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Spencer Gulbronson, a candidate for May graduation from Hamilton, has been awarded a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for 2012-13. Her project, titled “The Universal Language: Exploring Creative Approaches to Math Education,” was among 40 national winners of the Fellowships.

The total number of students on Hamilton’s campus may be smaller than an entire graduating class at big research universities, but that doesn’t mean Hamilton’s research opportunities are any more limited. In fact, as Matthew T. Farrington ’12, Diane Paverman ’13, Spencer Gulbronson ’12, Peter Lauro ’12 and alumnus Sam Hinks ’11 are discovering, research at Hamilton is just as engaging as it can be at large universities. The students are working with Professor of Computer Science Stuart Hirshfield to determine if computers can recognize the unique “signature” of a user’s brain.

Research Associate Leanne Hirshfield ’02 presented a talk titled “This is Your Brain on Computers: Using Non-invasive Cognitive and Physiological Sensors to Enhance Human-Computer Interactions” on Dec. 7 at Syracuse University.  

Hamilton students and faculty are working with the U.S. Air Force this summer on a project that measures the neurological responses to fear, frustration and suspicion of humans as they interact with computers.

Many computer users are unaware of the varied and serious threats that their computers are exposed to. To help raise awareness of computer security, Leah Wolf ’14 is working this summer with Associate Professor of Computer Science Mark Bailey on curricular work for the introductory class Secrets, Lies and Digital Threats. She is preparing all the materials for this course to be available online for other educators.

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.