New England Undergraduate Computing Symposium 2012
Celebrating Excellence and Diversity in Computing
Saturday, April 21, 2012 Brandeis University
The NEUCS organizing committee invites all undergraduates in computing sciences at universities, colleges, and community colleges in New England to participate in the fourth New England Undergraduate Computing Symposium. Organized annually to celebrate Excellence and Diversity in Undergraduate Computing.
Undergraduates are invited to share exciting projects they’ve been working on over the past year. These projects can be creative homework assignments from classes, independent research projects, senior honors thesis projects, software built for fun, or any other computing project including such areas as biology, physics, social networks. Students can share their projects during the poster sessions by presenting posters or demos on laptops. Several student talks will be selected for 10-minute presentations from submitted abstracts.
Tim Hickey honored for teaching
Dean of Arts and Sciences Susan Birren announced today:
- Timothy J. Hickey, professor of computer science, was awarded the Lerman-Neubauer ’69 Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring.
Hickey, the 2012 recipient of the Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer ‘69 and Joseph Neubauer Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring, is a professor of computer science. This prize, established by Trustee Jeanette Lerman at the time of her marriage to Joseph Neubauer, requires its recipient to be not just an exceptional teacher, but also one who has had a significant impact on students’ lives as a mentor, advisor and friend. Continue reading →
Nianwen Xue has received a four-year $2.2M DARPA grant from the Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) Program to work on Chinese language resources and technologies.
Professor James Pustejovsky has just published a new book with Oxford University Press entitled “Interpreting Motion: Grounded Representations for Spatial Language” with Inderjeet Mani.
On Thursday, November 10th, 2011, the Computer Science Department formally opened its new student laboratory/lounge which replaced the terminal room known as the “Berry Patch”. Our students no longer needed as many department supplied workstations, but prefer to work on their own laptops. Envisioned by Prof. Jim Storer after visiting CS departments around the country, we proposed fundraising to combine Classroom 105 with Masters office 104 into a large airy space with several windows, a glass front to the Volen Lobby, and modern furniture including Aeron chairs, rolling conference tables for small group meetings, and soft chairs with laptop trays.
In 2005, Professor Mitch Cherniack co-founded a company, Vertica, with colleagues from MIT and Brown to commercialize a column-based Database technology called C-store, and the company gifted a number of stock shares to the University. Vertica grew to be a leader in “Big Data” and in 2011, Hewlett Packard acquired Vertica, which turned the stock into an actual gift.
With the gift in hand, during the summer, we engaged with University Facilities and its external contractors to realize Jim Storer’s vision for the new space, which is heavily used by both our undergraduate and masters students every day. Photos (by Johann Larusson) from the opening reception follow the break. Continue reading →
Entrepreneur Magazine did a story on Studyegg.com, a startup by three Brandeis CS students which has developed a mobile app for electronic flashcards. The students previously took CS 235 with Prof. Colon-Osorio and an independent study with Professor Hickey.
Professors Jim Storer and Antonella Di Lillo received a one year grant from Google entitled “Navigation in Urban Spaces with Applications to Assistance for the Visually Impaired”.
Professor Jordan Pollack gave a Keynote address at the European Conference on Artificial Life on August 11th in Paris. The title was “Prospects for Machine Embryogenesis” and covered the DEMO lab’s history of work on co-evolving robot bodies and brains.
The CS department is sponsoring a series of lectures on Mobile Applications and Game Design as part of the Justice Brandeis Semester program of the same name being offered this summer. All of the lectures are being taped and the videos posted to youtube. You can also attend in person on Mondays from 1-2 in Lemberg 55. Here is a link to the series with links to the videos and info about future talks this summer: https://sites.google.com/site/jbs2011mobile/info-pages/classroom-work/speakers These lectures are open to all, please come if you are in the neighborhood! We will have two alumni speaking in the series: Rob Lindeman ’85 (Assoc Prof of CS at WPI) who spoke last week and Haggai Goldfarb ’85, CEO of LIquidBits, Inc. who will be speaking on 7/11. Here is a link to a video of Prof. Lindeman’s talk:
VIDEO: Rob Lindeman ’85 on “Virtual and Augmented Reality”
Professor Olga Papaemmanouil presented a research paper at ACM SIGMOD conference in Athens Greece on June 14th. The title was “Performance Prediction for Concurrent Database Workloads.”
