Seminar Schedule

2021–22

September 9, 2021 — Nicki HamesPariveda Solutions

Nicki Hames

Solving Problems & Staying Technical as a Consulting Manager

When I graduated from Hope many years ago, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I enjoyed solving problems. I applied across a myriad of different jobs, both inside and outside technology, and somehow ended at a consulting firm. In this talk, I'll walk through my career journey at Pariveda Solutions, explore my evolution from an individual contributor to a technical manager, delivery leader, and cloud architect as well as highlight some of the problems I've been involved in solving for various enterprises, including many on the Fortune 500 list.

Nicki Hames graduated from Hope College in 2015 with a Psychology and Women's & Gender Studies double major and Computer Science minor. She is a Senior Technical Manager and Enterprise Architect at the North American consulting firm, Pariveda Solutions, and is based in Dallas, TX. Although she's had her fair share of developing customer web and mobile apps over the years for various companies, she now specializes in the DevOps, Cloud maturation, and system architecture space with a focus in AWS since 2017. Nicki enjoys the opportunity and challenge of solving interesting, real world problems and has managed large-scale projects within highly complex enterprises. When she's not working, you can find her watching the latest romantic reality show, posting delicious meals on her instagram (@nick.with.an.i), or wrangling her larger than expected pandemic puppy. 

Watch a video of Nicki's presentation

September 30, 2021 — Mark PowersArgonne National Laboratory

Nicki Hames

Cloud Computing with Chameleon

Chameleon is a cloud testbed for computer science research and education. In this talk, I will introduce cloud computing, and show how it is used at Chameleon, including discussion of some use cases of cloud computing. I’ll give a demonstration of how to get started with Chameleon, and the different ways to interact with cloud resources. Afterwards, I’ll answer questions about cloud computing, or any questions about my graduate school experience.

Mark Powers is a software developer working on the Chameleon Cloud project, through the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He graduated from Hope College in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. While at Hope, Mark worked with Dr. Ryan McFall on the JanDY survey system, and with Dr. Charles A. Cusack on graph pebbling. Mark completed a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021. During the summer of 2020, Mark was the instructor of Introduction to Programming at UW-Madison.

Watch a video of Mark's presentation

October 21, 2021 — Summer Research Presentations I

“Algoraph but in C++” by Adam James Czeranko and Andres Solorzano, mentor Dr. Chuck Cusack

Given a configuration of “pebbles” on a graph G, a pebbling move removes two pebbles from a source vertex and one pebble is added to an adjacent vertex. A vertex is reachable if there is a sequence of pebbling moves that places one pebble on the vertex; a graph is solvable if every vertex is reachable. The pebbling number of graph g is the smallest integer 𝜋(G), such that any configuration that uses 𝜋(G) pebbles is solvable. A graph satisfies the two-pebbling property if for any configuration of more than 2𝜋(G) - q pebbles, where q is the number of vertices in G with at least one pebble, two pebbles can be moved to any vertex. Through heuristics and algorithms, Algoraph is a program that allows a user to run multiple permutations of pebbles on a graph and determine the reachability, solvability, and satisfaction of the two-pebbling property. Algoraph was originally coded in Java by Dr. Cusack and was translated into C++ by Adam James Czeranko and Andres Solorzano. Through proper data management and parallelization of code, the team developed a new, more efficient version of Algoraph.

“TreeSap 3.2: Bringing People to Trees on Android and iOS” by Evan Mulshine, mentor Dr. Michael Jipping

TreeSap is a mobile app that was created to help people understand and appreciate the value of trees in Holland, Michigan. TreeSap uses data collected by the City of Holland and Hope College to identify trees by GPS location, manual coordinates, or map. Users can also submit their own trees to be added to the database upon review by trusted curators.  Evan will present work from this summer to update the software.

“MyMilkData: Collecting Data from Young Mothers on Breastfeeding” by Isabella Lemus and Kealeigh Usaik, mentor Michael Jipping

MyMilkData is software created to support research by Dr. Anita Esquerra-Zwiers in the Nursing department.  It collects data and provides education for mothers on breastfeeding before and after the birth of a child.  Our work this summer provided a way for mothers to learn about the benefits of breastfeeding and to provide data on how breastfeeding affects the child.  

Watch a video of these presentations

October 28, 2021 — Summer Research Presentations II

“Applying Machine Learning to Tennis” by Kaley Wilson and John VerMeulen, mentor Dr. Ryan McFall

In this presentation, John and Kaley will describe their work utilizing machine learning techniques to automatically identify various actions in a video of a tennis match.  In particular, they will talk about applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify the type of shot contained within an individual video frame.  As part of their talk, they will describe using a framework named You Only Look Once (YOLO) to detect and label individual objects within a video frame, and using pre-trained CNNs to aid in the classification task.

“Applications of Machine Learning using SciKit-Learn and TensorFlow” by Kenneth Munyuza and Trevor Palmatier, mentor Dr. Fola Olagbemi

Machine Learning – Learning from Data – is a field of study that is being successfully applied in several disciplines and industries. The earlier part of the project focused on exploring some of the traditional regression and classification machine learning models and their applications, and implementing various approaches to improve the accuracy of prediction of the classification models or minimize the error (a measure of the model’s accuracy) of regression models. The latter part of the project, which was completed in collaboration with Dr. Brooke Odle (Engineering), entailed developing an artificial neural network (ANN) trained on data obtained from healthy subjects equipped with inertial Measuring Units (IMUs) while they stood on force plates and performed a series of tasks that simulate motions assumed by caregivers while performing patient-handling tasks. The ANN was used to estimate ground reaction forces typically measured by force plates to facilitate the analysis of mechanics related to performance of patient-handling tasks outside of a gait laboratory. 

“Lynnette Redesign: Data-Driven Redesign of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for Middle School Algebra” by Marcus Artigue, research was through Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania

Lynnette is an AI-based tutoring system for middle-school students learning equation solving. In past studies it has been found to be very effective in helping students learn. This work consists of a redesign of the tutor based on past user data with the goal of improving usability and optimizing student learning.

Mentors were Dr. Vincent Aleven and graduate student Tomohiro Nagashima from Carnegie Mellon Human–Computer Interaction Institute. Marcus also worked with another undergraduate student, Michelle Ma from UCLA, on this project.

Watch a video of these presentations

December 2 — Jonathan Chaffer

Jonathan Chaffer '21

Generative Art: From Zero to random()

Generative art is a unique intersection of computer science and visual art. With some creativity, math, and a bit of chaos, you can start creating your own generative art in just a few minutes. In this talk, you'll learn what generative art is, build a basic generative art program, and discover the wide range of exploration possibilities in generative art.

Jonathan Chaffer graduated from Hope College in Spring 2021 and is now working at Atomic Object. During his time at Hope, he worked as a teaching assistant and tutor. At Atomic Object, he has built custom software for local and international clients.

2019–20

September 5, 2019 — Josiah Brett, Jonathan Chaffer, Micah Chrisman, Josie CraneHope College

Mark Powers

Cloud Computing with Chameleon

Chameleon is a cloud testbed for computer science research and education. In this talk, I will introduce cloud computing, and show how it is used at Chameleon, including discussion of some use cases of cloud computing. I’ll give a demonstration of how to get started with Chameleon, and the different ways to interact with cloud resources. Afterwards, I’ll answer questions about cloud computing, or any questions about my graduate school experience.

Josiah Brett (East Lansing), Jonathan Chaffer (Grand Rapids, Michigan), Micah Chrisman (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) and Josie Crane (Mattawan, Michigan) are all junior Computer Science majors at Hope College. They completed their work on TreeSap as part of the Computer Science department's Hope Software Insitute during a 9-week period in the summer. In addition to software development, they enjoyed drawing creative "frogs" on the lab's white board and weekly trips to various local eateries for lunch. Their work was supervised by Dr. Jipping.

September 12, 2019 — Gabrielle Kosiba, Claire Lundy, Carmen RodriguezHope College

 

Gabrielle Kosiba, Claire Lundy, Carmen Rodriguez

THE HELPME WEB APPLICATION: ENHANCING COMMUNICATION WITHIN INSTRUCTIONAL LAB SETTINGS

Stressful college labs are all too familiar to today’s students due to the imbalance of instructional staff (professors and TAs) and the students’ need for assistance. Students are often left waiting for help, hindering their ability to utilize lab time effectively. It can also leave instructors stressed and exasperated, especially when the same question is asked repeatedly.

We created the HelpMe application to better facilitate communication during labs between students and instructors. As students enter their questions into the system, the instructional staff is alerted. Instructors can then provide detailed information to the student and allow other students to access and benefit from the answer via HelpMe. This allows students to work at their own pace and avoids the pitfall of many students having the same question and needing assistance. Our overarching vision is to better provide students with the support they need by providing access to the necessary information and allowing instructional staff to use their time as effectively as possible.

Our presentation will describe how HelpMe enhances rather than replaces human interaction by addressing its features and future uses. We performed two beta tests over the course of the summer and will describe what we learned from these two tests. Attendees will have a chance to interact with the HelpMe application as part of the presentation.

Gabrielle Kosiba (Farmington Hills, Michigan), Claire Lundy (Okemos, Michigan), and Carmen Rodriguez (Tegucigalpa, Honduras) are all sophomore Computer Science majors at Hope College.  They completed their work on the HelpMe application as part of the Computer Science department's Hope Software Insitute during a nine-week period in the summer. In addition to software development, they enjoyed hourly workout breaks, weekly trips to various local eateries for lunch and a highly competitive evening of Spike Ball. Their work was supervised by Dr. McFall.

Watch a recording of this presentation (requires 1Hope login)

 September 26, 2019 — Bruce BassettRetired Software Engineer

Bruce Bassett

Embedded Systems Product Development: Tales from the Front.

After describing what an embedded system is and how its code differs from other kinds of software, software engineer Bruce Bassett will share his adventures in developing a currency-counting and counterfeit detection machine which operates at 1600 bills per minute. Bruce will also describe the product development process in the real world, turning a cool device into a product that customers actually buy.

Bruce Bassett graduated from the University of Chicago with a BS in mathematics in 1984 and was a software developer, architect and consultant in the Chicago area until retiring to Holland last December. Despite retirement, Bruce continues to enjoy working on a toolkit to translate assembly language programs into human-quality C.

Watch a recording of this presentation (requires 1Hope login)

October 10, 2019 — Wassnaa AL-maweeWestern Michigan University

Wassnaa AL-mawee

Maia: A Language for Mandatory Integrity Controls of Arbitrary Structured Data

The expansion of attacks against information systems of companies, that operate nuclear power stations and other energy facilities in the United States and other countries, are noticeable with potential catastrophic real-world implications. Data integrity is a fundamental component of information security. It refers to the accuracy and the trustworthiness of data or resources. Data integrity within information systems becomes an important factor of security protection as the data becomes more integrated and crucial to decision-making. The security threats brought by human errors whether, malicious or unintentional, such as viruses, hacking, and many other cyber threats, are dangerous and require mandatory integrity protection. To date, Biba and Clark-Wilson are well-known general integrity models in computer systems but they impose a number of restrictions that make them impractical to implement. Additionally, permission-based solutions are one of the popular approaches in the literature but existing solutions are designed to address the trustworthiness of who accesses the data not the trustworthiness of the data itself. To solve these problems, we propose a generally applicable system to prevent and detect compromised data integrity.

The proposed work consists of two major components: the definition of the language for describing integrity constraints, and the construction of the mandatory integrity control model. The main idea of this research is to describe the integrity constraints for arbitrary structured data. In addition, we propose to construct a set of specification rules that enables users to identify the clearance levels of their tested data using Multi-Level Security (MLS). Furthermore, we use Structural Operational Semantic (SOS) to evaluate and validate our approach. Also, we will provide an evaluation study in term of the effectiveness and usability of our system in the classroom. By using our mandatory integrity protection approach, companies and organizations can ensure data integrity in their information systems.

Watch a recording of this presentation (requires 1Hope login)

October 17, 2019  — Yucong JiangIndiana University

Yucong Jiang

Artificial Intelligence and Music

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved impressive results in many tasks: face recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, self-driving cars, and so on. In recent years, a research area called “AI and music” has also been growing. It is an interdisciplinary field connecting music and technology. I will introduce this with some cool applications, and then talk about some common techniques and challenges in this field, including discussing my research on Automatic Piano Score-following. Along the way, I’ll share my experience of being a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington, and my two internships at Google.

Yucong Jiang is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, music informatics, and machine learning. Before coming to the US for her Ph.D., she earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Meanwhile she started to take piano lessons in 2013, and held her first recital in 2018.

October 24, 2019 — Meredith BronkOpen Systems Technologies

Meredith Bronk

Technology Skills in a Digital World

Relevance in a digital world is shifting. Technology skills are no longer just about what you know, but about how you can leverage your knowledge to better understand the needs of others, communicate effectively, and create the outcomes people want.  Whether you are studying CS, Marketing, or another discipline, the future is digital – which means we are all technologists!  Based on my 20+ years running and leading a technology consulting company – and the various evolutions of transformation I’ve been through – let’s talk about what businesses today are really looking for (and it’s more than just MongoDB, iOS and .Net), and what that means for how you approach your future.  I will share some fun stories of things I’ve seen, lessons I’ve learned in my own path to becoming CEO, and will answer any questions you have about the industry, leadership, and the future!

Meredith Bronk, president and CEO of OST, has been with the company since 1998. Meredith understands the needs of a dynamic growing organization and leverages her strong leadership capabilities to bring creative solutions to clients while maintaining a strong organizational culture. It is this vision, passion and empathy that she brings to leading OST and it’s 200+ employees every day.

In addition to earning her bachelor’s degree from Alma College, Meredith also earned her MBA from Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business in 2014. Her career started in accounting, but her compassion and insight quickly expanded her into project management, recruiting and human resources. She joined OST as a project manager and was promoted to chief operating officer for several years before being named president and CEO. Her diverse experience has created a unique combination of strong analytical and interpersonal skills. Meredith’s servant attitude and commitment to the success of others is an excellent representation of OST’s dedication to its employees and customers.

In addition, Meredith serves on several professional and community board of directors including the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, United Bank of Michigan and SecurAlarm Systems, Inc.

Meredith is married with three daughters. When she is not dedicating time to OST, she can often be found on the softball diamond teaching girls the fundamentals. She openly shares the lessons learned during her playing career and how they are applicable at work – and to life in general.

Watch a recording of this presentation (requires 1Hope login)

November 7, 2019 — Maha AllouziKent State University

Maha Allouzi

Soter: Trust Discovery Framework for the Internet of Medical things (IoMT)

While the Internet of Things is in the rise in the healthcare industry, implementation of this technology has not been as rapid as in many other sectors-largely because of the strict HIPAA compliance. In this talk, we propose Soter a HIPAA compliance distributed personalized authentication mechanism for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), based on Multiparty Trust Negotiation. Multiparty Trust Negotiation (MTN) is a promising approach for establishing trust between multiparty (Things) demanding to share resources, by gradually exchanging digital credentials based Access Control Policies (ACP). Previous work has been proposed for authentication in IoMT environment, however the proposed approaches are not the best for IoMT as they are centralized and based on Identity Access Control Policies (IBAC) which have limitations make them unsuitable for open distributed environment such as the IoMT, we explain these limitations on the next section. Soter framework presents a number of innovative features, such as the use of Multiparty Trust Negotiation (MTN) to establish trust between Medical Things, and the use of Personalized Access Control Policies (PACP).

 Maha Allouzi is currently a PhD candidate at Kent State University and received her Master’s degree in computer science at Kent State University. Her primary research bridges several areas of authentication and authorization protocols and algorithms, Multiparty Trust Negotiation, and Internet of Medical things (IoMT). Her research contributions have been published in the following IEEE conferences; International Conference of Semantic Computing (ICSC), World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia networks (WoWMoM) and the Software, Quality Reliability and Security (QRS). She also teaches and serve as an undergraduate advisor in the Computer Science department at Kent State university.

November 21, 2019 — Fola OlagbemiWestern Michigan University

Omofolakunmi (Fola) Olagbemi

Scalable Algorithms and Hybrid Parallelization Strategies for Multivariate Integration with ParAdapt and CUDA

The evaluation of numerical integrals finds applications in fields such as High Energy Physics, Bayesian Statistics, Stochastic Geometry, Molecular Modeling and Medical Physics. The erratic behavior of some integrands due to singularities, peaks, or ridges in the integration region suggests the need for reliable algorithms and software that not only provide an estimation of the integral with a level of accuracy acceptable to the user, but also perform this task in a timely manner. We developed ParAdapt, a numerical integration software based on a classic global adaptive strategy, which employs Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) in providing integral evaluations. Specifically, ParAdapt applies adaptive region partitioning strategies developed for efficient integration and mapping to GPUs. The resulting methods render the framework of the classic global adaptive scheme suitable for general functions in moderate dimensions, say 10 to 25. The algorithms presented have been determined to be scalable as evidenced by speedup values in the double and triple digits up to very large numbers of subdivisions. An analysis of the various partitioning and parallelization strategies is given.

Fola is a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University’s Computer Science Department, looking forward to graduating at the end of the Fall 2019 semester. During her time as a graduate student, Fola has taught several classes in Java (both Labs and Lectures), at both the introductory and more advanced levels. In the current (Fall 2019) semester, in addition to a Java Lab, she is teaching an introductory course in Web Technologies (including topics like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP).

Prior to coming to the United States to pursue a PhD degree, Fola worked for some years at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Nigeria, working with teams to provide assurance services to the firm’s clients.

Her research areas include: high performance computing, applying GPUs and CUDA to scientific computations including the estimation of multivariate numerical integrals from diverse fields such as Bayesian Statistics and High Energy Physics.

Fola obtained her Bachelors in Computer Science from University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria, and her M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Watch a video of Ms. Olagbemi's presentation.

December 5, 2019 — Senior Project Presentations

Project descriptions and presenter information to be posted soon!

January 16, 2020 — Ryan McFallHope College

 

Ryan McFall

Stories of Hope

Your time at Hope College is shaping you in many ways -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.  Some of the ways Hope has influenced and changed you are already evident to you, while others will be discovered later in life.  In this somewhat out of the ordinary Computer Science seminar, I will describe some of the lessons I have learned about life during my over 25 years at Hope as a student and a faculty member.  Each of these lessons will be examined through a story.  A few of the topics will be related to Computer Science, but many will not.  Audience participation and story-telling will be encouraged!

Ryan McFall ’93 started working at Hope in 2000. He is a professor of computer science and served as the department chairperson from fall 2012 - spring 2018. He has served as the principal architect of the online teaching evaluation system on campus (SALT), working with students to create the program.  Most ecently he has worked with two teams of students to create Vitalis and HelpMe.

Ryan’s primary areas of expertise include educational technology and the practical aspects of software engineering. In the early 2000s, he led a project to develop and evaluate the impact of collaborative electronic textbooks, implementing one of the first tablet computing platforms, the Microsoft Tablet PC. Many of the ideas his research team investigated are now making their way into commercial products. The community highlights feature in the Amazon Kindle platform is very similar to ideas that he investigated in his eTextReader project.

He spent the fall 2013 semester as a software developer at Open Systems Technologies (OST) in Grand Rapids. He also spent parts of the summer of 2014 as consultant with OST. He has been working to bring many of the tools and practices he learned there into his courses at Hope.

Watch a video of this seminar (requires 1Hope login)

January 30, 2020 — Safia Hattab; Jonathan Chaffer & Caleb TallquistHope College CS students

Safia Hattab

Title: Using Artificial Intelligence Algorithms to Predict Student Understanding of Chemistry by Eye Movements

Abstract:  Artificial intelligence algorithms, specifically neural networks, have grown in popularity for analyzing large amounts of data and finding inherent patterns that would be difficult to decipher otherwise. Here, we use artificial neural network algorithms to analyze eye-tracking data from fifty individual participants viewing fourteen individual slides of images. The neural network will be built from the analysis of the expert and novice data set (twenty-two subjects total), and used to determine its usefulness in predicting the ability of the middle set.

Jonathan Chaffer & Caleb Tallquist

Title: Title: Building a Fabric Matching Application

Abstract: In the fall semester, through the Center for Leadership's consulting program, we were tasked to build a web application, titled Fabric Magic, to be used internally at a Herman Miller plant. The end result was a working prototype that could be further expanded upon by developers at Herman Miller. The project involved work in C#, SQL Server, HTML, and JavaScript, as well as the front-end library Bootstrap. In this presentation, we describe the process of building the application, its desired future, and what we learned from working on a project for a real-world company.

Watch a video of this seminar (requires 1Hope login)

February 13, 2020 — Victor NormanCalvin University

Victor Norman

Building a Cross-Platform App Before Your Very Eyes using Ionic

In this talk, I will show you how to build a simple Quiz app, using the Ionic development framework. By the end of the 50 minutes, we'll have an app that works on both Android and iOS, and appears to be a native app on both platforms. The talk will include an introduction to Typescript and the Ionic Framework, as well as a demonstration that honors the Model-View-Controller paradigm.

 

Victor Norman is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Calvin University. His areas of interest currently include Best Practices for Computer Science Pedagogy, and Computing and Missions. He spent the 2018-2019 year on sabbatical working at Atomic Object where he learned web app development, including Typescript, and in Germany working for Greater Europe Mission where he learned building mobile apps with Ionic. 

 

Watch a video of this seminar (requires 1Hope login)

February 27, 2020 — Shawn AndersonLogikcull

Shawn Anderson

A Coder’s Journey

Every journey begins with a single step; we’ll look at the adventure and lessons learned from one 20 year journey in a software career. We'll cover topics ranging from internships, to development and consulting, to working remotely and a few technical pointers along the way. What can each piece of the journey teach us about building better software and becoming a better developer, designer, person?

Shawn Anderson is a senior engineer at Logikcull, but spent much of his career as a software consultant with Atomic Object. He holds a degree in computer science from GVSU and has been writing software professionally for almost 20 years. Shawn has written software for web, mobile, desktop, and embedded platforms. Since interning at Atomic Object and starting his career using extreme programming, he has become an expert in designing, testing, and deploying production software and considers himself a well-rounded generalist. Shawn also teaches at Hope College semi-regularly on various programming related courses. He’ll be teaching Applications Programming again in Fall 2020.

March 12, 2020 — Herb DershemHope College

Herb Dershem

An Interesting Talk about Uninteresting Numbers

What does it mean for a number to be random? This talk will explore this question in a manner that will expand your understanding of the concept of randomness and its role in computer science using a recently discovered concept called algorithmic complexity. Along the way, we will discover that all numbers can be divided into those that are interesting and those that are uninteresting. Also, you will be introduced to the only known uninteresting number in the universe, known as Chaitin's Omega.

Dr. Herb Dershem is a retired professor of Computer Science at Hope College, serving in that role from 1969 to 2013.  He also was the department chair from 1975 to 2003, and served two terms as interim Dean for the Natural and Applied Sciences.  He received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Dayton in 1965, his M.S. in Computer Science in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1969.  Both of his graduate degrees are from Purdue University.

Now that he's retired, Herb spends a lot of time with his fantastic wife and six terrific grandchildren. He also enjoys being a Kids Hope mentor and serving as a Pastoral Care Elder at his church. For exercise, he likes to bike and play tennis.

April 2, 2020 — Natalie Boardway and Josh HubersOttawa Area Intermediate School District

Title, Abstract, and Bio will be posted shortly.

April 16, 2020 — TBD

Title, Abstract, and Bio will be posted shortly.

2018–19

September 6, 2018 - Andrew Van PernisDreamworks Animation

Andrew Van Pernis

Technology at DWA: Developing Artistic Tools in a Collaborative Environment

In this talk, I'll present a brief overview of the pipeline for producing animated feature films at DreamWorks Animation and explore some of the technology challenges faced by that pipeline. We'll dive in on DreamWorks' Academy Award winning animation tool Premo to discuss how several teams collaborated to create a fast and intuitive application.

Andrew is a project manager with a focus on building artist-centric applications with C++, Python, OpenGL and Qt.

He has worked on both visual effects production and animated films. He has experience in creating the user interface and experience for applications as well as the core technologies to drive those applications.

Andrew grew up on the shores of Lake Superior in Ashland, Wisconsin. He received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Hope College in 1996. Andrew then went on to Clemson University where he obtained a Master’s degree in 1998 and a Ph.D. in 2004 in Computer Science. His Ph.D. thesis was titled Global Diffuse Illumination for Image Sequences and focused on creating realistic lighting for animated virtual environments.

Andrew started his career in visual effects and animation in 2004 with the startup In-Three, Inc. which provided stereoscopic conversion for several Disney films including Alice in Wonderland. In 2009 he joined DreamWorks Animation as a Senior Software Engineer on the Animation Tools team. He has had the incredible pleasure of working on every film since How To Train Your Dragon. During that time, Andrew has helped to build a state-of-the-art animation tool, Premo, that was first used on How To Train Your Dragon 2 and he is currently working on a cutting edge tool for character setup and rigging, Luna. Andrew works directly with the Software Engineers, Animators and Character TDs to create solutions for the technical and creative challenges they encounter. This close collaboration with productions has allowed DreamWorks to create fast, intuitive and immersive tools that are best in class.

Outside of work, he enjoys hiking, camping, and playing video games and board games.

Watch a video of Andrew's presentation

September 20, 2018 - Hope Summer Research projects

Phil Caris, Jori Gelbaugh, Dennis Towns - Vitalis, an Electronic Medical Record for Nursing Education.  Watch a video of this presentation.

Josiah Brett and Josiah Brouwer - Parallel Programming on GPUs using CUDA

Louis Kopp and Caleb Tallquist - Android Bilancio and TreesApp

October 4, 2018 - Nathan VanceGraduate Student at University of Notre Dame

Nathan Vance

Life as a graduate student in Computer Science at Notre Dame

In this talk, Nathan will describe his current research at the University of Notre Dame as a computer science graduate student and will describe what being a graduate student is like. There will be plenty of time for questions from the audience, so make sure to bring your questions with you!

Nathan Vance graduated from Hope College in May 2017 with majors in computer science and chemistry. While at Hope, he worked closely with Dr. Will Polik in the chemistry department to build high throughput computing systems ranging from cluster computers to dynamically allocated cloud systems.

Nathan started graduate school at the Univeristy of Notre Dame in the Fall of 2017. He is part of Dr. Dong Wang's research group, which focuses on social sensing, edge computing, machine learning and cyberphysical-human systems. Nathan is particularly interested in edge computing, which applies the concepts of cloud, cluster and ubiquitous computing to commodity hardware in close proximity to the data being processed.

In his spare time, Nathan is involved with his church, plays board games and attempts at carpentry.

Watch a video of Nathan's presentation (due to a technical difficulty, this recording starts in the middle of the presentation)

October 18, 2018 - Victoria GondaBuffer

Victoria Gonda

Exploring Functional Programming

Being an Android developer, much of my work has been using Java in an object-oriented paradigm style. Recently, many aspects of functional programming have become standard in the community with the adoption of Kotlin and RxJava. But what does it mean to use functional paradigm properties, and how can it be helpful? I decided to explore some of the fundamentals of functional programming, and what it might look like coming from Java. In this presentation, I'll share with you what I found!

Victoria started her software development journey at Hope College studying dance and computer science. After graduating from Hope in 2016, she began her career at Collective Idea in Holland, MI working on Android and Ruby on Rails applications. Since deciding to focus on mobile development, she now works remotely as an Android developer at Buffer. She is also an author for RayWenderlich.com, and is active in the Android community as a conference speaker.

When not traveling for work or play, you can find her at her home in Chicago. She enjoys playing board games with her partner, Tyler, or attending dance classes. Relaxing looks like curling up with a good book and some tea, while cuddling her cat and hedgehog.

Watch a video of Victoria's presentation

November 1, 2018 - J. TowerTrailhead Technologies

J. Tower, Trailhead technology partners

Why Microsoft is the #1 Company Developers Should be Watching

For many years, development was pretty simple. You could realistically learn everything there was to know about your technology of choice, you did all your work on your own computer, and the development world was split neatly into two camps: enterprise and open-source. Today, all of those lines have blurred into each other.--development rarely happens without use of the cloud, enterprise frameworks like Microsoft's .NET have gone open-source, and virtually no one can afford to only develop using a single technology. During this transition, Microsoft made some deft technology moves that, in my opinion, make it the most important company for professional software developers to watch.

In this talk, I'll give you a quick survey of some of the most important technologies coming out of Microsoft today, including .NET Core, Xamarin, and Blazor for doing cross-platform development, great tooling like Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code, and some of Microsoft's game-changing cloud services like Azure Functions, Machine Learning, AI, and Azure DevOps. Even if you currently know nothing about Microsoft's development technologies, you will walk away with a good overview of what's happening at software development's most important company.

Jonathan "J." Tower is a Microsoft MVP, Telerik Developer Expert, and business owner with twenty years of software industry experience. He loves solving problems and the creative aspects of software work, as well as sharing what he's learned with others and building the technology community. His current technology interests include C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, and the JavaScript ecosystem, as well as a few different mobile app technologies. J. lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with his wife and children, where he uses his passion for the tech community to run a user group and the Beer City Code conference.

Watch a video of J.'s presentation

November 15, 2018 - Rachael McQuater & Taylor Vanden HoekAtomic Object

Rachael McQuater & Taylor Vanden Hoek

Integrating Design and Development to Make Great Software

Atomic Object is a consultancy that works with clients to create custom software to help them do what they do best — better. Armed with the right software, our clients have made pipelines safer, cities greener, healthcare smarter, and old products new again.

Design and development are deeply intertwined at Atomic. We believe that designers and developers each bring an important lens to the problem space, and the more we can empathize and collaborate with one another, the more value we can create. In this talk, we'll dive into the Atomic process and see how software gets made, how our teams work together, and how we create the best experiences we can for our customers.

Rachael is a Software Consultant and Developer at Atomic Object. She's been building software and consulting with Atomic clients since 2016. She brings technical perspectives to the human-centered problems that her customers face.

Taylor is a Software Consultant and Designer at Atomic Object. She works alongside Atomic’s clients and development teams to design and create great software solutions that work for the people who use them.

Watch a video of Rachael and Taylor's Presentation

November 29, 2018 - Sanethia ThomasPhD Candidate at the University of Florida

Sanethia Thomas

I AM PRO: A Career Identity Tool for Athlete Development using a Human Centered Computing Approach

In this talk I will discuss how used I the Human Centered Computing (HCC) approach to create I AM PRO, a technology that assists athletes in transition by helping them identify a career for life after sport. I will present an overview of HCC and explain how it can be applied to develop more effective and usable technologies for specialized populations. I will conclude with a demo of I AM PRO and a review of the preliminary findings from my dissertation research.

Sanethia Thomas is a PhD Candidate, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow, and GEM fellow at the University of Florida in the Human Experience Research Lab under Dr. Juan Gilbert. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from the University of Texas El Paso and a Masters in Youth Development Leadership from Clemson University, where she graduated in the top ten percent and was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. She was also inducted into the first African American Honor Society Beta Eta Sigma and Golden Key International Honor Society for the top fifteen percent of graduate students.  

She has represented the United States of America by playing basketball in Amsterdam, Belgium, and Paris. Her basketball experiences have fueled her research in developing technologies that will assist athletes in transitional skills and mental health. Her research is interdisciplinary as it includes the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Athlete Development, Artificial Intelligence and Affective Computing. Specifically, she explores the concept using Natural Language Interfaces and Intelligent Embodied Conversational Agents to help athletes. Her research also touches areas in User Experience, Human-Centered Computing, Educational Technologies, and Athlete Development. Sanethia Thomas has made notable contributions by publishing in the Journal of Higher Education Athletics & Innovation and several conference venues.

Her experiences have spanned across the private and public sector, from America Online (AOL) to Government and to K-12. Outside of graduate school, Sanethia has helped over 500 students and student-athletes prepare college by helping them increase their SAT/ACT scores through her non-profit organization Score High Coach.

Watch a video of Sanethia's presentation (you will need the password that was emailed out to all students via the Computer Science Community news forum)

December 6, 2018 - Senior Project Showcase

In this showcase, students in CSCI 481, Senior Project Seminar, will demonstrate what they've accomplished for their senior projects.

January 17, 2019 - Summer Research Opportunities

At this seminar, faculty from the computer science department will present the summer research opportunities for 2019. 

February 7, 2019 - James HerrickHope College Department of Communication

James A. Herrick

Framing AI

AI is an issue of increasingly urgent international import. In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the control of artificial intelligence will be crucial to global power. In a “science lesson” to start the Russian school year, Putin said that artificial intelligence is “the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind.” Tech writer Kevin Kelly calls AI, “the ur-force in our future. The term artificial intelligence came into wide use among computer scientists after MIT researcher John McCarthy imagined in 1960 the possibility of computers not simply managing data, but thinking like human beings. In 1989 mathematician Roger Penrose defined the “objectives” of AI as “to imitate, by means of machines…as much of human mental activity as possible, and perhaps to improve upon human abilities in these respects.” 

Despite such assessments--and despite the fact that the stakes could not be higher—AI remains enigmatic and poorly understood by the public. The language we employ to describe AI will have important consequences for the technology’s future development and regulation. As a result, efforts to craft linguistic frames for AI are in full swing. Journalist Andrea Morris writes that “we may need a vernacular to talk about non-biological superintelligent agents who display highly skilled behaviors.” That new vernacular is being forged in contemporary public discourse about AI. This presentation will explore six prominent efforts to frame AI for contemporary audiences, and the implications of each.

James A. Herrick (MA University of California-Davis, PhD University of Wisconsin) is the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope. Professor Herrick is the author or editor of three books on the rhetoric of technology.  He writes and speaks about the history of rhetoric, new religious movements, and the human enhancement movement. 

Watch Dr. Herrick's presentation (requires 1Hope login)

February 21,2019 - Jim LeamerWycliffe Bible Translators

Mr. Jim Leamer

Using technology in missions

Jim will be presenting “How technology is used in missions”. Some of the topics include lasers that are used for shooting mosquitos, mobile devices, machine learning for Bible translation, satellites, and other technologies. It is exciting to see how these technologies will increasingly impact world missions.

Jim joined Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1977. He was involved in the design of the first portable computer to be used in the field by Bible translators. Other projects included part of the team that designed Wycliffe’s communications network and installation of major business software.

He met his wife at Wycliffe’s technical center in North Carolina, and they have two daughters. In 1983 Jim and Jeanne worked in Nairobi, Kenya where Jim was involved in defining a computing strategy for East Africa. After 15 years of involvement in the area of computers, his family moved to the Wycliffe office in Atlanta, Georgia where Jim is involved in recruitment of technical personnel. His goal is to challenge students to use their skills in the critical need of Information Technology in missions.

Since moving to Atlanta, Jim has made presentations on more than 75 college campuses and spoken at many conferences and churches. His excitement about missions and how God can use anyone is evident as he shares the possibilities with students.

Watch Mr. Leamer's presentation (requires 1Hope login)

March 7, 2019 - Valerie TaylorArgonne National Laboratory (Bultman Student Center, Schaap Auditorium)

Dr. Valerie Taylor

Exploring the Tradeoffs Between Performance and Power for Parallel Applications

The demand for computational power continues to drive the deployment of ever-growing parallel systems. Production parallel systems with hundreds of thousands of components are being designed and deployed. Future parallel systems are expected to have millions of processors and hundreds of millions of cores, with power requirements. The complexity of these systems is increasing, with hierarchically configured manycore processors and accelerators, together with a deep and complex memory hierarchy. As a result of the complexity, applications face an enormous challenge in exploiting the necessary parameters for efficient execution. While reducing execution time is still the major objective for high performance computing, future systems and applications will have additional power requirements that represent a multidimensional tuning challenge. To embrace these key challenges, we must understand the complicated tradeoffs among runtime and power, and in some cases resilience strategies. This talk will present our methods and analyses to explore these tradeoffs for parallel applications.

The lectureship is supported by a multi-year grant from the Kavli Foundation of Oxnard, California, to bring prominent scientists to campus.

Dr. Taylor is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. Previously, she served at Texas A&M University as head of the computer science and engineering departments, senior associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Engineering, and also a Regents Professor and the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Prior to her time at Texas A&M, Dr. Taylor was a faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Northwestern University for 11 years.

Her research is in the area of high-performance computing, with a focus on performance analysis and modeling of parallel, scientific applications. She is also the chief executive officer and president of the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT), and is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for Computing Machinery.  

Watch Dr. Taylor's Presentation (requires 1Hope login)

March 28, 2019 - Maria GlenskiUniversity of Notre Dame

Maria Glenski

Social Media Consumers and Curators

People frequently rely on social media as their primary source of news and information. Tasked with curating an ever-increasing amount of content, providers leverage user interaction feedback to make decisions about which content to display, highlight, and hide. User interactions such as likes, votes, clicks, and views are assumed to be a proxy of a content's quality, popularity, or news-worthiness. Users in turn rely on the anonymous, aggregate ratings of others to make important decisions about which products to buy, movies to watch, news to read, or even political candidates to support. The sheer volume of new information being produced and consumed only increases the reliance that individuals place on anonymous others to curate and sort massive amounts of information. As crowd-sourced curation of news and information have become the norm, it is important to understand not only how individuals consume information through social news Web sites, but also how they contribute to their ranking systems and to the spread and reception of news and misinformation.

Maria Glenski is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. She is an Arthur J Schmitt Leadership in Science and Engineering Fellow, a member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA), and has served on the program committee for the international AAAI conference on web and social media (ICWSM).

Her research in social news, social media analysis, and rating systems has been published in top tier venues including the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, and the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. During her time at the University of Notre Dame, she has also been an NSF EASPSI fellow in Beijing, China; a Rome Global Gateway Research Fellow in residence; and a National Security Internship Program (NSIP) intern at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington.

Watch Dr. Glenski's presentation (requires 1Hope login)

April 2, 2019 - Sara Wachter-BoettcherPrincipal, Rare Union

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Inclusive Design, Ethical Tech, and All of Us 

We all want design to be a force for good—we want to make things welcoming, seamless, and maybe even fun to use. But without a process for ensuring our design decisions are also inclusive, equitable, and fair, our products can end up with all sorts of biases embedded in them. At best, these biases leave people out or let them down, like a “smart scale” that assumes everyone wants to lose weight, or a celebratory notification sent out to a grieving user. At worst, they can cause lasting harm: résumé-review algorithms trained to weed out women candidates, facial-recognition services that fail for people of color, “recommended content” features that put increasingly disturbing and violent content in front of kids.

In this talk, we’ll look at the ways tech and design have gone wrong—and then talk about what needs to happen to prevent these problems in our own work, and to push tech companies to adopt a more ethical and inclusive way forward.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is the principal of Rare Union, a digital product and content strategy consultancy based in Philadelphia, and the co-host of Strong Feelings, a weekly podcast about living your best feminist life at work. Her most recent book, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech (W.W. Norton, 2017), was named one of the best tech books of the year by Wired, and one of the top business books of the year by Fast Company.

Sara is also the co-author, with Eric Meyer, of Design for Real Life (A Book Apart, 2016), a book about creating products and interfaces that are more inclusive and compassionate, and the author of Content Everywhere (Rosenfeld Media, 2012), a book about designing flexible, mobile-ready content.

Sara speaks about design, tech, and digital publishing at conferences around the world, and consults with startups, Fortune 100 companies, and academic institutions. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Slate, The Guardian, Salon, McSweeney’s, and more. Find her on Twitter @sara_ann_marie or at sarawb.com.

Watch Ms. Wachter-Boettcher's presentation (requires 1Hope login)

April 18, 2019 - Pranay RajgarhiaSolid Circle

Pranay Rajgarhia

Information Painful Wonderful

The fear of change and failure is leading organizations across the world to adapt off-the- shelf software systems. Does this impact business processes? Does this meet the users need? How does the business get impacted? What can you do?

In the presentation we will discuss the answers to the above questions and look at how to become a software development Rockstar that can help organization grow and improve processes. Additionally, we will investigate the new role an Information Technology department plays in the complex new corporate world.

Pranay Rajgarhia is the founder of SolidCircle, a business process improvement company based in West Michigan. Pranay possesses over 25 years of experience within government, information technology, manufacturing, and international business. His expertise lies in Custom Off-the-shelf Software Development (COTS), Business Process Management, Software Implementation Strategy and Leadership.

Pranay founded SolidCircle in 2004 to find simple solutions to complex business problems and to provide the highest quality of customer service. He focuses on maximizing client business productivity with process improvement, seamless information flow and sustainability. As founder of the company, Pranay responsibility includes business planning, strategy-formulation, marketing, finance, legal, vendor management, alliance management, and the management of human capital.

Under Pranay’s leadership, SolidCircle has created a software to streamline the Justice System (Justice Suite), formed strategic partnerships to provide document management, created a data conversion application (Integration Platform), and designed methodology to easily transfer information from peripheral systems.

SolidCircle has provided services to public and private sector clients, including the Ottawa County Sheriff Office, Ottawa County Courts, Benzie County Sheriff Office, Mackinac County Sheriff Office, Montmorency County Sheriff Office, City of Ypsilanti, Arnie’s Restaurant and Bakery, and Holy Cross Services, among others. Pranay and his team pride himself on thoroughly evaluating each client’s business needs and recommending solutions that assist organizations in improving their processes and information sharing to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

Watch Mr. Rajgarhia's presentation (requires 1Hope login)

April 25, 2019 - Dr. Doug VanWierenGoogle

Watch Dr. VanWieren's presentation (requires 1Hope login)