Features
This edition of the newsletter includes several short articles: an alumni corner, spotlight on a current major, featured computer wizard, department news, faculty notes, planning schedule Spring term, and a link to a video showing our students teaching computing concepts to school children during our 2008 J-Term trip to Haiti.
Computer Science Spring Planning Schedule - Spring 2013
| Course Number | Course Title | Times | Credits | Instructor |
|---|
| CSCI 106 01 | Comp Appl in Busn | MWF 8:00-9:00 | 3 | Burrell |
|---|
| CSCI 106 02 | Comp Appl in Busn | TR 8:10-9:40 | 3 | Leska |
|---|
| HONR 292 01 | Building Mobile Comp Apps | MW 2:10-3:40 | 3 | Burrell |
|---|
| CSCI 112 01 | Intro Comp Sci II | MWF 9:10-10:10, TR 2:10-3:40 | 4 | Rabung |
|---|
| CSCI 214 01 | Alg and Data Structures | MW 2:10-3:40/TR 9:50-11:20 | 4 | Leska |
|---|
| CSCI 332 01 | Computer Graphics | MWF 10:20-11:20 | 3 | Burrell |
|---|
| CSCI 395 01 | Intro Comp Networking | TR 3:50-5:20 | 3 | Hague |
|---|
| CSCI 401 01 | Capstone Experience | M 3:50-4:50 | 1 | Burrell |
|---|
| CSCI 483 01 | Capstone Project - Software | TR 11:30-1:00 | 3 | Staff |
|---|
Department News
With our department faculty all moving toward their retirements, we expect to be recruiting for our first replacement this fall. If you would like to participate in the process and help foster a smooth transition, let us know by giving us a call or sending us an email.
On Tuesday, November 13 Adam Rabung was the guest presenter in the department's colloquium series. His talk was entitled "How to Survive and Thrive as a Software Developer." Everyone one who attended found it a well delivered and very useful presentation. The department hopes you can join us for one of the colloquium presentations this spring.
The department added more workstations to the Copley 216 lab/classroom and reconfigured the space to make better use of it as a small lab, seminar room, and after hours student work/study area. More improvements will be on the way when we are able to purchase better-sized new tables for the room. This fall the Junior Seminar and Parallel Computing classes are using the room.
And we saved the best news for last! John and Mary McManus, both graduates of the College, have established the Loving-McManus Endowed Fund for Computer Science. This fund will provide hardware and software needs for faculty-student research, including robot kits, special hardware for enhancing parallel-computing capabilities, and graphics packages. The department faculty are very grateful and extend heartfelt thanks to the McManuses for their generous support of the department. Please read the alumni corner to learn more about these exceptional alumni.
Faculty Notes
John Rabung
My summer was very pleasant and mostly relaxing. It started with a trip to the San Francisco area to see our new granddaughter. She's pretty cute and we found the whole family (two brothers and Mom and Dad) all well and happy.
They came to Virginia in August and Vivy (see accompanying picture) was more "conversant". On the premise that babies know the answers to deep intellectual questions when they are born, but then lose the knowledge when they pick up speech, you see Vivy pictured here in her struggle to respond to the question as to whether P=NP. No luck.
The rest of my summer was spent in the Center of the Universe spending my academically-oriented time working on a redevelopment of my course in Parallel Computing - shifting to a new textbook by Peter Pacheco covering MPI, Pthreads, and OpenMP. Pacheco's approach seems like an excellent way to consider and experience some basic concepts and challenges of parallelism in our age of many-core machines. Some of my activities beyond academics involved getting a couple more gallons of honey from our bees as well as dealing with the renting and then selling of our former residence on Chapman Street. With that accomplished, Marybeth and I are simply enjoying the benefits of living on the edge of campus - that's great!
Chuck Leska
This summer Ben Burrell and I continued our work on developing online materials for our CSCI 106 course, Computer Applications in Business. We edited our tested materials, created a number of additional sections for the Excel portion of the course, and created a initial draft of the materials for the database (Access) section. If you want to take a peek, the URLs are csci106.cs.rmc.edu and csci106.cs.rmc.edu/WebsiteDevAccess.