CS Open House
June 24, 2016Hi everyone,
Richard Ni ’18 will be bringing you some fun guest blogs this summer. Here’s his first installment on the Computer Science (CS) Open House that took place on campus.
Summer research has been underway for some time now, and the computer science department held an open house to show off some cool research projects as well as their mad decorating skills.
Project/Team Name: CS Teaching Tips
Erica Goodwin, Nathan Justin, Angela Zhao, Jason Dwyer, Nate Diamant, Kofi Sekyi-Appiah, Nick Draper
This team is working on making education of CS more accessible to traditionally tech-minority groups such as women, racial minorities and people from disadvantaged economic backgrounds. They compile tips for CS teachers. Erica’s favorite tips are those that encourage teachers to recognize some biases that they might have – in one study where researchers sent emails to professors under several different fake names, they found that emails under male names got more responses than female names!
Project/Team Name: Ran’s Pawns
Daniel Bork, Ricson Cheng, Matt Dohlen, Chen Pekker, Gabriel Quiroz, Jean Sun, Jincheng Wang
This project is a sweet blend of CS and biology! When two species coevolve, many varieties of symbiotic “pairs” of partners can be represented by phylogenic trees. There could be ten different types of bees that are associated with ten different types of flowers – so how do we know which bee goes with which flower, and how can we know which evolutionary events that created new types of bees are associated with which events created new types of flowers? This problem gets harder when there are more than hundreds of types of bees and flowers. This team uses computer science, as well as some sick decorating skills, to figure it out.
Student Startups!
Name: Same Page
Fabio Amendola, Sally Cheng, Lee Norgaard
This team is creating a student social network that will allow users to share resources and readings, and have discussions online outside of class. If I can share readings with others, maybe I wouldn’t have to ever buy a textbook again!
Name: BubbleU
Olivia Watkins, Matthew Guillory, Preethi Seshadri, Daksha Agarwal
They were fed up with the ineffective “5C For Sale” Facebook page, so they made an improved buying and selling website with messaging, location based search, authentication and comic sans. None of them had any experience in back-end development or integrating with iOS before this summer!
Stay tuned for more from Richard as the summer continues!