a new program that challenges researchers from across the country to develop systems that facilitate data analysis while preserving privacy. http://news.colgate.edu/2016/01/professor-hay-earns-500000-data-security-grant.html/">Read more...

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  A map of the U.S. Long-haul Fiber-optic Infrastructure

Working with a team of researchers, Prof. Sommers created a map of the cables that power the Internet by putting together ISP maps and cross referencing against a massive set of public records. http://news.colgate.edu/2015/10/work-co-produced-by-professor-joel-sommers-featured-in-technology-review.html/">Read more...

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  Grace Hopper conference, Anita Borg institute

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Four of our students attended the recent Grace Hopper Conference.
http://gracehopper.org/2015-scholars/spano-samantha-app2912s1/">Sam Spano, http://gracehopper.org/2015-scholars/vicenti-bria-app2641s1/">Bria Vicenti, and http://gracehopper.org/2015-scholars/mcgill-courtney-app3163s1/">Courtney McGill were selected as Grace Hopper scholars, winning support to attend the http://gracehopper.org">Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing conference in October. Samantha Braver was selected as a http://gracehopper.org/hoppers/">Hopper, a conference volunteer ...

During the week of Sept. 28, 2015, students in COSC 201, "Computer Organization," got to use digital logic gates and switches to build the arithmetic units used in electronic computers. This course is taught by Profs. Nevison and Stratton. Many thanks to the Physics department for lending us the equipment!

Prof. Philip Mulry was presented with a gift at the first department tea for the Fall 2015 semester to thank him for his dedicated service to the department as chair for the past several years. Prof. Vijay Ramachandran, the current department chair, presented him with the gift and thanked him for the many things that he has done for the department. Under Mulry's leadership, the department has seen huge ...

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  Cindy Han, Vijay Ramachandran, John Simoni, and Michael Chavinda at the 2015 Summer Research Poster Session. Photo by Tom Balonek.

Michael Chavinda '17 and Duy Tran '17, working with http://cs.colgate.edu/~efourquet/">Assistant Professor Elodie Fourquet, were recognized as one of three top projects presented at Colgate's Summer Research Poster session on Thursday, July 23. Their work is titled "Drawing: The Elephant in the Coding Room." http://news.colgate.edu/2015/07/students-present-summer-research.html/">Read more about the poster session at Colgate News.

The CS department held its annual http://upe.acm.org">UPE honor society induction ceremony. Congratulations to all the inductees!

Mackenzie Baler
Matthew Brauner
Sam Daulton
Andy Dau
Anindya Guha
Charles Jennings
Justin Lannin
Jiayang Li
Dong Mai
Minh Nguyen
Neil Walton
Samantha Whalen (absent in photo)

Prof. Ahmet Ay and three Colgate CS majors/minors merge biology, math, and computer science to publish two journal articles about zebrafish. Read the Colgate News article by Kellyann Hayes '16 for more: http://news.colgate.edu/2014/11/professor-ahmet-ay-and-students-merge-biology-math-and-computer-science-in-published-papers.html/

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  WiCS visiting Facebook in NYC.

Lauren Yeary '15 and Farah Fouladi '15 organized a midterm-break trip to New York City for the Women in Computer Science club to connect with tech companies. Read more here: http://news.colgate.edu/2014/10/lauren-yeary-15-farah-fouladi-15-organize-trip-to-nyc-with-other-female-computer-science-majors.html/

Professor Michael Hay in our department is one of several faculty to have been awarded research grants from the National Science Foundation. Read more about Colgate grant winners here: http://news.colgate.edu/2014/09/national-science-foundation-grants-foster-faculty-research.html/

As part of the department renovation, the area that used to occupy McGregory 317 has been refashioned into a research and workspace for department majors and minors. All three windows that were formerly blacked out have been opened up, and couches (with built-in power jacks), a couple large flatscreens, and other amenities have been added.

Over the summer, the home of the Computer Science department at Colgate received a major renovation. As you'll see in the photos, "major renovation" may even be an understatement!

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  Eli Goberdon '16 and Junghyun Seo ’16.

Eli Goberdon '16 writes about his experience working with Prof. Elodie Fourquet studying lighting in 3D environments. Prof. Fourquet joined the department in July 2014. Read more here: http://news.colgate.edu/2014/08/eli-goberdon-16-brings-to-light-techniques-for-lighting-the-stage-and-the-screen.html/

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  Michael Dunnegan '16 at BuildingBlok (courtesy Colgate website)

Michael Dunnegan '16, one of our computer-science majors, recently wrote a guest post for the Colgate website about his 2014 summer internship at BuildingBlok, a tech startup in New York City. Read his post here: http://news.colgate.edu/2014/07/computer-science-major-mike-dunnegan-16-builds-coding-skills-at-buildingblok.html/

The home of the computer science department at Colgate --- the 3rd floor of McGregory Hall --- is getting a major facelift this summer. Students wrote on the walls of the hallway near the current 317 space to say farewell to the old setup. We will follow up in fall with photos of the new space!

A lunch-time party marked the end of the semester and end of the 13-14 academic year. Congratulations and best wishes to all our graduating seniors!

The first Computer Science thanksgiving dinner was held at the Colgate Inn on November 19. Thanks to Lauren Yeary '15 and Farah Fouladi '15 for organizing this event!

We have weekly department "teas" on Tuesdays with an informal presentation and/or discussion over lunch. These photos of our majors and minors in the department are from the November 19, 2013 tea.

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  Lauren Yeary '15 and Farah Fouladi '15

Two Computer Science majors, Farah Fouladi '15 and Lauren Yeary '15, recently started holding tutoring and problem-solving sessions for women enrolled in our intro-level courses.

Q: Can you describe a bit of what you do and your goals for these sessions?

Lauren: Right now these sessions are taking on more of a tutoring style meeting where the women in 101 and 102 come with problems from review sheets or from ...

Two teams from the CS department recently competed in the ACM International Programming Competition Northeast preliminaries held in Oswego on 13 October. Congratulations!

There are department teas - short talks with discussion - every Tuesday in the department. The photos here are of a tea given by Rohan Mehta '14, on research he did over summer '12.

We had our annual department barbecue on September 20, 2012. The weather cooperated this year, and the food was catered by Doug's Holy Smoke.

The last day of classes was marked with a lunchtime party for students and faculty. Prof. Mulry awarded Avi Das '12 and Roberto Segebre '12 with iPads in appreciation for their work in running the CS club over the past year.

Thanks for Jay Bauer '12 for taking the photos!

The CS club hosted a lunch and information session that coincided with Google CodeJam. CS majors were on hand to discuss what it's like being a COSC major at Colgate, internship opportunities, jobs, research and other topics.

On October 22, six of our students competed in the preliminary round of the Northeast Preliminary Round of 2011 Northeast North America Regional Competition of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. One our teams finished second overall (out of 18 teams). The top three teams advance to the regional competition. Congratulations to all students!

We had our annual department barbecue on October 4, 2011. Congratulations to Josh, winner of this year's iPod!

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  Roberto Segebre '12 and Avi Das '12

7 students spent time on campus doing research this summer: Avi Das '12, Ahmad Emad '13, Mstislav Fedorchuk '13, Alan Keith '12, Marvin Ma '12, Roberto Segebre '12, and M. Paul Weeks '12.

Projects that students were involved in:

Ahmad Emad '13 and Mstislav Fedorchuk '13
Marvin Ma '12 and M. Paul Weeks '12

"Expanding the Functionality of Internet Routers"
These students are contributing to a long-term project that has ...

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  Mark Miller '11 and Rado Ivanov '11

Radoslav Ivanov and Mark Miller successfully defended their honors theses this spring.

Mark's thesis was titled "A computer scientist's guide to predicting the future - of major league soccer matches", and examined machine learning methods for predicting the outcome of major league soccer matches.

Rado's thesis was titled "The MRAI-to-link delay ratio: a very important condition for BGP convergence" and examined aspects of routing convergence properties of the ...

Post Graduation Plans for Graduating Seniors Include:

Software engineer at ZocDoc in NYC. Voted the #1 best place to work in NYC by Crains magazine.
Analyst on the Foreign Exchanges Sales & Trading desk with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Software engineer for Autodesk
Hedge fund.
Internship at Mt. Sinai in NYC
CDM Training Institute
InterActive Corp.
PhD program at Cornell
PhD program at University of Chicago
PhD program at UPenn ...

Congratulations to our graduates:

Drew Brien
Carson Carlisle
Jonathan Hall
Radoslav Ivanov
Jonathan Joelson
Michael Komosinski
Michael Lam
Louis Mensah
Mark Miller
Tiantong Yu
Will Vernon
Bimo Wahyugroho
Evan Zimmerman

Minors:
Henry Bottger
Thomas Dinitz
Alexander Montgomery
Nedelina Teneva

Post-graduation plans for these students include:
Software engineer at ZocDoc in NYC. Voted the #1 best place to work in NYC by Crains magazine.
Analyst on the Foreign Exchanges Sales & Trading ...

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  (L-R) Mark Miller '11, Drew Brien '11, M. Paul Weeks '12, John Raffensperger '12, Alan Keith '12, Radoslav Ivanov '11

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Six of our students were inducted into the Upsilon Pi Epsilon computer science honors society in May, 2011. Congratulations!

Our graduates get jobs. Some of the companies with which they've found employment in the past couple years:

AMS
Applications Developer for Federal Government
Arthur Andersen Consulting
Brigade Capital Management
Cisco Systems, Inc.
Credit Suisse
Crossfire Consulting
E-commerce Group
Empirix Corp.
Epic Systems Corp.
FactSet Research Systems
FGM, Inc.
Fletcher Spaght, Inc.
GE Capital
IBM
iXL Enterprises
JP Morgan
JWM Partners, LLC
Keane, Inc.
Nike
PriceWaterhouseCooper
Sandia
Solucians
Stanley ...

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  Prof. Mulry with Drew Brien '11

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  Prof. Mulry with contest winner Marius Dragus

Drew Brien '11 created the CS Club and held weekly meetings for interested students--not limited to CS majors. At the end of the spring semester, Drew organized a programming contest in which Marius Dragus won. Marius was the happy recipient of an iPad for his hard work!

The CS department took over the field house bowling lanes for a party and some friendly competition.

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  Alan Keith '12

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  Avi Das '12 and Kate Byun '12

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  John Raffensperger '12 and Kenley Unruh '12

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  Mark Miller '11, Carson Carlisle '11, and Evan Zimmerman '11

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  Oana Patilea '12

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  Sue Sawyer

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  Zach Rabin '13, winner of the iPod drawing

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  Dharmesh Bhatt '13

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  Max Segan '13 and Prof. Jaggard

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  Sommers family

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  Zach Rabin '13 and Josh Zukoff '13

Photos from our annual department barbeque, September 2010. The weather wasn't especially cooperative, so it was held in the CS department lounge.

Welcome to the Department of Computer Science!

With the fall term rapidly approaching we can look back on an exciting past academic year. First of all we pass on our hearty congratulations to the CS class of 2011 graduates who are already making their mark on the world. We can boast 100% employment or attendance in graduate school for this group which is a testament to the hard work and ...

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  John Raffensperger '12 and Tiantong Yu '11

Tiantong Yu '11 and John Raffensperger '12 accompanied Prof. Joel Sommers to the 8th GENI Engineering Conference in San Diego, CA in July 2010 to present a poster on their work to develop a passive network measurement system for GENI (http://www.geni.net). The students fielded questions from other GENI researchers and participated in various conference sessions.

The weather cooperated for our annual department barbeque in Fall of 09. The new CS department t-shirts were a hit.