Hope Computer Science News

Students Win Poster Competition

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:51:02 EST

by Mike Jipping.

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.

Cusack and students present research at Meaningful Play 2008

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:26:40 EDT

by Charles Cusack.

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.

Department Faculty Publish Papers

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:40:21 EDT

by Mike Jipping.

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.

Summer Research 2008 Wraps Up

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:18:31 EDT

by Mike Jipping.

The summer research program for 2008 wrapped up on August 1, 2008. This was version 17 of our summer research, going for 17 years, having started in 1992. We had 12 students this summer, working on 5 different research projects. We were able to support 9 Hope students and 3 students from outside Hope.

The research projects and participants are listed below:

Professor Chuck Cusack led a project with two parts. The project "Volunteer Computing Games" involved Andrew Foster and Jeff Largent, both from Hope. Dr. Cusack led the second project with Dr. Airat Bekmetjev from the Math department on "Graph Pebbling" which involved Hope student Kevin Browder. Both projects fell under the same umbrella, since they contributed to an online graph pebbling game. Find the game at http://pebbleit.hope.edu
Professor Matt DeJongh led a project on "Modeling Microbial Metabolism". Hope students Paul Frybarger and Alayna Ruberg worked on this project with Dr. DeJongh.
Professor Mike Jipping led two projects. The first, "Parallel Processing Across a Handheld Mesh Network" involved Hope students Dirk Van Bruggen and Jason Wickstra. The second project, entitled "Software Tools for Java Bytecode Programming", involved Nate Martin from Hope and Cameron Flint from Muskegon Community College.
Professor Ryan McFall headed up a project entitled "Automatically recognizing and classifying questions from educational assessment instruments" that was part of a bigger research project at Michigan State University. This project involved Gabe Larriuz from American University of Puerto Rico and Eleanor Poley from Knox College.

Computer Science department goes virtual

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:25:56 EDT

by Ryan McFall.

Over the summer, the computer science department's servers were migrated from a set of 7 separate computers to a server cluster of 2 physical PCs running a virtualization environment called VMWare. Virtualization simplifies many management tasks, and also results in reductions in power and cooling costs. With the move, we are also saying good bye to Sun hardware and the Solaris operating system.

Virtualization is a hot topic these days, as companies and organizations seek to reduce the impact of energy use on their bottom line. The virtual servers consist of both Windows servers and several Ubuntu Linux machines.


The old servers

The department's virtual server cluster consists of two physical PCs, along with a network attached storage (NAS) system. Virtual machines can be hot swapped among the physical servers, allowing for a high availability and load balancing.

The move also allowed the department to move their servers from VanderWerf hall into the server room at CIT, freeing up space in VanderWerf. The department is hopeful that this space will be used to enlarge the current student lab in VanderWerf 115.

Setting up a new virtual machine requires little more than making a copy of a file. This fact will allow innovation in teaching methods in courses such

as Operating Systems, Networking and Computer Security. In the past, giving students administrative access to a lab machine and allowing them to tinker with its configuration, possibly breaking it, was simply not feasible. The new system allows faculty to give students their own virtual machine, which they can configure without impacting other students.

Kudos go to Steve Bareman and Paul VanAllsburg, who orchestrated the process of specifying hardware/software for the new server cluster, worked out the process of administrating the system, and migrated all of the old data and applications to the virtual machines.


Steve Bareman	Paul VanAllsburg

Computer Science Student Join Others to Celebrate Undergraduate Research

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:39:46 EDT

by Mike Jipping.

Research projects on topics ranging from microscopic gene-cell interaction to the effects of globalization were featured during the seventh annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Performance at Hope on Friday, March 28. Five computer science students joined some 290 other Hope students and their faculty mentors. The poster presentations illustrated their projects and the students were on-hand to discuss their work.

Gary Benson '10, James Daly '08, Eric DePree '10, Paul Frybarger '09, and Matthew Shott '10 were showing off projects they did during the summer of 2007. Each student worked with a faculty mentor during the Computer Science department's summer research program.

The Computer Science department's summer research program, in its 17th year in 2008, is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Computer science students assemble high-performance computer

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:07:33 EST

by Matt DeJongh.

During the first week of February, computer science students from the SegFault student group met to assemble a high-performance computer to house a new graphics card with powerful parallel processing capabilities. The graphics card is an NVIDIA 8800GTX, which was donated by alumnus Joe Stam, an employee of NVIDIA, during a visit to Hope College last semester.

The students have named the computer GLaDOS, which stands for Generic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (and is an evil A.I. from the game Portal). It has two Intel Xeon processors with four cores each, 4 gigabytes of FB-DIMM memory, and over 500 gigabytes of hard disk space. GLaDOS is housed in the Computer Science laboratory. Several of the SegFault students are enrolled in an independent student course to work on projects that will take advantage of the computer's high-performance parallel processing capabilities.

Hope Alumni featured in Grand Rapids Press article

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:55:49 EST

by Ryan McFall.

Hope alumni Mike Harris (left) and Mat Nguyen were recently featured in a Grand Rapids press article for their work at Worksighted, a computer networking firm they founded shortly after they graduated from Hope in 2001. The firm has successfully built an international client base, as well as working on local projects such as designing and implementing the computer infrastructure for a new hotel being built in downtown Holland. The full Grand Rapids press article can be found here .

In addition to their work at Worksighted, Mat co-founded the Holland Young Professionals 2004 years ago. This organization aims at attracting and retaining young talent in the greater Holland area, and tries to do so by being a catalyst for young pros and aspiring entrepreneurs to meet and develop professionally, socially, and as active members of the community. Mike and Mat are strong advocates of community involvement and are plugged in to the community as individuals, but also encourage everyone in the company to play some type of leadership role outside of work.

Senior Wins Best Talk Award

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:31:49 EST

by Charles Cusack.

Senior James Daly was awarded a "best talk" award at the 2007 Michigan Undergraduate Mathematics Conference for his talk entitled "Graph Pebbling and Parallel Computing." The talk is based on research he performed in the summer of 2007 under the supervision of Dr. Cusack from the Computer Science Department, and Dr. Bekmetjev from the Mathematics Department.

James implemented several parallel algorithms to determine the solvability of pebbling configurations on various classes of graphs. He ran simulations on Curie, the 16-node cluster operated by the Computational Science and Modeling Laboratory at Hope College, to verify several results related to pebbling thresholds. In addition, he was able to prove an interesting result about the pebbling threshold of certain sequences of diameter two graphs. His project is a great example of how the combination of computational techniques and mathematics can be synergistic.

Hope Scholarships for Community College Transfers

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:38:34 EST

by Herb Dershem.

With support from a $564,360 grant from the National Science Foundation, Hope College is offering 8 scholarships per year to students transferring to Hope from community colleges. These students will be enrolled in study in computer science or one of the other sciences at Hope and will be worth up to $10,000 per year. This project is being directed by Professor Herb Dershem of the Computer Science Department. Further information is found in the college press release and on the project's web site.