6 students who participated in the 2009 Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates program presented the results of their research as part of the department's colloquium series. The students were Ryan Alfuth, Eric DePree, Kim Klask, Jeff Largent, Nate Martin, and Tim Wahmhoff. Ryan, Eric, Kim and Jeff worked with Professor Charles Cusack on his PebbleIt project, a human computing game whose goal is to solve several NP-complete problems related to graph pebbling. Nate and Tim worked with Professor Ravi Argarwal to explore the features of the Android operating system, which was recently released as an open source OS for mobile devices by Google.

Dr. Matt DeJongh is the lead investigator on a recently awarded $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project that is linking three Hope College departments and three institutions in developing computer models for genetic research.

The support will enable faculty and students in the departments of biology, computer science and mathematics to expand an ongoing research effort at Hope to develop software to model microbial metabolism based on information encoded in the microbial genomes. The resulting tools will ultimately be integrated into the RAST (Rapid Annotation using Subsystems Technology) genome analysis service (at http://rast.nmpdr.org) available to researchers internationally through the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

The two year grant includes support for 2 student researchers during the academic year and 4 students researchers during the summer. Participating institutions include the Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes in Burr Ridge, Illinois, and the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, California.

5 students presented their research at the annual Celebration of Research and Creative Performance, held at the DeVos Fieldhouse on March 27. In the picture at left are students Kevin Browder, Jeff Largent and Andrew Foster, who worked on the PebbleIt project with Prof. Chuck Cusack. Bridger Hamilton, part of a research team working with Prof. Ryan McFall, is shown at right. Ths year's research celebration featured approximately 300 Hope students presenting 160 research projects.

During the spring of 2009, Professor Matt DeJongh and his family are living in Bordeaux, France. Professor DeJongh is funded by a Fulbright-Aquitaine Regional Council Award to conduct bioinformatics research with the Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LABRI) at the Universite de Bordeaux.

The DeJongh family arrived in Bordeaux on January 9, where they are living in an apartment on the outskirts of the city. After spending several weeks filling out paperwork for the French government, Professor DeJongh has settled into work on his research project with the LABRI. He is developing software tools for the creation and analysis of metabolic models of bacteria, and applying these tools to genome sequences collected by his collaborators at the LABRI. He is enjoying the frequent espresso breaks and the two hour lunches.

All four children are enrolled in the french schools and are doing very well at learning the language. The whole family has worked hard to fulfill the "cultural exchange" mandate of the Fulbright program by sampling as many patisseries as possible.

The DeJonghs will be in France until June 24. At the end of this time, Professor DeJongh will be presenting the results of his research at the JOBIM 2009 conference in Nantes.

Students in a special topics course currently being offered are learning about developing interactive web applications using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), the environment which Google uses to develop its online applications such as GMail and Google Docs. Students will be working on an AJAX enabled web site of their choosing as their course project.

GWT allows AJAX applications to be developed in the Java language, rather than the traditional Javascript language. By allowing development in Java, web programming can take advantages of the strong typing of Java, and leverage all the traditional tools associated with Java development, such as the Eclipse IDE and JUnit tools for testing. GWT provides a Java to Javascript compiler which is used when the application is ready to be deployed to the web.

Currently students are working through the development of an online version of the game Battleship, and have also developed a "gadget" that provides real time stock tracking on any web site. They are also working through the book "Google Web Toolkit Applications" by Ryan Dewsbury.

If you're interested, you can check out the GWT at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/. Or, if you've developed applications that you think students would find interesting, please feel free to send Professor Ryan McFall an email (mcfall@hope.edu).

For the 18th consecutive year, Hope College's Computer Science department will be offering a summer program in research, funded by the National Science Foundation. The funding for this program is currently pending a renewal decision by the NSF. If renewed, our summer program will go from June 2, 2009 through July 31, 2009. Participants will receive $4,500 for the nine weeks. Applications are being accepted at http://sharp.hope.edu. More information can be found at http://www.cs.hope.edu/reu.

During the spring and summer of 2009, Professor Ryan McFall will be working to develop two new courses, in an effort to expand the visibility of the computer science department on Hope's campus. The first course will be a course in Web Site Design & Implementation, while the second course will supplement the programming material in the introductory lab course with exercises using applications such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and wireless networks.

The web course will initially be targeted at communications majors, and will cover the fundamental technologies behind the world wide web, such as HTML and Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). In addition, students will learn how to retrieve and display data from databases on their site. Finally, techniques for designing a large web site to ensure usability and accessibility will be covered. This course will fill a void in the current offerings on campus, and will hopefully be attractive to a wider audience.

The hope of the new labs is that they will invite students to learn computer science concepts at the same time as they learn skills they will find useful as they graduate into an increasingly technologically-oriented world. As one example, students will gain experience setting up and configuring a wireless network; experience that will allow them to avoid calling in the "Geek Squad" or similar services in the future. In the process, they will gain a better understanding of the layers of abstraction inherent in today's networks, and some of the details of the TCP/IP protocol stack. Using an application such as Photoshop Elements will facilitate discussion of image processing algorithms, as well as seeing databases in places students may not expect.

If you have ideas or input for either of these courses, we'd love to hear them! Send them along to Professor McFall (mcfall@hope.edu).

Cameron Flint and Nathaniel Martin won second place in the student poster competition at the 2008 Consortium for Computing Science in Colleges Midwest conference. The conference, held at Hope College on September 26 and 27, brought in professors and students from school like Hope from throughout the Midwest.

Martin is from Hope College; Flint is from Muskegon Community College. Their poster detailed work they did during the 2008 summer research program and was entitled "Jasclipse: Enabling The Use of Java Bytecode for Assembly Language Programming. Their summer research work was to research and design a plug-in for the Eclipse integrated development environment that would facilitate the learning of Java bytecode and promote both more efficient coding in that language. Java bytecode is used to teach assembly language programming in CSCI 260: Computer Organization.

The work of both Flint and Martin was supported by the National Science Foundation through the Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant to the Hope College Computer Science department. Their research mentor was Dr. Mike Jipping.

Professor Charles Cusack, Hope students Andrew Foster, Jeff Largent, and Kevin Browder, and Tufts University graduate student Evan Peck presented two different projects at Meaningful Play 2008 at Michigan State University on October 9-11. Meaningful Play is an interdisciplinary academic conference that explores the potential of games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways.

The entire group presented an "alpha" version of Pebble It at the games competition. Pebble It is a game that asks the player to solve graph pebbling problems. Every move the player makes is recorded, and researchers can replay the games of the best players to see if the strategies can be turned into more efficient algorithms to solve the problem. Although the game is still in development, it can be played at http://pebbleit.hope.edu. More information about graph pebbling is also available there.

Dr. Cusack also presented the paper "Volunteer Computing Games: Merging Online Casual Gaming with Volunteer Computing," written in conjunction with Evan Peck when he was an undergraduate at Gordon College, and Maria Riolo, an undergraduate at Cal Tech. The paper is available here.

Both the game and the talk were well received. Most of the researchers at the conference were interested in what players get out of games (training, education, etc.), and several participants were intrigued by the notion that games can be used to accomplish meaningful tasks for researchers.

Two of the Computer Science department faculty have had papers accepted for publication recently.

Professor Ravi Agarwal, a visiting professor with us for two years, has had a paper accepted to be published in Educational Gerontology. The paper is entitled "LifeLong Learning: Becoming Computer Savvy at a Later Age." The paper addresses a longitudinal study that "employs a mixed method data collection and analysis approach that includes the use of standardized surveys, measures of physical fitness and physiology, observations in the retirement community, and structured interviews." For Dr. Agarawal, "the potential significance of the project was to create a valid and reliable model for outreach to retirement and assisted living communities and other centers for senior citizens."

Professor Chuck Cusack, an assistant professor in the Computer Science department, has had a paper accepted in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. The paper, entitled "Pebbling Algorithms in Diameter Two Graphs," was co-authored with Professor Airat Bekmetjev of the Mathematics department. The paper examines algorithms that implement pebbling, a method of working with connected graphs. Cusack's research works with connected graphs and configurations of pebbles on graph vertices. A pebbling step consists of removing two pebbles from a vertex and placing one on an adjacent vertex. A configuration is called solvable if it is possible to place a pebble on any given vertex through a sequence of pebbling steps. A smallest number t such that any configuration with t pebbles is solvable is called the pebbling number of the graph. In the accepted paper, Cusack and Bekmetjev consider algorithms determining the solvability of a pebbling configuration on graphs of diameter two. For more information, see Cusack's pebbling Web site at http://pebbleit.hope.edu.