Folding@Home Milestone - AGAIN!

Today we broke another Folding@Home milestone! We are now 295th out of 157,000! Last week we added a PS3 to our team, but we can always use more power. If you're interested in joining the team or learning more, check out http://clipper.ship.edu/folding/

Folding@Home Milestone

Matt Geiman has set up our labs to participate in an important distributed computing project; Folding@Home is a project run by Stanford University that is studying how proteins fold. This research has the possibility of helping us understand how protein folding affects many diseases. You can read more at folding.stanford.edu.

Our big news is that, of 157,000 participating teams, our team has broken into the top 1000! We are currently 905th! Check our progress with up-to-date statistics.

However, we can do better than that! If you'd like to set up your machine to be a part of our team, it's really easy:

There are folding clients available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS's, as well as Playstation 3's. So even if some people don't leave their computer on but they have a PS3, its easy enough to let the game console fold.

Our team name is Shippensburg University Computer Science Department
Our team number is 163348

The Folding@Home site is here: http://folding.stanford.edu/

It can be a little hard to navigate, so here are some useful links that can take a while to find:

To register your username so that no one else claims your work as their own, you can get a passkey emailed to you here:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/getpasskey.py

You can check if your desired username is in use here:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download#ntoc2

I'll keep you posted on our progress!

Programming Team Rocked Slippery Rock

This weekend the programming team traveled to Slippery Rock to complete in the annual PACISE programming contest. This is where the teams from the state system schools compete. We took three teams. Dane Howard, Logan Kennedy, and Rob Koch were the only team to solve 6 problems and came in first. Casey Boone, Phil Diffenderfer, and Brian Lindsay were the fastest team to solve 5 problems, so they came in second. Tristan Dalius, Matt Hydock, and A.J. Marx were the fasted team to solve two problems and came in fifth.

For our first team, this is a dramatic improvement over the contest at Dickinson the previous weekend. A couple of strategic mis-steps caused us to fall from first to fourth place in the last 30 minutes of the competition. It's a great example of how strategy plays a roll in these events.

Our second team gives us great hope for the future; it includes a freshman (Brian) and a sophomore (Phil) who, if they keep practicing, hold great potential for regional competitions over the next couple of years.

I'll work on getting a picture - took the camera and forgot to use it!

Skin Sensor Trial

On Friday, we had an official clinical trial of a new device we have built. Last summer, we received a grant to build a device to measure the color of skin by analyzing the reflectivity of the skin at nine different wavelengths. We have built three prototypes of the device and a java application that analyzes the data.

In the trial, we measured the color of 111 participants with our device and with two similar existing commercial devices. In addition, we gathered information on ethnicity, gender, and Fitzpatrick skin type assessments for every participants. We certainly have a lot of data to analyze now!

Professor Briggs becomes Dr. Briggs

Today, Professor Briggs successfully defended his PhD dissertation. Titled, " Constraint Generation and Reasoning in OWL," it was focused on weaknesses in the current set of semantic web documents in the Swoogle database. In particular, these documents are often not completely specified and Briggs investigated ways to automatically complete those specifications. Those generated restrictions could cause issues with the subsequent reasoning, so Briggs also developed theoretically sound modifications to the standard reasoning rules that detect such problems and can retract everything that was inferred from generated restrictions.



This is an important milestone for our department. Dr. Briggs has been a strong faculty member throughout his tenure with us and we are pleased that he will be able to continue to challenge our students in a wide variety of ways.

WiCS Field Trip

On Friday, WiCS took a trip to the Volvo PowerTrain plant in Hagerstown to see the robots. Our tour guide, Harold Duffey, was a retired engineer who had a wealth of knowledge about the company, the things that were being manufactured, and the direction Volvo is planning for that facility. While we met our goal of seeing robots in action (and we'll make a podcast to tell you more about that), we also learned a lot about manufacturing in general. It was certainly an insightful tour. We ended the day with a trip to the outlets to learn about dressing for interviews. Here we are at the start of the day:

From Trip to Volvo

Jessica, Megan, Danielle, Missy, Elizabeth, Tina, Harold Duffey, Dr. Armstrong, and Sarah (I took the picture!)

Trip to See Brian Kernighan

Professors Briggs and Armstrong took a group of students to Johns Hopkins University to see a talk by Brian Kernighan (one of the original authors of C and Unix). He was speaking on "The Changing Face of Programming" and it turned out to be a very interesting talk. The main focus was on programming languages and how they change as the applications we build change. As the discipline moves from software that resides in individual devices to web-based applications, the features required by a language change dramatically. On the way home, the discussion continued with how this shift in application-type could also affect the demands on the operating systems we develop.