The COSC Department celebrates the first day of classes in its new home, Bernstein Hall. We are excited for the expanded opportunities for teaching, research, and collaboration that will be facilitated by our new space.
Thanh Dang ‘25 received an Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. Thanh used machine learning to uncover risk factors for Seasonal Affective Disorder under the guidance of Prof. Ahmet Ay and Prof. Krista Ingram at Colgate. Additionally, Thanh developed an evaluation infrastructure for comparing untangling tools under the guidance of Dr. Michael Ernst at the University of Washington; this work was awarded first place in the Student Research Competition at the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) 2023.
At the SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), students Anzi Wang and Aryaman Chobey presented a poster on training neural language models on a curriculum with developmentally plausible data, and Prof. Forrest Davis gave a talk on tricking language models with language illusions.
Three Colgate Computer Science students — Jaanhvi Agarwal, Anzi Wang and Aryaman Chobey — presented their summer research projects at the NY6 Undergraduate Research Conference in November 2023.
Ten Colgate computer science students attended the 2023 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing thanks to the generous support of the Tom and Liz Brackett Endowed Fund for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Computer Science.
The Department of Computer Science would like to welcome several new faculty and staff for the Fall 2023 semester. Forrest Davis, David Perkins, Raina Samuel, Savio Kay, and Kate Valete will be contributing their expertise to many courses and labs across the curriculum. If you see them around the department, please say hi!
In the special season finale of Colgate’s 13 Podcast, Profs. Noah Apthorpe, Nick Diana, and Grusha Prasad share their insights into the history of AI development, understanding the power and limitations of current AI systems, and what, if anything, we should fear about this potentially world-changing technology.
Seven students in the class of 2023 were recognized with academic awards in computer science.
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Prof. Grusha Prasad was awarded the Gibson/Fedorenko Young Scholar Prize for her presentation “Studying relative clause representations: a novel parsing model and priming paradigm” at the 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP 2023).
A map of US long-haul fiber-optic infrastructure included in Prof. Joel Sommers’ 2015 paper InterTubes: A study of the US long-haul fiber-optic infrastructure will be included in the “Cellphone: Unseen Connections” exhibit opening June 23, 2023 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
The groundbreaking for the Benton Center for Creativity and Innovation marks the beginning of construction of the new home for the Department of Computer Science in the Middle Campus.
In the course Human-Computer Interaction, Prof. Nick Diana teaches students to build technology that is meaningful. Read Aleta Mayne’s Summer 2022 Colgate Magazine Article “Computer Science, the Liberal Arts Way” to learn more.
Four Colgate computer science students were coauthors of a paper published at the IFIP Traffic Measurements and Analysis 2021 conference – Lily Davisson ‘22, Joakim Jakovleski ‘22, Nhiem Ngo ‘21, and Chau Pham ‘22. In the paper, titled “Reassessing the Constancy of End-to-End Internet Latency”, the students analyzed data made available through the RIPE Atlas project https://atlas.ripe.net to examine how constant or stable Internet latencies are as compared with a study done ~20 years ago. The full paper is available at https://www.cs.colgate.edu/~jsommers/pubs/constancy_tma21.pdf.
Xi (Chase) Jiang ‘21 won first place in the undergraduate ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at SIGCOMM 2021 for his poster on “Non-interoperability Detection for Routing Protocol Implementations.” Xi designed a system that infers packet causal relationships to detect inconsistencies in network routing protocol implementations that arise due to ambiguities in routing protocol standards. A detailed description of Xi’s work is available at https://aaron.gember-jacobson.com/docs/sigcomm2021interop.pdf
Michael Hay, Associate Professor of Computer Science, is one of three faculty members featured in Aleta Mayne’s Spring 2020 Colgate Magazine article entitled “Privacy Matters.” His work on differential privacy received an ACM PODS award. Read the article here: https://news.colgate.edu/magazine/2020/05/01/privacy-matters/
Students in Prof. Fourquet’s Computer Graphics (COSC 435) course created Colgate-themed games for their final course project. The themes ranged from rugby to cruisers, with each game having a unique visual aesthetic and play style. Students and faculty enjoyed the games during an arcade event held during final exam week. You can view and play the games at: https://www.cs.colgate.edu/~efourquet/cosc435/gallery/gallery.html
Ruchit Shrestha ‘20 was selected for Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2020. Ruchit began conducting computer science research in summer 2017, and has continued to work with Prof. Gember-Jacobson over the past two and a half years. Ruchit has made substantial contributions to two research projects on network repair and co-presented a poster at the 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in February 2019. Ruchit has also conducted research in Mathematics with Prof. Robertson, co-founded <Colgate Coders>, served as a peer tutor for CS and Math courses, and served as a community leader.
This year the CS department teamed up with Career Services to fund 10 students to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing https://ghc.anitab.org/, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Additionally, 5 Colgate CS students were awarded scholarships by GHC or by the Computing Research Association to attend, making it possible for 15 students (our largest number yet!) to attend the conference. Congratulations to all students who were awarded funding to attend!
Colgate Coders hosted a Student Internship Panel (moderated by Tam Nguyen ‘22) during which five computer science students shared their internship experiences. The panelists were: Essie Baiden ‘21 (Google Engineering Practicum Intern), Bilal Boussayoud ‘21 (Teaching Assistant at All Star Code), Brittney Chin ‘21 (Amazon Future Engineer SDE Intern), Lauren Henske ‘20 (Privacy Engineering Intern at Apple) and Ginni Song ‘20 (Software Engineer Intern at Facebook).
Prof. Hay received the 2019 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for his work “Ektelo: A Framework for Defining Differentially-Private Computations.” Ektelo is a programming framework and system that aids programmers in writing programs over sensitive data sources. The framework ensures that strong privacy protections are enforced while at the same time enables programmers to write accurate and efficient programs. More information about Ektelo can be found here: https://ektelo.github.io
Xiaolin Sun ‘20 and Prof. Gember-Jacobson attended ACM SIGCOMM 2019, “the flagship annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication.” Prof. Gember-Jacobson presented a keynote “Localizing Routing Configuration Errors Using Minimal Correction Sets” at the co-located ACM SIGCOMM 2019 Workshop on Networking and Programming Languages. The keynote focused on Prof. Gember-Jacobson’s ongoing research to automatically diagnosis human- and software-induced network configuration errors that cause networks to improperly forward traffic. Xiaolin has made significant contributions to the research and was awarded a Student Travel Grant to attend the conference.
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.
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 time consuming. The poster introduces a technique that uses unsatisfiable cores from network models based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) to accurately identify which parts of a network’s configurations are likely the cause of requirement violations. View the poster: https://aaron.gember-jacobson.com/docs/nsdi2019localizingerrors_poster.pdf
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.
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Eleven Colgate students and Professor Hay attended Grace Hopper Celebration (https://ghc.anitab.org/), the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.
The <Colgate Coders> 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!
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.
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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!
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The department hosted (a new record number!) 18 students for summer research this past summer. Students participated in a wide range of projects, including:
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
Students were inducted to the Upsilon Pi Epsilon computer science honor society.
Students in Colgate’s 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. Read more at Colgate News: http://news.colgate.edu/2018/04/student-ventures-receive-funding-during-entrepreneur-weekend.html.
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. Read more on the TIA Blog: http://blogs.colgate.edu/tiainstitute/2018/01/24/halligan-works-to-improve-the-lives-of-first-responders
In a paper to be presented at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference in Berlin in March 2018, Prof. Joel Sommers describes a study of the empirical characteristics of language tags used in HTTP transactions and in web pages to indicate the language of the content and possibly the script, region, and other information. The top-level pages of websites in the Alexa Top 1 Million sites were used in the study, with data gathered from six different geographic perspectives using a commercial VPN service.
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Leo Ascenzi ‘19 and Prof. Madeline E. Smith traveled to Sanibel, Florida to present at the 2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork (GROUP).