Prof. Tim Wahls receives tenure

We are very happy to announce that Associate Professor of Computer Science Tim Wahls has received tenure at Dickinson College. This decision was made by the college in recognition of his high quality teaching, research, and service. Congratulations Tim!

Prof. Dick Forrester has paper accepted

Professor Dick Forrester had the paper “Concise RLT Forms of Binary Programs: A Computational Study of the Quadratic Knapsack Problem” accepted to the journal Naval Research Logistics

Prof. Tesman receives EPaDel teaching award

Each year the Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware (EPaDel) section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) gives one award to a distinguished teacher in the section. This year’s recipient of the 2009 James P. Crawford EPaDel Teaching Award is Barry Tesman, Professor of Mathematics at Dickinson College. Barry will be given his award at the spring EPaDel meeting (March 28, at Gettysburg College). In addition, Barry will be the section’s official nominee for the MAA’s national Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.

Congratulations Barry!

Department of Math/CS has a Facebook page

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science has a Facebook page. It is intended as a gathering place for students, alumni, faculty, and friends of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Dickinson College.

CS major Russell Toris (’11) wins international contest

From the Reuters article: College Student Russell Toris Leads the Pack with Innovative JCR-based Web 2.0 Application:

Day Software,… a leading provider of global content management and content infrastructure software, today announced Russell Toris, a second-year college student at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as the winner of Day`s inaugural JCR Cup 2008. Toris` innovative JCR-based web clipping application, “Crux,” beat out over 50 entries in Day`s first-ever competition to design a unique software application based on Day CRX, a commercially packaged version of Apache Jackrabbit and Apache Sling.

Congratulations Russell!

Prof. Thanatipanonda publishes paper

Professor Aek Thanatipanonda published the paper “On the monochromatic Schur Triples type problem” in The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, R14 of Volume 16(1), 2009.

Prof. MacCormick presents paper

Professor John MacCormick presented his research on new algorithms for stereo and motion computer vision problems at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in December 2008.  The paper, “Continuously-adaptive discretization for message-passing algorithms” was co-authored by Kannan Achan from Yahoo Research and Michael Isard from Microsoft Research.

Welcome Tonya Miller to our department

We are very happy to welcome Tonya Miller to our department as our new Senior Academic Department Coordinator. Tonya is new to the department, but not new to the college. She’s been working in the Conferences and Special Events office for a number of years. We are looking forward to having her in our Tome family for many years! Please stop by and introduce yourself to Tonya.

Ruby Sung to go to Budapest

Congratulations to Ruby Sung.  She has been accepted into the prestigious Budapest Semester in Mathematics program. She will spend next spring in Hungary studying with some of the most talented mathematics students in the country.

Dickinson team places fourth in ACM Mid-Atlantic Regional Programming Contest

Two teams of computer science students competed at the ACM Mid-Atlantic Regional Programming Contest on Saturday (10/15/2008). This contest included 161 teams from 66 different colleges and universities in New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina.

Our two teams were:

Dickinson White: Kent Carmine, Fabio Drucker, Lewis Flanagan
Dickinson Red: James Doyle, Richard Rast, Ke (Harry) Zhou

Dickinson White finished in 85th place, solving 2 of the 8 problems.

Dickinson Red recorded the best Dickinson finish since 1985, solving 5 of the 8 problems and finishing in 4th place! Only one team solved more problems (University of Maryland solved 7) and only two other teams were able to solve 5 problems (University of Virginia and Duke University).

Prof. Wahls to present paper in Hawaii

Professor Tim Wahls and collaborator Nestor Catano will be presenting “Executing JML Specifications of Java Card Applications: A Case Study” at the 24th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, Hawaii. March 8 – 12, 2009

Prof. Richeson now a blogger

Professor Richeson has started writing a blog called Division by Zero. It is a blog about math, puzzles, teaching, and academic technology.

Prof. Tesman speaks to high school students about the election

Professor Barry Tesman gave a presentation to Carlisle High School students in the ATC (Academically Challenging Topics) program. The title of his talk was “Elections: More than just majority rules!”

Professor Richeson signing book at Whistlestop Bookshop

Professor Dave Richeson will be signing copies of his new book Euler’s Gem at the Whistlestop Bookshop on Friday, October 17 at 6:00. Light refreshments will be served.

Prof. R. Forrester publishes paper

The paper “Quadratic Binary Programming Models in Computational Biology,” that Professor Dick Forrester coauthored with Harvey Greenberg, just appeared in Algorithmic Operations Research.

Prof. MacCormick publishes paper

Professor John MacCormick presented his research on automatically mapping computer networks at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence in July 2008.  The paper, “CT-NOR: Representing and Reasoning About Events in Continuous Time”, by Aleksandr Simma, Moises Goldszmidt, John MacCormick, Paul Barham, Richard Black, Rebecca Isaacs, and Richard Mortier, was a collaboration with five researchers from Microsoft’s labs, and a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

Profs. Braught and Wahls publish two joint papers

Professors Grant Braught and Tim Wahls published two papers related to their study of the COMP 131 course:

Braught, G. & Wahls, T. (2008). Teaching Objects in Context. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 23(5), 101-109.

Braught, G., Eby, L. & Wahls, T. (2008). The Effects of Pair-Programming on Individual Programming Skills. In Proceedings of the thirty ninth ACM-SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. (pp. 200-204). (Also appears in: ACM SIGCSE Bulletin,40(1), 200-204.)

Computer science students present their results, win award

Two of Prof. Grant Braught’s students presented posters at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, 12th Annual Northeastern Conference, Staten Island, New York, April 11-12, 2008.

Ryan Zeigler (’08) presented “A New Approach for Evolving Robotic Controllers.”

Mark Veronda (’08) presented “Applying a Genetic Algorithm to the Localization Problem using a Sensing Limited Robot.” He received the Best Poster Award.

Mark was also a named a winner at the Dickinson Senior Research Symposium, for his presentation of the same work.

Prof. Froelich publishes paper in the Proceedings of the AMS

The paper “Capping groups and some cases of the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture,” by F.M. Bleher, T. Chinburg and Jennifer Froelich has been accepted for publication in the journal Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.  It will appear in a future issue.

Prof. Richeson publishes paper in Topology and its Applications

The paper “Chain recurrence rates and topological entropy,” by Dave Richeson and Jim Wiseman (Agnes Scott College) has been accepted for publication in the journal Topology and its Applications.  It will appear in a future issue.