Department News

• May 2010: The Lafayette Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the International Honor Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines, inducts three new members on May 5th, 2010. They are: Shrutarshi Basu, Philip Dominguez, and Khine Lin.
  
  
  Front row (from left to right): Shrutarshi Basu, Philip Dominguez, and Khine Lin.
  Back row (from left to right): Long Ho, Alex Shnayder, Haruki Yamaguchi, Jonathan Jenkins and Rhodes Baker.
  
  
• April 2010: This year's senior lunch took place on April 26th.
  
  
  Front row (from left to right): Chun Wai Liew, Frank Xia, Bill Collins, Long Ho, Xiaoyan Li, and Jeff Pfaffmann.
  Back row (from left to right): Alex Shnayder, Ryan Benjamin, Kyle Clayton, Brad Julian, Rhodes Baker, and Jonathan Jenkins.
  
  
• April 2010: We are pleased to announce that Professor Jeffrey Pfaffmann has received tenure and is being promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
  
  
• November 2009: Two teams from Lafayette competed at the Wilkes Barre site of the Annual ACM Programming Contest. Among the 24 teams competing at the site, the Lafayette-One team finished no. 5 and the team members are Chak Man Chan '10, Bidur Dahal '12, and Khine Lin '11. The Lafayette-Two team finished no. 4 on site and the team members are Maytee Chinavanichkit '12, Berkin Ilbeyi '12, and Ahsan Nawroj '12. The Lafayette teams were coached by Prof. Li and Prof. Xia of the CS department.
  
  
  
  
  



• November 2009: One of our recent alums, Alexandru Balan '03, is featured in an aticle in the Lafayette news for his research in body-imaging technology.
  
  
• November 2009: From Oct. 20 to Dec. 12, the exhibition Computation, Vision: Emergence will be displayed in the Richard A. and Rissa W. Grossman Gallery in the Williams Visual Arts Building of Lafayette College. The artwork in the exhibit represents a collaboration between students and faculty in the art and computer science departments, headed by Professor Ed Kerns of Art Department, and Professor Chun Wai Liew, head of Computer Science Department. The students working on the project include Rhodes Baker (CS '10), Imogen Cain (Art '12), Long Ho (CS Math '10), Khine Lin (ECE Math '10), and Scott Lyttle (Art '10). For more in formation, please read the article and watch a video in the Lafayette News.
  
  
• April 2009: This year's senior lunch took place on April 30rd.
  
  
  (from left to right): Ge Xia, Jeff Pfaffmann, Rob Follett, Kyle Kotch, Micah Heineck, James Stoholski, Chun Wai Liew, Bill Collins and Xiaoyan Li
  
  
• April 2008: This year's senior lunch took place on April 23rd.
  
  
  Picture 1 (from left to right): Xiaoyan Li, Smathi Charanasomboon, Jeff Pfaffmann, David Young, Chun Wai Liew, George Armah, and Tim Zirkel
  
  
  
  
  Picture 2 (from left to right): Ge Xia, Smathi Charanasomboon, Jeff Pfaffmann, David Young, Chun Wai Liew, George Armah, and Tim Zirkel
  
  
• November 2007: The second Annual Autonomous Robotics Competition sponsored by the CS department took place on November 9th, Friday, in AEC 500. See the robotics competition website for more information, and read this article in the College newspaper the Lafayette.
  
  
  
  
• November 2007: One team from Lafayette competed at the Wilkes Barre site of the Annual ACM Programming Contest. The team consists of Chak Man Chan (2010), David Young (2008) and Timothy Zirkel (2008). They finished 8th on site.
  
  
• November 2007: Professor Jeff Pfaffmann and his colleagues, Professor Sharon Jones of civil & environmental engineering, and Professor Chris Ruebeck of economics & business have received a $635,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to use an interdisciplinary approach to see how policies affect the life cycles of products. Read this article on College website or more details.
  
  
• October 2007: List of scholarships and awards received by the CS students in recent years:
  • Goldwater Scholarship
    • 2004 Joseph Crobak
    • 2000 Matthew Patton
  • Upsilon Pi Epsilon Scholarship - The computer science honor society scholarship
    • 2007 Tim Zirkel
    • 2006 Bryan Culbertson
    • 2004 Joseph Crobak
    • 2002 Alexandru Balan -- Microsoft Scholarship Award
    • 2001 Matthew Patton -- Microsoft Scholarship Award
  • James P. Schwar Prize - Lafayette Department of Computer Science
    • 2006 Tim Zirkel
    • 2005 Mark Kokoska
    • 2004 Bryan Culbersont
    • 2003 Mayank Lahiri
    • 2002 Lazar Nikolic
    • 2001 Geoff Oxholm
    Lynn Van Dyke Prize - Lafayette Department of Computer Science
    • 2006 George Armah
    • 2005 Ihssane Loudiyi
    • 2003 Andrew Phillips
    • 2002 Prince Chidyagwai
    • 2001 Geoff Oxholm
  • ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest
    • 2006 Second place on site in regional competion
    • 2005 Second place on site in regional competion
    • 2004 Wins regional competition, finishing 5th out of 73 institutions.
    • 2003 Places in top fifth in the Mid-Atlantic Region.
  • EXCEL Scholars
    • 2006 Teruhisa Haruguchi Algorithmic Complexity
    • 2005 Bryan Culbertson Genetic Algorithms
    • 2005 Michael Dominguez Genetic Algorithms
    • 2005 Mark Kokoska Genetic Algorithms
    • 2005 Jon Rowe Artifical Chemistry Model
    • 2004 Joseph Crobak Computer Networks
    • 2004 Konstantinos Bousmalis Evolutionary Algorithms
    • 2003-4 Mayank Lahiri Genetic Algorithms
    • 2002 Geoff Oxholm Intelligent Tutoring Systems
    • 2002 Robert Brown Intelligent Tutoring Systems
    • 2002 Viet Nguyen Intelligent Tutoring Systems
    • 2001 Lazar Nikolic Intelligent Tutoring Systems
    • 2001 Alexandru Balan Network Optimization
    • 2000 Dan Huber 3D Computer Modeling
    • 2000 Matthew Patton Heuristic Search
  • Honors Theses
    • 2006 Joseph Crobak "Shortest Path Problems and Experimental Results."
    • 2005 Mayank Lahiri "Numerical Efficiency of Course-Grained Parallel Genetic Algorithms."
    • 2004 Geoff Oxholm "An Artificially Intelligent Analysis of Musical Emotion"
    • 2004 Kojo Adams "Exact: The Experimental Algorithmics Computational Toolkit"
    • 2003 Alexandru Balan "An Enhanced Approach to Network Reliability Using Boolean Algebra"
    • 2003 James Bogan "Clustering Methods for Network Intrusion Detection"
    • 2003 Robert Brown "The Application of Habituating Self-Organizing Maps on Network Anomaly Detection."
  
  
  
• September 2007: Professor Chun Wai Liew, head of the CS department, has received a $590,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help faculty and students understand the importance and role of computational approaches in their disciplines and to incorporate computational approaches and tools into the curriculum. Read this article for more details on College website.
  
  
• September 2007: Tim Zirkel (2008) has been awarded a 2007 Upsilon Pi Epsilon Scholarship.
  
  
• September 2007: On September 20-21, the CS Department hosted a visit by Lafayette College's Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Daniel Huttenlocher, the Neafsey Professor of Computing, Information Science and Business at Cornell University. Professor Huttenlocher gave a public lecture in Kirby Hall, a talk in the Math Department and three talks in the CS Department. The following are some pictures taken before and after one of the CS talks, when Professor Huttenlocher was talking to the studnets.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• August 2007: The department is now equipped with a new state-of-the-art 12 node computing cluster as a result of a National Science Foundation grant. Read this article for more details on College website.
  
  
  
• August 2007: The publications by the faculty in the Computer Science Department during academic year 2006-2007:
  
  Collins, William J.
  (coauthor Jeffrey O. Pfaffmann). "Teaching Artificial Intelligence Across the Computer Science Curriculum using Sudoku as a Problem Domain". 20th International FLAIRS Conference, Key West, FL, May 7-9, 2007.
  
  Liew, C. W.
  (coauthors Robert G. Root and Megan A. Cummins*). "Using Artificial Organisms To Study The Evolution of Backbones in Fish." 1st IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, Honolulu, HI, April 2007.
  
  Pfaffmann, Jeffrey O.
  (coauthor William J. Collins). "Teaching Artificial Intelligence Across the Computer Science Curriculum using Sudoku as a Problem Domain". 20th International FLAIRS Conference, Key West, FL, May 7-9, 2007.
  
  Xia, Ge
  (coauthors Jianer Chen, Xiuzhen Huang, and Iyad A. Kanj). "Polynomial time approximation schemes and parameterized complexity", Discrete Applied Mathematics 155.2 (2007): 180-193.
  
  --- (coauthors Jianer Chen, X. Huang, and Iyad A. Kanj). "On the computational hardness based on linear FPT-reductions", Journal of Combinatorial Optimization 11.2 (2006): 231-247.
  
  --- (coauthors Jianer Chen, Xiuzhen Huang, and Iyad A. Kanj). "Strong Computational Lower Bounds via Parameterized Complexity." Journal of Computer and System Sciences 72.8 (2006): 1346-67.
  
  --- (coauthors Jianer Chen, Andrew Jiang, Iyad A. Kanj, and Fenghui Zhang). "Separability and Topology Control of Quasi Unit Disk Graphs", Proc. 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'07), Anchorage, AK. (May 2007): 2225-2233.
  
  --- (coauthors Jianer Chen, Iyad A. Kanj, Jie Meng, and Fenghui Zhang). "On the Effective Enumerability of NP Problems." Proc. 2nd International Workshop on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IWPEC'06), Zurich, Switzerland, (Sep 2006) Springer LNCS 4169: 215-226.
  
  --- (coauthors Jianer Chen, and Iyad A. Kanj). "Improved Parameterized Upper Bounds for Vertex Cover." Proc. 31st International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS'06), Stará Lesná, Slovakia, (Aug-Sep 2006) Springer LNCS 4162: 238-249.
  
  --- (coauthors Iyad A. Kanj, and Luay Nakhlehy). "Reconstructing Evolution of Natural Languages: Complexity and Parameterized Algorithms." Proc. 12th International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON'06), Taipei, Taiwan. (Aug 2006) Springer LNCS 4112: 299-308.
  
  
• October 2006: Two teams from Lafayette competed at the Wilkes Barre site. The team consisting of Bryan Culbertson (2007), Mike Dominguez (2007), and Teruhisa Haruguchi (2007) came in second at the site. The second team consisting of David Young (2008), Tim Zirkel (2008) and Ryan McCall (2008) placed 17th.
  
  
  Bryan, Terry and Mike receiving awards
  
• October 2006: The website for the First Annual Lafayette College Department of Computer Science Autonomous Robotics Competition is up: www.cs.lafayette.edu/~robot. Everyone is welcome to participate. Please contact Jeff Gum for more information.
  
  
  
  
• September 2006: Xiaoyan Li has joined the department as an assistant professor after receiving her PhD from Rutgers University. Her research interest is in wireless sensor networks, ad hoc networks, and distributed systems. This fall, Prof. Li will be teaching CS 103 (Principles of CS II),
  
  
• September 2006: Jeff Gum have joined the department as a visiting assistant professor. He will be teaching CS 470 (Senior Project) in the fall.
  
  
• September 2006: Prof. Bill Collins will be the acting department head for the academic year 2006-2007 while Prof. Chun Wai Liew is on his sabbatical leave.
  
  
• For old news (from 2005-2006), click here
  
• For old news (from 2004-2005), click here