The work of two teams of Hope students, along with their faculty mentors, was recently featured in the Hope College Anchor newspaper. The article described two applications being developed for use on Hope's campus: an Android application for use by Health Dynamics students and faculty to help track students' fitness levels, and an online survey system to be used for a variety of purposes, including course evaluations. The article can be found here.

Development of the FiT app was done by current seniors Tim Cooke and John Stathakis, and was supervised by Prof. Mike Jipping.  The students had a great experience working with a "real" client and developing software for the Android platform, something new to both of them.

The survey system, named JanDY, was worked on by Nick DeJongh ('15), Mike Henley ('13) and Matt Johnson ('14).  JanDY is an ongoing project and has been worked on by a many different Hope CS students, and is currently under active development by the members of the Senior Project Seminar course.  This project makes use of the Google Web Toolkit, a framework for developing interactive web applications in Java.

The summer program for 2012 wrapped up on July 20, 2012. This was 21st year of our summer research, having started in 1992, with each year supported by the National Science Foundation. We had 13 students, working on 5 different projects. In addition, we piloted a new project in software development, modeled after the research program.

There were four research projects, each mentored by a faculty member:

• Chuck Cusack worked with Lisa Dion from Providence College and Hope student Tim Lewis to produce various theoretical results connected to NP-completeness of graph pebbling algorithms.
• Matt DeJongh worked with three Hope students on a project entitled "Modeling Bacterial Metabolism and Genetic Regulation."  This project worked toward building computer models that use genetic information about organisms to simulate and predict their behavior.  Matt's research students were Andrea Houg, Josh Kammeraad, and Shinnosuke Kondo.
• Mike Jipping worked with three students from off Hope's campus to study security problems and to demonstrate how those problems occur.  The goal of this project was to produce lab experiments that teach students how security problems are exploited and how to prevent such exploitations.  The security issues included password cracking, denial-of-service attacks, virus attacks, SQL injection, and remote exploitations (such as buffer overflows).  Acshi Haggemiller from Yale University, Matt Koster from Calvin College, and Eric Ostrowski from Grand Valley State University joined Mike on this project.
• Ryan McFall worked on a project called "Building an online survey system" with three students. This project involved continuing development, testing and deployment of a free, open source software system to administer and analyze online surveys, similar to services such as SurveyMonkey.  Ryan was joined by Hope students Nick DeJongh, Michael Henley, and Matt Johnson.

Each student involved in the summer program will be presenting the results of their work at their respective institutions.  Congratulations to all on a great summer!

Professor Mike Jipping made a presentation at Hope's Winter Happening, a series of seminars that is open to Holland's general public.  Dr. Jipping's talk focused on his research on assistive technology and it's implementation on Android mobile phone platforms.

Jipping's talk drew approximately 60 people from the Holland community.