Open House

A couple of Saturdays ago, I helped at our Open House for prospective students.  I should do that very regularly!  Bragging about our programs to them is a great way to remind me of all of the cool things we do.  There are so many things, I thought I'd share the slides from the presentation so everyone can be awed by us!  Let me know what I have missed so I can brag about more next time!

Tech Talks

Every Friday, Dr. Briggs is running a series of talks (Tech Talks) about our machines, labs, servers, etc.  Today he talked about accounts on our machines and how they can leverage AFS and our VPN to access/share files.  We are working on posting a video of the talk and notes with the details onto our equipment support web site: https://sites.google.com/a/cs.ship.edu/equipment-support/

Let us know if there are topics that you are interested in so we can keep this series going strong!

Dr. Lee's Research With Her Students

Dr. Lee has been actively working to involve both graduate and undergraduate students in her research projects.  She has just returned from a trip to The 13th CUR National Conference was Undergraduate Research which was titled Transformative Practice: Developing Leaders and Solutions for a Better Society. The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) National Conference 2010 was held at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, June 19 - 22, 2010. 

Dr. Lee presented a poster titled "Accurate and Efficient Solvers for Analyzing DNA Microarray Gene Expression" and it detailed her work on recovering missing values for a given DNA microarray gene expression for complex diseases like Crohn's Disease and Type II diabetes.  This is an ongoing project for Dr. Lee and she has successfully included Fen Qin, a graduate student, into the research.  This summer, she has grants to fund not only Fen's activities, but to also include Matt Freed, an undergraduate student.  Expect to see more as this project continues . . .

One of our Graduate Students Solved a Problem in SIAM

SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) poses problems to see if readers can solve them.  Recently, they posed "A Liouville-Type Property for Differential Inequalities" and one of our graduate students was an author on one of the solutions they accepted.  Check out Fen Qin's amazing mathematical skills.

Programming Team is victorious, again!

Our programming team competed at a contest at Dickinson College this weekend.  There were fifteen teams from about seven schools including Dickinson, Gettysburg, Messiah, and Lebanon Valley College.  Phil Diffenderfer, Andrew Marx, and Keith Porter came in first place by solving all of the problems with an hour to spare.  To challenge them, the head judge gave them an extra problem that was in previous competitions but never solved.  They came close to getting that one, too!  Dane Howard, Logan Kennedy, and Rob Koch solved five problems placing in third.  Philip Hagar and David Kelly solved two problems as did Jessica Burns, Emily Bruckart, and Danielle Leonard.  Four people earned jackets (Dane Howard, Andrew Marx (though both of them should have earned theirs previously), David Kelly, and Danielle Leonard!

We travel to West Chester to compete against the other State System teams on April 10th.  I think we'll do well!

Weekly Programming Contest

The Programming Team is running a weekly programming competition that all of our students are invited to join!  You can find details at https://sites.google.com/a/cs.ship.edu/progteam/online-contest and it's an opportunity to make some money!  The contest a cumulative through the semester and the department has pledged $100 for first place, $60 for second place, and $40 for third place. The first problem has been posted and is due by 2/6, so get started!

A new semester begins

We are approaching the end of the first week of classes of spring 2010.  Here are some things to watch for:

• Our Testing & XP course will be building applications for a local business and a teacher in Chambersburg
• Our programming team will compete in two competitions.
• Our programming team is starting a weekly running competition with prizes at the end of the semester (check it out)
• Our Game Development Club is going to start development with Flash Professional
• The BROADSIDE Center will continue work with local industries
• We are making proposals to update and improve some of our lab equipment
• We have 26 seniors completing senior research projects covering a wide variety of topics

I'll try to keep you posted, but, if I get busy and forget to post news every week, NAG ME!!!