The National Center for Women & IT (NCWIT) Academic Alliance (AA) and Symmantec have funded TCNJ CS student Michele Dey and WICS to build community by having students work together on a software project. This project will serve as a way for participants to exchange knowledge, skills, experience, and ideas. Peer mentoring will occur through more experienced students assisting others in their tasks. The goal is to extend younger members’ classroom experiences, and to help forge closer relationships within the club.

Please congratulate Michele (and Patrick D’Ericco who help with the proposal)!

This workshop will take place on the first reading day, Friday, May 3rd,
from noon to about 2:30 or 3pm and will cover installation, setup and
use of MongoDB. We also anticipate that a small sample application will
be built using MongoDB, as well as some discussion coverage of the
various drivers that connect from a technology stack (like PHP or Java,
etc.) to talk to MongoDB.

If you are interested in the wave of NoSQL databases, are a web
developer, or are technologically curious, this workshop may be for you!

The event is open to all students, faculty, staff from TCNJ, but seating
is limited, so sign ups are a must:
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/4899501541  Please use the waiting list
if you can’t reserve a spot. If demand warrants, we can look into a
different location.

Refreshments will be provided.

Date: May 3, 2013
Time: Noon – 2:30 or 3pm
Location: New Education Building Rm 113

We look forward to seeing you there.

–
Peter J. DePasquale, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science

On Saturday, April 13th, the Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) chapter of The College of New Jersey hosted an alumni roundtable discussion. TCNJ Computer Science alumni, now at different graduate schools and tech companies, shared their post-graduation experiences with current TCNJ students. The graduate students discussed their struggles with applying to graduate school, adjusting to their new larger workloads, and finding faculty mentors that truly cared for them and their futures. Meanwhile, the industry workers shared stories about technical job interviews, adjusting from undergraduate academics to the industry workforce, and the importance of networking in finding job opportunities.

After the initial introductions and group Q&A, lunch was served, and discussions continued between alumni, current students, and CS faculty in smaller, more personal groups. UPE would like to thank the alumni who made this event possible:

Elizabeth Carter ‘07, PhD Candidate at Lehigh University
Steve Lombardi ‘09, PhD Candidate at Drexel University
Sarah Middleton ‘11, PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania
Jake Voytko ‘08, Google
Chris Neylan ‘09, Highbridge Capital Management
Matt Tom-Wolverton ‘10, Tumblr
Kevin Coughlin ‘12, Bank of America

The event was very informative for current students, especially those of us drawing close to our own graduations. We plan to make this an annual event and hope to see it grow in the future!

Shahzore Qureshi – UPE President
Alexa Cain – UPE Treasurer

In addition to moving onto Phase II and a chance at the 100k prize, Dr. Kim will be a panelist at the Games For Health conference session, “The Aligning Forces for Quality Games for Data Challenge : Meet the Finalists”.

More information can be found here, http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/newsroom-content/2013/04/af4q-games-to-generate-data-challenge.html

Selected from nearly 1,500 applications from over 120 universities, CS student Glen Oakley was named a 2013 KPCB Engineering Fellow.   Please congratulate Glen on his very prestigious award!

April 2, 2013
Education Building Rm. 113 (tentative)
11:30am – 12:30pm
Refreshments to follow the presentation

iRoom: Experiments with an Intelligent Room

In this talk, I will describe our iRoom research project which shares the vision of smart environments responding to human presence and activity. The goal of iRoom is to make the room environment itself become the human computer interface. For example, the iRoom can determine the identity, location, and visit duration of a person entering the room using inputs from a variety of networked sensors and cameras. We use sensor fusion to determine context from sensor inputs and produce actions responding to the identity and/or activity of the visitor in the room. The iRoom generates in real-time several abstractions of contextual messages that developers can subscribe to in order to build third-party applications. I will describe the architecture, sensors, messaging protocols, algorithms, and potential applications of the iRoom.

Biography:

Dr. Hock M. Ng is a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent in Murray Hill, NJ. He received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in 1994, 1997, and 2000, respectively. Currently, his research interests are in the area of sensor fusion, computer vision, data visualization and pervasive computing. Prior to 2008, his research contributions were in the field of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) of wide bandgap semiconductor materials and devices, with a focus on GaN and ZnO. His work was recognized by the Electrochemical Society with the 2006 Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award and by the North American MBE conference with the inaugural 2006 Young Investigator Award. He is also an alumnus of the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (2004). He is a
senior member of the IEEE. In his spare time, he likes to tinker with robotics and 3D-printers.

Stephen Lombardi

The Jay Modi Award is presented annually to a Computer Science Ph.D. student in recognition of academic excellence and the potential to become a leader in the field.

Lombardi joined Drexel University’s Department of Computer Science in 2009 after completing his bachelor’s degree at The College of New Jersey. Currently a fourth year Ph.D. candidate working with Dr. Ko Nishino, associate professor of computer science, in Drexel’s Vision and Graphics Laboratory. His research interests lie in the area of “physics-based vision,” which investigates the properties of materials, illumination, and shape that ultimately come together to produce an image in a photograph. Recently his work in this area was published in the European Conference on Computer Vision 2012, a top level computer vision conference, as an oral presentation. Following the conference, he began a two-month-long stay in Osaka, Japan working with members of Professor Yasushi Yagi’s laboratory to publish a collaborative paper.

Outside of his research, Steve built and currently maintains an educational computer game, Mathe Monkeys, for use in the classroom by teachers and students. He also enjoys playing guitar and listening to music. Learn more about Lombardi’s research and academic achievements here.