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.

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 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 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.

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.

	Dr. Cusack attended FuturePlay 2007 along with Evan Peck, a student from Gordon College,
to present a poster entitled Wildfire Wally: A Volunteer Computing Game. The poster describes the work they completed, along with Maria Riolo, a student from Cal Tech, while participating in the department's REU program this summer.

WildFire Wally is a game in which the player must stop the spread of a forest fire by dousing the flames with water and creating firelines. The game is an example of a volunteer computing game--a game which is also a volunteer algorithm. Specifically, Wildfire Wally solves instances of the Maximum Clique Problem. The goal of the project is to attract people from around the world to volunteer computing who would not normally participate.

FuturePlay is The International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology, a conference where academics researching video games from many perspectives and leaders from the video game industry get together to exchange ideas. The poster was well received, with lots of questions and many positive comments.

In April, 2007, Computer Science seniors Paul Boillot (right) and Kevin Formsma (left) travelled to Washington, D.C., to present at the Council for Undergraduate Research 2007 Posters on the Hill meeting. This annual event takes place in the Sam Rayburn Congressional Office building. Sixty competitively selected student posters are displayed during a late afternoon reception, and members of Congress are invited to meet the students and view their work.

Paul and Kevin presented a research poster entitled “Comparative Metabolic Modeling of Prokaryotic Genomes”. This poster describes their work with professor Matt DeJongh on software tools for automating the process of creating computer models of microbial metabolism from sequenced genomes. Congressmen Vern Ehlers of Grand Rapids (center) stopped by to meet Paul and Kevin and view their poster.

For the past year, a group of students, along with Professor Ryan McFall, have been developing a plug-in to the Digital Video Recorder application BeyondTV. The project started based on a personal need of McFall's, and has given the students a chance to work collaboratively to develop a real application.

Work on the project occurs outside of regularly scheduled class time. The students have gained experience using Subversion (SVN), a source code repository and version control system, as well as learning to write applications using the C# language within Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

McFall's original goal was to make BeyondTV extend the duration of sporting events, which often last beyond the time frame allotted by the networks. The team eventually decided to develop a general purpose event-driven framework which allows custom rules to be defined. These custom rules allow BeyondTV users to process upcoming recordings in any way that they choose.

The team recently reached a milestone - they were able to successfully process the set of upcoming recordings and extend the duration of the sporting events correctly! Some work remains to be done, but the team is optimistic that they will be able to complete the application soon. They then plan to make the plug-in available to the BeyondTV community for testing and use.

In the summer and fall of 2007 three Hope College graduates completed the Ph.D. in computer science.

Dr. Laura Grit Duke University Dr. Daron Vroon Georgia Tech Dr. James Vanderhyde Georgia Tech

Laura Grit, a 2001 graduate of Hope, is completing her Ph.D. at Duke University this fall. She has attended Duke with support from a National Physical Science Consortium Fellowship and has spend summers at Sandia National Laboratories, Hewlett Packard Research Lab, and IBM Watson Research Center. Her research has been conducted in the Network/Internet Computing Lab and her interest is in the design and implementation of distributed systems, with concentrations on resource allocation and economic/market-based systems. She has accepted a job as a technical program manager with Amazon.com in Seattle.

Daron Vroon is also a 2001 graduate of Hope. He finished his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in the summer of 2007. Daron's dissertation explored ways to automate termination proofs of programs written in side-effect free first-order functional programming languages. While Turing showed this to be an undecidable problem in general, Daron developed a new framework that can prove termination for over 98% of programs in practice, and assist users in finding termination proofs when fully automatic techniques fail. About a year before he finished his degree, Daron felt a call to the ministry and is presently studying at General Theological Seminary in New York City.

The summer research program for 2007 wrapped up on August 3, 2007. This was the 16th version of our summer research, which started in 1992. We had 13 students this summer, working on 5 different research projects. We were able to support 8 Hope students and 5 students from outside Hope.

The projects and students are listed below.

• Professor Chuck Cusack led two projects. One project was entitled "Volunteer Computing Games" and involved Evan Peck, from Gordon College, and Maria Riolo, from the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Cusack led the second project with Dr. Airat Bekmetjev from the Math department. It was entitled "Graph Pebbling" and involved Hope student James Daly.
  
• Professor Matt DeJongh led a project on "Modeling Microbial Metabolism". Hope students Paul Frybarger, Tim Wahmhoff, and Jared Wilkening worked on this project with Dr. DeJongh.
• Professor Mike Jipping led a project on "Supporting Parallel Processing on a Local Grid" that involved Hope students John Bruggers, Eric DePree, and Matt Shott. It also involved Chris Dragga from Macalester College.
• Professor Ryan McFall headed up a project entitled "Establishing a Database on Student Assessment" that was part of a bigger research project at Michigan State University. This project involved Gary Benson from Hope, Lidiya Ilcheva from Oberlin College and Daniel Savoie from Michigan State University.