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?

It Begins!

Fall semester has officially started with the first meeting of the WiCS Crew (that's Women in Computer Science). We are working on a couple of podcasts based on robotics, so today we started building two types of robots.

Here are Missy, Jody, Sarah, and Logan building a WAO Cranius:



And this is Megan, Jessica, and Tina building a pan/tilt robot with a bioloid robot set.



We'll let you know when the resulting podcasts are available.

Welcome to fall!

Fall Approaches . . .

We are busy getting ready for fall and have made a few of changes to our spaces.

First, MCT 163 will no longer be an open lab. We're turning it into research space to support the various undergraduate research projects that are starting. It will give each of our research huddles a work space and a computer. This should give those project more resources and visibility, so we're hoping that it will enrich that aspect of our programs.

Second, the "zoid" (seminar room) and the department secretary's office have switched spaces. Mrs. Kann is very happy to have a window and the only downside for the seminar room is that we'll have to come up with a new name for it since it's no longer a trapezoid. Suggestions.

Third, with the retirement of Dr. Thomas, I have moved my office into his old office. We will re-purpose my old office into either a lab or space for our tutors. I'm happy to be out where I'm easier to find and I think it'll be a much more valuable use of my space.

Fourth, you may notice my reference to "tutors." We will have two graduate students who will be responsible for providing tutoring for all of our lower division (100 and 200 level) courses. Please take advantage of this!

Finally, we are welcoming a new faculty member: Dr. Alice Armstrong. Her office is between Briggs and Lee. Please stop by and welcome her to our department!

As always, I'm really looking forward to everyone coming back and our freshman class looks really strong. It should be a good year!