All News

Graphic interface tools can help students in computer science understand the programs they are dealing with. Ru Jun Han ’14 is working with Associate Professor of Computer Science Mark Bailey on a user-friendly graphic interface tool for beginner computer science students.

Computer programming, and specifically natural language processing, has the potential to decode sentence structure and organize immense quantities of information. This summer, Richard Klockowski ’12 is working with Associate Professor of Computer Science Alistair Campbell with aspirations to automatically extract information from Pubmed’s database of medical research papers.

Four Hamilton students were co-authors of a paper accepted for presentation at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing held May 7-12 in Vancouver, B.C.

Sam Hincks ’11 was recently awarded first place in the student research poster competition at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Northeast Region Conference. His poster was titled "The Optimal Mind-Reader: Data Maining Schemes That Decipher FNIRS Output."  Hincks attended the conference at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass., on April 15-17, with Stephen Harper Kirner Chair of Computer Science Stuart Hirshfield.

Having received a grant for $458,900 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Stuart Hirshfield, the Stephen Harper Kirner Chair of Computer Science, and Research Associate Leanne Hirshfield ’02 have begun studying the real-time, quantitative assessment of computer users’ mental states to enhance usability testing and to create adaptive computer systems. They are creating a state-of-the-art usability laboratory that allows them to make concurrent cognitive, physiological and behavioral user measurements.

Facebook is one of the Internet’s most popular phenomena; the site already has more than 400 million active users, and an average of 374,000 new people join every day. But users may not realize that putting a lot of their personal information on Facebook could leave them open to identity theft and other security issues. Working under Associate Professor of Computer Science Mark Bailey, Spencer Gulbronson ’12 is creating exercises to inform college students about security threats that could put their most essential information at risk.

Hamilton hosted a Community-based Research (CBR) program on Friday, Nov. 6, arranged by New York Campus Compact, at which four CBR models currently in use as part of Hamilton courses were presented. Faculty members from Colgate and SUNY/IT as well Hamilton faculty and two Levitt Vista workers attended this roundtable which included discussions of best practices for student learning and community outcomes.

One plus one is undoubtedly two. One times one is indubitably one. But what happens when you put a whole string of these simple calculations together? That is what Tawanda Mashavave ’10 researched this summer. His project was designated as computer science research, but it was geared more toward number theory. With Professor of Computer Science Richard Decker, Mashavave analyzed integer complexity: the integer complexity of a positive integer n, denoted by c(n), is the least amount of 1s used to represent n using only additions, multiplications, and parentheses.

A written assignment can be deceiving. Even if the finished product is immaculate, the student might have put in many hours of work in order to get it to that point. On the other hand, holes in a student’s argument indicate that he either rushed through that portion of his analysis or toiled over its synthesis for longer than necessary. Matt Russell ’11 sees this as a problem for educators who are trying to help their students understand classroom material. If they cannot see what areas on which their students are spending an inordinate amount of time, they cannot help them improve. This summer, Russell worked with Associate Professor of Computer Science Mark Bailey to design a computer program that will visually represent the time spent on certain aspects of computer programming. 

If your computer begins to flash neon colors and warning signs, it’s not about to explode. It could be a malware or virus that resulted from a buffer overflow – a problem that occurs when a program stores data outside the memory the programmer set aside for it. A buffer overflow won’t kill the computer, but it will make it more vulnerable to hackers.