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.

ACM Programming Competition

Last Saturday our programming team competed in the ACM's Mid-Atlantic Regional Programming Competition and fared quite well! A total of 146 teams competed at sites all over the region. We had three teams competing and all three solved at least one problem. That shows a depth rivaled by few teams from schools of our size. Rob Koch, Brian Lindsay and Missy Lewis solved three problems placing 17th overall; Jessica Burns, Elizabeth Jones, and Andrew Marx solved two problems placing 71st overall; and Casey Boone, Phil Diffenderfer, and Logan Kennedy solved one problem placing 97th overall.

I see great promise in these results and, with a few changes to how we run things, I think we'll excel in the contests this Spring. Anyone know where next year's world final will be?!

Unfortunately, I was so busy playing site director that I forgot to take pictures. I hope someone else came through on that front . . . Sorry!

Game Programming Club?

There's a rumor that some of our students have banded together to create a game programming club. I think that's terrific and I'm glad they are having fun. However, I'd like to do what I can to help you be an official club (the university and department can support you better that way). Can anyone who knows any details help me connect with the leaders of this rebel crew?