COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021 Update from the Department Chair
Dear Alumni, Parents and Friends of HMC CS, I am excited to share the 2021 CS newsletter with you from the brand new Scott A. McGregor Computer Science Center! The McGregor Computer Science Center sits on the corner of Dartmouth and Platt and provides a welcoming gateway to the HMC campus. It brings together CS offices, Clinic and research spaces, and CS labs and classrooms under one roof and provides a new home for the many activities of the entire HMC CS community; highlights of which I’m excited to share in this newsletter. We begin the 2021–2022 academic year with considerable excitement, welcoming two new classes to campus. The halls of McGregor are buzzing with students catching up with each other and with professors and staff—it’s
nearly impossible not to encounter groups of students huddled together, working through problem sets or chatting about life. Our CS professors and students return to campus with a renewed eagerness. Indeed, both faculty and students alike mention how energizing it is to be back in the classroom. Moving our HMC CS curriculum online last year forced us to think creatively about pedagogy, and has led to exciting new ideas and experiments in our classes this fall. Our new state-of-the-art labs and Clinic workrooms will provide space for curricular innovations for years to come. As I begin my inaugural year as CS department chair, I do so with a heart full of gratitude to our students and faculty for the courage, grace and compassion with which they navigated a year full of unprecedented
challenges. I am grateful for our staff, who helped us seamlessly transition to our new building while managing the turmoil of a pandemic. I am indebted to our network of families and alumni for their unwavering support. And finally, I extend my appreciation for the many leaders who preceded me in building this department to what it is today. A special thanks to our most recent department chair, Melissa O’Neill, who led our department through a period of vibrant growth, and to 2020–2021 interim department chair Bill Daub, who led us through the challenging pandemic year. We also send our warm congratulations and a fond farewell to Ran Libeskind-Hadas, who is moving across the street to become the founding chair of integrated science at Claremont McKenna College. I am honored to serve the HMC CS community as department chair and do so standing on the shoulders of giants. I am eager to see how we can grow together as a community in the years to come!
Jim Boerkoel
Csilla & Walt Foley Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science
FEATURE
What’s It Like In McGregor? In June, the Department of Computer Science moved into the McGregor Computer Science Center, and the building was in full use for the fall semester. The shops in the Libra Complex were renovated and repositioned, and the College’s first permanent makerspace opened. Here, a few community members describe their thoughts and experiences in the College’s newest building.
Surani Gunasena
Clinic Coordinator, Computer Science Department What’s your favorite aspect of being in McGregor so far? I love how bright it is in the building. There are windows throughout, and the colors make everything pop. I also love that we, as a department, are all on the same floor. It’s been great for collaboration and building community. Have there been any surprises about the new space that you’re excited about? There are many workspaces available for students or faculty throughout the building. I’ve been enjoying seeing how students utilize each nook. There are several areas that students can use to collaborate with each other, especially with the whiteboards throughout the space. It’s been nice to see the whiteboards filled with ideas and drawings from the students. How have you been using the various spaces so far? I’ve been enjoying using the spaces for Clinic. We have 12 workrooms for our teams in McGregor, and the other 10 teams are in
Sprague. It’s been great to be able to utilize the study rooms and conference room to give students private meeting spaces when needed. What does the new space offer that previously wasn’t possible? Having enclosed Clinic spaces has been incredible. This is the first time that the CS department has had enclosed Clinic workspaces. The teams have been enjoying their spaces, and teams that are in Sprague have more space to stretch out. It’s great being housed under one roof. George D. Montañez
Iris and Howard Critchell Assistant Professor What’s your favorite aspect of being in McGregor so far? The feeling of an as-of-yet-uncreated future. It feels wide open for us to collaboratively create and discover what the spaces mean. Have there been any surprises about the new space that you’re excited about? I’m excited about the nooks and crannies in the building that the students are discovering and claiming as meaningful spaces for themselves.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
For example, I have a wonderful Scripps student majoring in CS at Mudd who spends much of her on-campus time on the terrace patio outside of my office, because it is her “favorite place” on campus. I love that! How have you been using the various spaces so far? Student interaction! In my lab (AMISTAD), the 17 independent-study research students and I have been taking advantage of the terrific new conference room for our weekly lab meetings, where we now all comfortably have space to sit and discuss our research progress. The collaborative student area directly in front of my office is another great space for student interaction: it has become a grutoring space for Algorithms (which I’m teaching), and where students and I get together on Friday afternoons to play games during social hours. I no longer have to squeeze 10+ students into my office to hang out on Fridays! What does the new space offer that previously wasn’t possible? One of the great additions is dedicated research space for students. Prof. Lucas Bang and I share a room, where we have machines set up for our research teams, which gives them a sense of
2
FEATURE
What’s it Like In McGregor?
(CONTINUED)
place and belonging. It also gives a dedicated space to set up research machines, which was lacking in the previous building. Overall, the new building is much more student-centric than the previous building was, giving them multiple spaces to hang out and belong. Lucas Bang
Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department What’s your favorite aspect of being in McGregor so far? I love having everybody in the department on one floor. It is laid out in a large loop, so no matter which direction you go you are bound to run into somebody. Have there been any surprises about the new space that you’re excited about? The AV studio is amazing. I’m not sure what is going to happen in there yet, but there is a lot of potential. I am excited to find out what is in store! How have you been using the various spaces so far? I’ve really been enjoying the makerspace and the convenient connection to the new machine and wood shops in the neighboring basement. I’ve been spending a lot of time circulating between the robotics lab, the wood shop and the makerspace working on some art projects. I’ve also been experimenting with teaching a flipped classroom version of Programming Languages (CS131). During class time, we use the computer labs to do hands-on work with writing code to implement the core ideas behind how programming languages work. This is my first time teaching a flipped classroom, and it is really great to work side-by-side with students and have a direct window into how every student in the class is engaging with the material and programming problems. Also, as part of this class, we recently used the McGregor courtyard for a mini outdoor gallery walk. I displayed student submissions from a CS131 assignment about programmatically generating abstract images and played some chill music. It was a fun way to get students talking with each other about the course material. I also passed out a zine of student submissions that I put together in the MakerSpace.
What does the new space offer that previously wasn’t possible? There weren’t many places for people to gather in Olin. Now, in McGregor, we have a lot of space to facilitate different types of activities. There are tons of chairs, tables and whiteboards for studying or working on personal projects or having an informal meeting. There is a nook outside my office currently outfitted with games and puzzles, and I really enjoy running into students hanging out there. The fact that there are now places to actually hang out in the CS department opens up so many opportunities for impromptu conversations, sharing of ideas and experiences, or just simply saying hello! Kim Neal
CS & McGregor Center Quick Facts Computer science (students majoring in some form of CS) now rivals engineering as one of the most popular majors on campus. Twenty-four percent of all declared majors enrolled through the end of 2020 spring semester were CS majors, making computer science the secondmost popular major behind only engineering (31%). Another 21% were CS-math or Math-Comp-Bio majors.
Makerspace Manager How have you been using the various spaces so far? So far, the 3D print room has been used quite a bit to support E4 and some Scripps Art classes. The central work area has supported numerous individual and groups of students, including clubs. The long-term, large project storage area is housing Prof. Harris’s new airplane kit that he’s building with his students on Wed. evenings. What does the new space offer that previously wasn’t possible? Having a makerspace that is a 5C resource where students of wildly different fields of study can collaborate is a great thing.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
The new academic facility includes faculty offices, Clinic and project studios, teaching and research laboratories and collaboration spaces, including a makerspace—a studio designed for hands-on creative activities. Made possible by members of the HMC Board of Trustees, foundations, alumni, parents and friends, including a leadership gift from HMC Trustee Laurie J. Girand and her husband, Scott A. McGregor.
3
DEPARTMENT NEWS
Faculty and Staff Updates Tenure and Promotion, Associate Professor Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu develops and applies
computational and mathematical models to study evolutionary biology. She focuses on reconstructing gene histories across multiple species, which helps scientists understand differences within and across species, particularly in how genes form and function. In 2018, Wu was awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development grant for her project “CAREER: Algorithms for Gene Family Evolution with Gene Duplication, Loss, and Coalescence.” Wu teaches courses across the CS curriculum and serves as an advisor on CS Clinic projects.
First two-year reappointment
Visiting Faculty
Xanda Schofield ’13
specializes in designing easy-touse tools for largescale corpus text mining, with a focus on distributional semantic models. She also is interested in integrating privacy into machine-learning-aided data mining in natural language processing.
Ryan Blake Jackson, visiting
assistant professor (beginning January 2022), researches human-robot interaction. He studies natural language generation in clarification dialogues and robot noncompliance interactions, like generating appropriately polite command refusals. He is earning a PhD in computer science from Colorado School of Mines.
focuses his research is in mathematical biology, including collective cell migration, circadian rhythms and ballrolling dung beetles. He earned a PhD from the University of Utah and did a teaching postdoc at UCLA.
CS Staff Kevin Herrera ’17
Erin Talvitie
specializes in applying machine learning to problems of artificial intelligence, working toward artificial autonomous agents that can learn to act flexibly and competently in unknown environments.
Leif Zinn-Brooks
Calden Wloka,
visiting assistant professor, spent last year spent last year as a postdoc at York University. His research is focused on early visual attention and eye movement modeling. His PhD in computer science is from York University (Toronto).
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
(CS) has an expanded role. In addition to CS curriculum coordinator, he is the assistant CS system administrator.
4
DEPARTMENT NEWS
National Science Foundation Funding NSF grants are the largest share of external support for HMC faculty research
CIVIC Innovation Challenge Research Grant “The goal of the CIVIC Innovation Challenge is to connect higher ed institutions with community partners to get solutions into the real world,” says computer science professor and grant co-principal investigator Julie Medero. “The planning grant supports the collaboration needed to get those proposals written.” This project came about from discussions Medero and Zach Dodds, Leonhard-JohnsonRae Professor of Computer Science, were having with local nonprofit organizations to find ways to offer more community-engaged projects for the College’s Clinic Program. “This is an unusual grant in that it’s a small planning grant, with the target outcome being another grant proposal,” says Medero, who researches natural language processing, machine learning and educational applications of language technology. In 2017, Medero and Dodds received an NSF grant for the continuation of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates site in computer science, supporting a variety of research projects in the Computer Science Department. Medero is collaborating with co-PI Tobias Hecht and Devon Hartman (both of CHERP Locally Grown Power), along with a small team of independent study students, to prepare a proposal that addresses two problems. The first is the lack of resilience hubs and cooling centers in an economically disadvantaged community threatened by earthquakes, heat waves, public power shut-offs and, now, a pandemic. The second problem they wish to study is learning why that same community has not benefited directly from advances in renewable energy.
“We propose a solution that addresses both of these challenges with a single project,” Medero says. That proposal, if approved, will provide funding to install solar power at several community sites in Pomona, California, with the resulting financial incentives supporting a program to help low-income households in the same community move to renewable sources for their power. “Our hope is that if we get the next grant, it will include support for one or more Clinic teams to work with CHERP on the implementation of the resilience centers and/ or on analysis of how well the setup works,” Medero says.
Better Software Testing Techniques Software systems in programmable items— from household appliances to cars and planes—must be reliable and high quality to avoid inconvenient or disastrous consequences. In order to improve software quality, computer science researchers at Harvey Mudd and the University of California, Santa Barbara are seeking to improve software quality assurance techniques and have received funding from the NSF. Lucas Bang, assistant professor of computer science, has teamed with Tevfik Bultan, professor and chair of computer science at UCSB, as co-principal investigator on the project “Automated Quantitative Assessment of Testing Difficulty.”
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
“There is no existing technique that can predict how challenging it will be to automatically test a piece of software,” says Bang whose research area is quantitative program analysis. “This project will address this open problem by providing an automated, scalable and quantitative approach for assessing software testing difficulty.” Their work could lead to significant contributions to the field through the development of techniques for computing and composing two novel software complexity metrics, program path complexity and program path selectivity, to predict testing difficulty. The framework developed within the scope of the project will enable development of more effective software testing techniques based on better resource allocation for software quality assurance tasks. “This will lead to improvements in software quality and reduction in software defects that cause dependability and security problems,” Bang says. The research team will include graduate and undergraduate students—including those from underrepresented groups—who will be exposed to software quality assurance challenges and techniques. Research results will be incorporated in courses on both campuses, including Bang’s courses on software verification, data structures and program development. Since 2018, Bang has mentored 17 research students resulting in several papers with undergraduate lead authors either accepted, under submission or in preparation. He is also co-director, with computer science professor George Montañez, for an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates site at HMC focusing on computer systems. Bang and Bultan will disseminate the knowledge, techniques and tools developed within the scope of the “Testing Difficulty” project through publishing in open literature and making available the software tools that are developed as open-source.
5
FACULTY NEWS
Summer Seminar Text Analysis Isn’t a Piece of Cake Experts across a variety of social science and humanistic disciplines have adopted natural language processing technologies to help assist their analyses of large text collections. However, these new projects in computational text analysis are often stymied by obstacles in the critical human work of applying these models: obtaining access to data in a useful format, implementing a processing workflow that attends to things the expert cares about, and analyzing the limited information that a model of text can reflect. Xanda Schofield ’13 discussed how it can be hard for text analysis novices to navigate the underspecified “recipes” of the text analysis process, focusing specifically on LDA topic models. She touched on research she’s done
with students in understanding how text analysis practitioners make meaning from LDA models and how we can build software to better support their work. Schofield, assistant professor of computer science, is a computer science and mathematics alum. She completed her PhD in computer science at Cornell University in 2019. Her work focuses on practical applications of unsupervised models of text, particularly topic models, to research in the humanities and social sciences. Outside of research, she is an organizer of the Widening NLP workshop, whose aim is to improve representation and inclusive practices in the natural language processing community.
2021 Outstanding Faculty Member For the eighth annual Leadership Awards, community members gathered via Zoom meeting to celebrate students, faculty and staff for their contributions on campus and beyond. Each year, kudos go to a faculty member who has gone above and beyond their job role to serve as a mentor for students and/or student organizations and embody Mudd values, such as collaboration and care for the campus community. George Montañez
Assistant professor of computer science A nominator wrote: “Professor Montañez encourages students to not only work hard and learn challenging concepts, but also to be good members of both the Mudd and global community. He cares about his students’ successes and wellbeing. He fosters collaboration among students, which is one of Mudd’s main draws for new students. Montañez is a phenomenal mentor to his lab students and supports his students in any aspect of life …. He is inclusive of everyone, even allowing students with no experience, like myself, to enter the lab. He fosters intellectual curiosity and discussion and helps guide students all the way to graduate school.”
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
6
FACULTY NEWS
Published Bioinformatics Paper Details eMPRess Software Tool Research related to the evolution of genes and species being conducted by professors of computer science Ran LibeskindHadas and Yi-Chieh “Jessica” Wu and their research students is published in Bioinformatics, a leading journal that focuses on new developments in genome bioinformatics and computational biology. Santi Santichaivekin ’22, Rose Liu ’22, Qing Yang ’23, Ross Mawhorter ’18, Trenton Wesley ’23 and Justin Jiang ’23 are co-
authors of the paper, “eMPRess: A Systematic Cophylogeny Reconciliation Tool,” which details the software tool they have been developing. A number of other HMC students have contributed to this project in recent years. Darwin wrote that he could imagine how pairs of species, such as flowers and their bee pollinators, might coevolve so that the two species would adapt and specialize to one another. “Co-evolution arises in symbionts, such as plants and their pollinators as well as in hosts and parasites and other pairs of related entities,” Libeskind-Hadas says. “The problem that we’re studying is that of ’reconciling’ pairs of evolutionary trees to explain how a given pair of taxa may have co-evolved.” The HMC research group and others have
developed several efficient algorithms that determine how to reconcile pairs of trees and analyze these reconciliations. The eMPRess software tool integrates several of these algorithms into a single software tool for use by biologists. Students are making key contributions. Santichaivekin, who oversaw the software development team that implemented eMPRess, worked with Mawhorter and LibeskindHadas to develop several algorithms over the last several years. Mawhorter and Liu also contributed to the implementation of the algorithms. Jiang, Yang and Wesley developed graphical elements of the eMPRess software tool to aid visualization and use.
Algorithmic Biases Are Not Necessarily Bad George Montañez and his students Daniel Bashir ’20 and Julius Lauw ’20 celebrated the publishing of “Trading Bias for Expressivity in Artificial Learning,” a chapter in ICAART 2020: Agents and Artificial Intelligence, part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (Springer, Cham). The HMC researchers’ work about how bias relates to algorithm flexibility (expressivity) was an expanded and completely rewritten version of the lab’s award-winning 2020 paper for the International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART). Montañez, Bashir and Lauw expanded their original paper by beginning with a definition of the term “bias.” “The word ‘bias’ is a loaded term in machine learning and statistics, with at least four different uses,” says Montañez. “We added a section differentiating the meanings of the term and showing how our particular notion of bias, ‘algorithmic bias,’ is not equivalent to the prejudicial biases we rightly try to eliminate in
data science. While all prejudicial biases create algorithmic bias, not all algorithmic biases are prejudicial.” The authors also took advantage of having more time with their research to improve their presentation of the paper’s core ideas. “Often when you present a paper, in having to communicate the ideas simply to an audience, you stumble upon a much better way of presenting your work,” Montañez says. “Although all of the theorems and definitions are equivalent between the original paper and book chapter,” he explains, “the extended version in the book introduces all of the key concepts around a geometric idea called inductive orientation, which is basically a direction an algorithm ‘points towards’ in high-dimensional space. The degree to which it points somewhere away from the baseline direction is the degree to which it can be algorithmically biased—we’re basically measuring how well-aligned an algorithm is with regard to a particular situation we care about. Furthermore, pointing towards one direction means pointing away from other directions, so we see that no algorithm can be well-aligned with all situations. This geometric idea of alignment paints a better intuitive picture of what we mean by algorithmic biases.” The original paper, “The Bias-Expressivity
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Trade-off,” co-authored by Montañez, Lauw, Dominique Macias ’19, Akshay Trikha ’21 and Julia Vendemiatti ’21, won the Best Paper award at ICAART 2020. “This chapter stands essentially as a new paper, which builds on the content of the original conference publication, but improves it in many ways,” says Montañez. “We were also fortunate to have Daniel Bashir join us as a co-author; he was responsible for many of the improvements in the new work, including the new section on different biases in artificial learning.” This publication marks Bashir’s third and Lauw’s fifth with Montañez’s AMISTAD Lab. In 2020, Lauw received a student researcher award from the Computer Science Department. Bashir was a 2020 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher honorable mention. “The chapter will likely be used by machine learning and AI practitioners who are interested in new ways of looking at and measuring biases in artificial learning systems,” says Montañez. “Hopefully it inspires greater transparency concerning the biases present in all learning algorithms.”
7
FACULTY NEWS
HMC & Caltech Partner to Train Next-gen Software Engineers Through a strategic partnership, Harvey Mudd alumni are poised to join the next generation of science-savvy software engineers who will set new standards in scientific software. Former HMC computer science professor and department chair Ran Libeskind Hadas (now founding chair of CMC’s Department of Integrated Sciences) and Katherine Breeden, assistant professor of computer science and a Caltech graduate, are members of the advisory board of Caltech’s Schmidt Academy for Software Engineering, a post-baccalaureate program in software engineering launched in 2019. Their connections to computer science graduates who are interested in software engineering and who have strong science fundamentals have been key to helping expand the program, which was initially only for Caltech grads. During the three-year, pilot program, Schmidt Scholars are embedded for one to two years with research groups across the Caltech campus. They are mentored by senior software engineers and receive industrycompetitive salaries, a strategy Breeden sees as a model for other universities. Projects range from designing, developing and deploying an adaptive charging network for electric vehicles to building a knowledge graph framework for metamaterials. Breeden said the hiring committee has been pleased with HMC applicants, who bring a strong set of skills and perspectives to the program. The first contingent of HMC alumni accepted in fall 2020 were Tom Dougherty ’20 (works with David Van Valen, biology), Anya Wallace ’20 (Chiara Daraio, mechanical engineering), Jenna Kahn ’20 (Frederick Eberhardt, philosophy ) and Cody Newman ’20 (Niles Pierce, chemistry)—nearly all will continue for a second year. Fall 2021 Schmidt Scholars from HMC are Alfredo Gomez ’21 and Julia Vendemiatti ’21. Wallace works with the Daraio lab on a joint project with several other research institutions (Duke, Northwestern, RPI, UVM and Caltech) to create an open-source, web-based database dedicated to providing data on nanocomposites and structured materials (metamaterials), as well as tools to analyze and explore that data. “Not only has it been a great opportunity to
ot only has it been a great opportunity to learn about “ Nsoftware engineering best-practices from professional software engineers, but I also to get to experience cutting-edge research in a scientific field that I otherwise might never have interacted with.
”
–Anya Wallace ’20
learn about software engineering best-practices from professional software engineers,” she says, “but I also get to experience cutting-edge research in a scientific field that I otherwise might never have interacted with.” Many computer science grads may have a limited view of what careers are available to them beyond highly paid, entry-level software engineering jobs in a handful of well-known
tech companies. “But there are tremendous opportunities right now to do impactful, fulfilling computing work in other areas: manufacturing, scientific research in the public sector and more,” Breeden says. “Supporters of the Schmidt Academy see the potential our students have to build software that can accelerate scientific discovery.”
Anya Wallace ‘20 is part of a team of investigators from four universities developing open-source prototype data resources for nano-composite materials (NanoMine) and structured materials (MetaMine).
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
8
FACULTY NEWS
Why Diversity In AI Is So Important Forbes column, July 16, 2020 Jim Boerkoel recently received a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to address the challenge of building a healthy cohort of AI researchers that represents the broader society. His project, “A Consortium for Cultivating Future Artificial Intelligence Researchers,” added a one-day consortium and full travel scholarships for undergraduates attending the annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 2020 and 2021. The consortium provides mentorship and cohort development to integrate undergraduates into the AI research community, and was originally envisioned as part of his 2017 NSF CAREER award. The consortium is also supported by AAAI and the Artificial Intelligence Journal. Boerkoel co-chaired the first consortium with Memo Ergezer, assistant professor of computer science at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. Boerkoel leads Harvey Mudd’s Human Experience and Agent Teamwork Lab (HEATlab) designed to develop techniques that augment humans’ cognitive and physical abilities to create integrated human-robot teams that are more effective than their individual counterparts. Here’s an excerpt of the interview by President Maria Klawe, who spoke with Boerkoel and others about the first AAAI Undergraduate Consortium. Maria Klawe: Why is diversity so crucial to the development of artificial intelligence? Jim Boerkoel: One of the challenges is that
when there’s a lack of diversity, there’s a lack of diverse thought. If the population that is creating the technology is homogeneous, we’re going to get technology that is designed by and works well for that specific population. Even if they have good intentions of serving everyone, their innate biases drive them to design toward what they are most familiar with. As we write algorithms, our biases inherently show up in the decisions we make about how to design the algorithm or what and how data sets are used, and then these biases can get reified in the technology that we produce. A lot of AI tools are driven by data, and data comes from society, which has its own built-in biases. For example, when trying to design a tool that tries
to learn whether someone is credit worthy using historical data, the historical biases in the process that exist are going to be copied and learned by the machine. It’s incredibly important to have a diverse set of people in the room, but we also need people who can ask questions like, “Here is what I see in the data. What problematic things can come up because of that?” It’s a hard problem to solve. You can take the race column out of the data to try and render the algorithm race blind, but algorithms can quickly relearn these biases through proxies and correlates for things like race or gender in the data. If the data we’re feeding in is already biased and we don’t put safeguards in place to protect against bias, we can con ourselves into believing the algorithm is really fairly and agnostically making decisions. This is a recipe for trouble. We’d be better served to have more diverse people tackling those problems to mitigate the chances that our own privileges and context blind us to the experiences of others. Maria Klawe: Can you give us a brief description of the project? Jim Boerkoel: The consortium was a one-day
event on the first day of the 2020 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in New York. It was designed to help undergrads determine if grad school is a good fit for them and hopefully convince them that it is. In addition to featured speakers and panels, a key part of the event was the mentoring program where undergraduates were paired up with known researchers in the field for one-on-one experiences in which
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
mentors gave them feedback on their work and offered advice on how to apply to grad school and find an advisor. In addition to the research mentors, the undergrads were paired with grad students to give them another point of contact and someone they could reach out to with questions that they might not feel comfortable asking a professor. Maria Klawe: Why did you decide to take this approach to trying to increase diversity among AI researchers? Jim Boerkoel: We are seeing more and more
undergraduate students attending academic conferences, and the experience can be daunting given the number of big names in the field who attend and the fact that the students have to present their own research. While grad students have a cohort and there are programs specifically for them, there wasn’t a lot of onboarding support for undergrads at these conferences. There was a gap in what was offered and whom these opportunities were being offered to. This program tries to attract a diverse set of undergraduate students who are interested in AI research and help them see themselves as belonging in the field of AI and pursuing AI research. We are seeing more and more of our students, particularly our underrepresented students, going into different fields or into industry. We are trying to capture more of them into PhDs and convince them that getting a PhD can give you more influence and impact in their fields. Read the full interview at bit.ly/3pfKjI8
9
STUDENT NEWS
Watson Fellow to Study Healthcare Inequity With a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Abel Sapirstein ’21, a mathematical and computational biology major, will study alternate perspectives in healthcare equity while traveling to Bhutan, Chile and Japan. “I will be shadowing community physicians and interviewing community members to gain insight into how different nations have generated novel solutions to healthcare inequity,” says Sapirstein, whose winning project is titled, “Past, Present and Future Alternatives in Health Equity.” Growing up in Baltimore, Sapirstein witnessed inequality and systemic racism and how this plays a role in life expectancy, job opportunities and health in the U.S. It inspired him to study inequity in healthcare on a global scale. He has strategically selected locations where he can observe healthcare systems, culture and politics to gain insight that may lead to solutions related to healthcare equity.
be fairly equitable, Sapirstein is interested in interacting with people who have lived through the shifts in healthcare structure and gaining insight about the positives and negatives of this system. Bhutan: Sapirstein says Bhutan’s healthcare
system, which integrates traditional medicine and Western medicine, seems to have yielded good mental healthcare and patient satisfaction.
will soon suffer from—a health infrastructure that was designed for a population much bigger than the current population.” Sapirstein plans to defer his Watson Fellowship for one year to enter a PhD program at Georgia Tech, where he will continue his studies in operations research. The 2021 class of Watson Fellows represents eight countries and 22 U.S. states. Fellows receive a $36,000 stipend for 12 months of travel and college loan assistance as needed.
Japan: Of interest to him is its changing
demographics and what other countries may learn from its people. He says, “Japan suffers from the problems that the rest of the world
will be shadowing community physicians and “ Iinterviewing community members to gain insight into
Chile: Sapirstein will study the impact Chile’s
history of centralized and decentralized healthcare has had on the country. While he considers Chile’s current healthcare system to
how different nations have generated novel solutions to healthcare inequity.
”
–Abel Sapirstein ’21
Abel Sapirstein ’21
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
10
STUDENT NEWS
Published and Presented The Department of Computer Science celebrates students’ paper acceptances and presentations at peer-reviewed archival conferences during spring 2021. Each Harvey Mudd CS faculty member has an active research program that involves undergraduates. A substantial portion of this research is funded by the National Science Foundation. The department has several active NSF grants, and additional research support comes from sources including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Mellon Foundation, and the Baker and Rose-Hills foundations.
“Metrinome: Path Complexity Predicts Symbolic Execution Path Explosion” The paper and software demo by Gabe Bessler ’20, Josh Cordova ’22, Shaheen Cullen-Baratloo ’23, Sofiane Dissem ’22, Emily Lu ’21, Ibrahim Abughararh ’22 and Sofia Devin ’22 was accepted at the International Conference on Software Engineering 2021.
abe’s enthusiasm, hard work, “ Gleadership, and breadth and depth of
technical skills have been crucial to the success of this long-term project.
”
–Lucas Bang, assistant professor of computer science
Lucas Bang, advisor and assistant professor of computer science, notes that Bessler has worked on the project since 2019. “Gabe’s enthusiasm, hard work, leadership, and breadth and depth of technical skills have been crucial to the success of this long-term project,” Bang says. The team presented Metrinome, a tool for performing automatic path complexity analysis of C functions. The path complexity of a function is an expression that describes the number of paths through the function up to a given execution depth. Metrinome constructs the control flow graph (CFG) of a C function using LLVM utilities, analyzes that CFG using algebraic graph theory and analytic combinatorics, and produces a closed-form expression for the path complexity as well as the asymptotic path complexity of the function. Our experiments show that path complexity predicts the growth rate of the number of execution paths that Klee, a popular symbolic execution tool, is able to cover within a given exploration depth. Metrinome is open-source, available as a Docker image for immediate use, and all of our experiments and data are available in our repository and included in our Docker image.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
“Undecidability of Underfitting” Sonia Sehra ’20, David Flores ’21, Professor George Montañez. Second International Conference on Computing and Data Science 2021, Jan. 28, 2021 Abstract: Using recent machine learning results that present an information-theoretic perspective on underfitting and overfitting, researchers prove that deciding whether an encodable learning algorithm will always underfit a dataset, even if given unlimited training time, is undecidable. They discussed the importance of this result and potential topics for further research, including information-theoretic and probabilistic strategies for bounding learning algorithm fit.
11
STUDENT NEWS
Published and Presented
(CONTINUED)
“The Gopher’s Gambit: Survival Advantages of Artifact-Based Intention Perception” Cynthia Hom ’23, Amani Maina-Kilaas ’23, K Ginta (Biola University), C. Lay ’22 CMC, George Montañez. 13th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence 2021, Feb. 4–6, 2021 Abstract: Being able to assess and calculate risks can positively impact an agent’s chances of survival. When other intelligent agents alter environments to create traps, the ability to detect such intended traps (and avoid them) could be life-saving. They investigated whether there are cases for which an agent’s ability to perceive intention through the assessment of environmental artifacts provides a measurable survival advantage. Their agents are virtual gophers assessing a series of room-like environments, which are potentially dangerous traps intended to harm them. Using statistical hypothesis tests based on configuration coherence, the gophers differentiate between designed traps and configurations that are randomly generated and most likely safe, allowing them access to the food contained within them. They found that gophers possessing the ability to perceive intention have significantly better survival outcomes than those without intention perception in most of the cases evaluated.
Figure 1: A real trap (left) and a randomly generated trap (right), in our simulated agent world.
“Ethical Dilemmas in Strategic Games”
“A Probabilistic Theory of Abductive Reasoning”
Rui-Jie Yew ’21 and Pavel Naumov (external research advisor, King’s College Pennsylvania). 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 2–9, 2021 The paper on modelling ethical decisions in intelligent Rui-Jie Yew ’21 agents is co-authored by Rui-Jie Yew ’21 and her external research advisor Pavel Naumov (King’s College Pennsylvania).
Nico Espinosa Dice ’22, Megan Kaye ’22, H. Ahmed SCR ’23, George Montañez. 13th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence 2021, Feb. 4–6, 2021
Abstract: An agent, or a coalition of agents, faces an ethical dilemma between several statements if she is forced to make a conscious choice between which of these statements will be true. The paper proposes to capture ethical dilemmas as a modality in strategic game settings with and without limit on sacrifice and for perfect and imperfect information games. The authors show that the dilemma modality cannot be defined through the earlier proposed blameworthiness modality. The main technical result is a sound and complete axiomatization of the properties of this modality with sacrifice in games with perfect information.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Abstract: Researchers presented an abductive search strategy that integrates creative abduction and probabilistic reasoning to produce plausible explanations for unexplained observations. Using a graphical model representation of abductive search, we introduce a heuristic approach to hypothesis generation, comparison and selection. To identify creative and plausible explanations, they proposed 1) applying novel structural similarity metrics to a search for simple explanations, and 2) optimizing for the probability of a hypothesis’ occurrence given known observations.
F igure 1: Data Corruption Example DAG
12
STUDENT NEWS
Published and Presented
(CONTINUED)
“A Castro Consensus: Understanding the Role of Dependence in Consensus Formation” Jana Allen ’22, C. Lay CMC ’22, George Montañez. Conference on Truth and Trust Online 2020, Oct. 16–17, 2020 Abstract: Consensus is viewed as a proxy for truth in many discussions of science. When a consensus is formed by the independent and free deliberations of many, it is indeed a strong indicator of truth. Yet not all consensuses are independent and freely formed. We investigate the role of dependence and pressure in the formation of consensus, showing that strong polarization, external pressure and dependence among individuals can force consensus around an issue, regardless of the underlying truth of the affirmed position. Dependence breaks consensus, often rendering it meaningless; a consensus can only be trusted to the extent that individuals are free to disagree with it.
Figure 1: Effect of polarization parameter θ on the probability of affirming a false hypothesis versus Mi
“An Information-Theoretic Perspective on Overfitting and Underfitting” Daniel Bashir ’20, George Montañez, Sonia Sehra ’20, Pedro Sandoval Segura ’19, Julius Lauw ’20. Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2020, Nov. 29–30, 2020 Abstract: Researchers presented an information-theoretic framework for understanding overfitting and underfitting in machine learning and prove the formal undecidability of determining whether an arbitrary classification algorithm will overfit a dataset. Measuring algorithm capacity via the information transferred from datasets to models, they considered mismatches between algorithm capacities and datasets to provide a signature for when a model can overfit or underfit a dataset. They presented results upper-bounding algorithm capacity, establish its relationship to quantities in the algorithmic search framework for machine learning, and relate work to recent information-theoretic approaches to generalization.
T able 1. Because the range of entropic expressivity changes with different levels of bias relative to target function t, the maximum value for CA,D does also.
Figure 1: Mhalt constructed using Moverfit. HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
13
STUDENT NEWS
Computing Research Awards The Computing Research Association announced its 2020 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards, and two Harvey Mudd College students were commended. The prestigious program recognizes undergraduates at North American colleges and universities who demonstrate outstanding potential in an area of computing research.
2021 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Lindsay Popowski ’21 (CS and mathematics)
Popowski has been involved in computer science research since her first year at HMC, and the CRA award recognizes several research projects she’s worked on throughout her undergraduate career. With Zach Dodds (Leonhard-Johnson-Rae Professor of Computer Science) in summer 2018, Popowski worked on several interdisciplinary projects with professors outside of CS to incorporate computational elements into their research or pedagogy. She also researched introductory CS education. During the following summer and in fall 2019, she worked with computer science professor Jim Boerkoel and other researchers in his HEATLab. “I worked with another student to develop new dynamic scheduling algorithms for use in multi-agent interaction scenarios with uncertainty, like human-robot teams,” she says. Last summer, Popowski participated in a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research. “I used neural-network-based natural language processing techniques to create vector representations of app screens,” she says. “This project will help users better program their phones to execute tasks, like other intelligent agents (Siri, Alexa, etc.), but this agent can be taught new tasks.” Popowski is pursuing a PhD in human-computer interaction at Stanford.
Finalist Abtin Molavi ’21 (CS)
Molavi’s nomination for the award was primarily based on a project in program verification that he worked on during summer 2019. “The overarching goal of this subfield of computer science is to ensure that code written today and in the future is as secure, efficient and correct as possible,” says Molavi, who plans to pursue a PhD in computer science. “Our specific contribution was the development of the first algorithm and software for counting the number of solutions to logical formulas involving integer arrays, an extremely common data structure in programming. Analysis techniques often take a program as input and produce logical formulas describing the behavior as output. Counting the number of solutions to these constraints enables us to answer questions like, How likely is this program behavior? and How much information is contained in this data structure?”
Students’ Shell Programming Paper Accepted to PLATEAU2020 A paper co-authored by Ishaan Gandhi ’21 and his sister, Anshula Gandhi (MIT), was accepted to PLATEAU2020, the 11th annual workshop on the intersection of human computer interaction and programming languages. Terminal emulators, or simply terminals, are used ubiquitously by developers. While many have proposed alternatives, their paper “Lightening the Cognitive Load of Shell Programming” examines the fundamental reasons why shell programming, especially when using a terminal as a programming environment, can be difficult, as understood through the cognitive dimensions framework. “The paper is about shell programming, a way of instructing computers, and terminal, an application used to write shell programs,” says Ishaan, a joint computer science and mathematics major. “We discussed what parts of terminal make the experience of writing shell programs easier and less cognitively demanding and what parts make it harder and more cognitively demanding.” He adds, “A lot of developers and researchers proposed alternatives to shell programming with terminal, but we wanted to take a step back and ask what shortcomings of shell programming with terminal any alternative might hope to address. Anshula was working at the Center for Brains, Minds & Machines at MIT at the time, and she brought some domain knowledge to this project.”
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Ishaan Gandhi ’21 and his sister, Anshula Gandhi (MIT)
14
RESEARCH & CLINIC
2021 Summer Research Program Identifying Bias in Data Using Two-Distribution Hypothesis Tests Students: William Yik, Limanthes Serfini, Tim Lindsey (Biola) Advisor: George Montañez Probabilistic Abduction Students: Kelly Yang, Max Szostak Advisor: George Montañez Vectorization of Bias in Machine Learning Algorithms Students: Sophie Bekerman, Eric Chen, Lily Lin (Biola) Advisor: George Montañez The Gopher Generation: The Optimizers Strike Back Students: Nick Grisanti, Anshul Kamath, Sadie Zhao (Pomona) Advisor: George Montañez
Scripting for All Students: Hallie Seay, Lilly Lee, Arianna Meinking, Kanalu Monaco Advisor: Zach Dodds
Probably-in-Ctrl Students: Hannah Davalos, Malia Morgan, Julianna Schalkwyk, Yuki Wang Advisor: Jim Boerkoel
Summer Start-up: Student-designed Entrepreneurial Projects Students: Amy Liu, Ammar Fakih, Cecilia Li, Kobe Lin, Sydney Riley, Alina Saratova, Rosy Chen Advisor: Zach Dodds
GrouPL: A Programming Language and Tool for Group-theory Proofs Students: Aldrin Feliciano, Abtin Molavi Advisor: Lucas Bang
Evergreen: A Web App for Engaging Young Children With the Trees Around Them Students: Mo Kyn and Htoo Naing Advisor: Zach Dodds
Using Imperfect Predictions to Make Good Decisions Students: Bowen Jiang, Jack Ontiveros, Jacob Boerma, Wayne Ying, Henry Eigen (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) Advisor: Erin Talvite
Improving Topic Modeling Tools for Text Miners Students: Simon Babb (Haverford), Dana Harris (CMC), Mia Wang, Ingrid Wu Advisor: Xanda Schofield
Thank you to donors who support CS summer research fellows. William Yik ’24 / George Montañez – Angiulo Family Research Endowment Sadie Zhao ’24 (UC Berkeley) / George Montañez – Angiulo Family Research Endowment and the Class of 1989 Summer Experiential Learning Fund Ingrid Wu ’23 / Xanda Schofield ’13 – Class of 1985 Experiential Learning Endowment and the Vandiver Experiential Learning Fund Aldrin Feliciano ’23 / Lucas Bang – Norman F. Sprague III, M.D. Experiential Learning Fund
2021 Clinic Projects Computer Science Clinic Alation Algorithmic Graph Clustering of Schemas Using Table Metadata Liaisons: Andrea Levy ’11, Ian Danforth Advisor: Leif Zinn-Brooks Students: Violet Burbank, Emi Copic, Jordan Seay, Beau Taylor-Ladd, Sunil Kumar American Express Identifying Small-Business Owners from Transactional Spend Data Liaisons: Dmitry Efimov, Di Xu Advisor: Leif Zinn-Brooks Students: Nina Samko, Marc Laugharn, Alejandro Posada-Sanchez, Heather Wing
CrowdStrike Kafka Consumer Simulation and Scaling Liaisons: Luke Hunter ’03, Julius Lauw ’20 Advisor: Lucas Bang Students: Anna Fry (PM-S), Ben Hinthorne (PM-F), Arielle Isaacs, Shivam Malpani
Factor Programming Language The Factor Programming Language: Web 2020 Liaison: John Benediktsson ’01 Advisor: Ben Wiedermann Students: Abtin Molavi (PM-S), David Mindlin (PM-F), David Flores, Jacob Fischer
Estée Lauder Companies Concierge App Liaisons: Chris Aidan, Dylan Gott, Florence Shaffer ’03, Ricky Wong, Jeremy Harrison Advisor: Heather Zinn-Brooks Students: Sasha Bridger, Megan Dymerski, Amanda Huang, Julia Lohman
Galaxy Semiconductors Intelligence Detecting Patterns of Defects in the Manufacture of Integrated Circuits Liaison: Wes Smith Advisor: Katherine Breeden Students: Mohamed Emish, Sean Hoerger, Aditya Khant, Andrew Chen
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
15
RESEARCH & CLINIC
2021 Clinic Projects
(CONTINUED)
Computer Science Clinic Greensill Capital Efficient Algorithms for Fairer Finance Liaisons: Andrew Martin, Warren Clegg Advisor: Andrew Bernoff Students: Jeremy Seow (PM), Christian Garcia, Steven Litvack-Winkler, Camille Simon, Sophia Thomas Intuit Futures Technology Group Facilitating Trust Liaisons: Roger Meike P21 P23, Amir Eftekhari, Corinne Finegan, Cody Driscoll, Diane Dryden, Joanne Locascio, Sarvesh Bhardwaj Advisor: Lisa Kaczmarczyk Students: Lorraine Zhao, Matthew Krager, Deyana Marsh, Serenity Wade, Jacob Waite Juniper Networks Juniper OSS Liaison: Ron Bonica Advisor: Zachary Dodds Students: Nick Ludwig (PM), Andreas Roeseler, Ishaan Gandhi, Spencer Lang Juniper Networks Coordinating Personal Interactions within Juniper Cloud Labs Liaisons: Lynn Gates, Marcelino Chua Advisor: Lisa Kaczmarczyk Students: Jennifer Zhuge (PM), Noah Bekele, Ciante Jones, Taeyun Lee, Girum Tihtina Jupiter Automating Fraud Detection and Response Liaison: Izzy Funke ’15 Advisor: Erin Talvitie Students: Kyle Grace (PM-S), Cindy Duong (PM-F), Sarah Embry, Max Kunz Microsoft Benchmarking HTTP/2 vs. HTTP/3 Liaisons: Mohit Suley, Arunothia Marappan (F), Amiya Gupta (S) Advisor: Geoff Kuenning Students: Nat Efrat-Henrici (PM-F), Jacob Boerma (PM-S), Ke Jin, Nette Mashewske, Loise Velazquez
Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center COVID-19 Data Aggregation and Analytics for Responding to the Pandemic Liaison: Kenneth Mak Advisor: Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu Students: Maurice Landers, Jerry Liang, Bryan Marin (F), Macallan Penberthy, Georgia Pope (PM) Proofpoint A Visual Display of ML Processes Liaisons: Adam Starr, Cameron Malloy Advisor: Elizabeth Sweedyk Students: Juan Diego Herrera (PM), Lidsay Popowski, Alfredo Gomez, Ramya Ramalingam Pure Storage Cloud Block Store Provisioning and Controller Liaisons: Andrew Bernat ’99, Naveen Neelakantam, Taher Vohra, Teddy Dubno ’19 Advisor: Mark Kampe Students: Bill Zhu, Aely Aronoff, Anisha Tandon, Daphne Poon ServiceNow Automating and Assessing Data Anonymization Liaisons: Shaleen Shankar, James Capaldo ’92, Vincent Seguin, Magaly Drant Advisor: Xanda Schofield ’13 Students: Erik Salgado, Alvin Zheng, Mimi Louie, Rachael Soh
The Vobile Group Sound Recording Cover Song Identification Liaisons: Mark Hall, Erica Alshuler, Perry Espardinez, Austin Jordan, Adrian Leatherland, Yonghui Ma Advisor: George Montañez Students: Caroline Tandrup, Alice Chi, Mengyi Shan, Raji Rajkumar, Hava Parker Wenatchee AppleSox A Schedule Generator, Assessor and Browser for the West Coast League Liaisons: Jose Oglesby P22, Lauren Feaux Advisor: Jim Boerkoel Students: Julia Vendemiatti, Harry Aung, Cynthia Oh, Omari Matthews, Clayton North
Computer Science/Physics Clinic Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Automatic Generation of Physiologically Relevant Lipid Bilayers Liaisons: Tim Carpenter, Helgi Ingólfsson, Drew Bennett Advisor: Peter Saeta Students: Eric Weiner, Rakia Segev, Emma Cuddy, Rachel Cohen, Rebecca Qin
Shopify Plus Improving Virtual Conferences Liaisons: Frank Liu ’14, Corey Martella, Kathi Taylor, Joe Doyle, Colin Bodell P14 Advisor: Ran Libeskind-Hadas Students: Angela Chen (PM-F), Nancy Cao (PM-S), Jacob Adolphe, Joaquin Fuenzalida Nunez, Andrew Ni Tradeweb Markets Inc. Anomaly Detection in High-Performance Trading Systems Liaisons: Justin Peterson ’85 and Stefan Kutko Advisor: Elizabeth Sweedyk Students: Julia Puzzo (PM), Brandon Theodorou, Riti Sharma, Jacob Donenfeld
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
16
RESEARCH & CLINIC
2021 CS Clinic: Pure Storage Pure Storage delivers a modern data experience that empowers organizations to run their operations as a true, automated, storage-asa-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. Through a virtual volume provisioning service in the cloud called Pure Cloud Block Store (CBS), Pure provides enterprise features such as high durability and availability that go beyond the standard cloud services that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides. However, many elements of the CBS service require manual control, increasing complexity and costs. It is imperative that these tasks be automated. Pure’s 2020-2021 CS Clinic project aimed to create tools to automate many of these manual tasks, thus increasing the efficiency and usability of CBS. This gives CBS greater flexibility and scalability, which will directly impact CBS’s performance and adoption. The project exposed the team members to real-world applications of AWS, Kubernetes and Golang and gave them experience building cloud infrastructure. Like many of the most successful Clinic projects, the Pure Storage Clinic had students tackling a real, pressing issue.
“Working remotely has not been ideal given the multiple different time zones, which has complicated scheduling conflicts, equipment shipment delays and other logistics,” says Bill Zhu ’22, the fall team leader. “On the other hand, work efficiency and expectations have by and large been unchanged as we work diligently and effectively with Pure Storage team members on ensuring timely completion of our project deliverables.” Technical staff members Naveen Neelakantam, Taher Vohra and manager Viji Ganapathi were the liaisons. Drew Bernat ’99 (member of technical staff) has overseen the work of three Clinic projects.“Clinic has become a great asset to Pure Storage,” says Bernat. There are six software engineers from HMC at the company. “It provides added energy for our team and has also been a big support for recruiting at Harvey Mudd.” The Pure Clinic team members were Bill Zhu ’22, Aely Aronoff ’21, Daphne Poon ’21 and Anisha Tandon ’21, with Mark Kampe, adjunct assistant professor of computer science, as faculty advisor.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Bill Zhu ’22
Aely Aronoff ’21
Daphne Poon ’21
Anisha Tandon ’21
17
AWARDS
2020–2021 Departmental Awards & Recognition The Class of ’94 Award
Clinic Team Awards
Amber Kampen Lindsay Popowski Rebecca Qin
Jacob Adolphe Aely Aronoff Nancy Cao Angela Chen Christian Garcia Alfredo Gomez Jean Diego Herrera Maurice Landers Jerry Liang Steven Litvack-Winkler Andrew Ni Joaquin Fuenzalida Nunez Macallan Penberthy Georgia Pope
Don Chamberlin Computer Science Research Award
Matthew LeMay Abtin Molavi Wing and Ellen Tam Award
Natasha Crepeau Kira Favakeh Benjamin Hinthorne Camille Simon
Daphne Poon Lindsay Popowski Ramya Ramalingam Jeremy Seow Camille Simon Anisha Tandon Sophia Thomas Bill Zhu Computer Science Service Award
Adam Grobman Arielle Isaacs Nam Tran
Class of 2021 Departmental Honors Aely S Aronoff Jacob Boerma Violet Burbank Alice Chi Emilia Copic Jacob Fischer David E. Flores Anna Tamara Fry Ishaan Gandhi Alfredo Gomez Sarah Kennyn Grade
Adam Grobman Carson Herness Arielle Isaacs Ke Jin Amber Roe Kampen Aditya Ketan Khant Taeyun Lee Jerry Yiming Liang Deyana Yvonne Marsh Abtin Daniel Molavi Tania Macallan Penberthy
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
Georgia Pope Lindsay Irene Popowski Rebecca Fei Qin Abel Sapirstein Camille Antonia Simon Anisha Tandon Sophia Thomas Nam Chan Tran Julia Lopes Vendemiatti Yi Zhen
18
ALUMNI NEWS
Celebrated Innovator Tackles Climate Change Since high school, Priya Donti ’15 (CS/math) knew she wanted to work on climate change, and that she wanted to work on it from a technical perspective. “I thought I would study something in chemistry and engineering, to maybe help develop the next generation of solar panels,” says Donti. But then she started taking computer science classes at Harvey Mudd College, and fell in love with the discipline. “It wasn’t entirely clear to me how computer science and climate change were linked, but I took a leap of faith,” she says, and changed her academic focus. In doing so, she found her life’s work. While working towards her PhD in computer science and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, she’s researching how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to forecast optimization and increase efficiency in electric power systems. She’s also co-founder of Climate Change AI, an interdisciplinary, global organization that brings together different sectors of industry, NGOs, academics and policy makers to “foster impactful uses of machine learning,” she said. Donti sees both pieces as vital in creating solutions related to climate change. She can use science to optimize a power grid, but that won’t work on an actual power grid unless those findings affects how “policy makers and decision makers view the transforming of the next generation of power grids from a technical perspective,” she says. Her work is so impressive that she was named to the MIT Technology Review’s prestigious list of Innovators Under 35, which recognizes exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the word. Donti first learned about these potential uses of AI and machine learning while at Harvey Mudd, when James Boerkoel, associate professor of computer science and department chair, sent her an article on algorithms developed for smart grids with high shares of renewable energy. He also encouraged her to apply for the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a one-year grant that allowed Donti to “travel for a year and interview people about next generation power systems and what kinds of technical developments were being done in the field,” she says.
Donti monderates a panel at the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Her core research right now focuses on developing an algorithm that can forecast optimization and control of electric power systems “with the goal that we have the ability to manage electric power systems with higher proportions of renewable energy.” Doing this with renewable energy can be tricky, for two reasons. First, the amount of power they produce varies from moment to moment vary—the energy produced by a wind turbine produces depends on how hard the wind is blowing, for example. “You need to build a power grid that can optimize more quickly, and that is more dynamic and responsive to what’s happening in real time,” she says. Second, any successful algorithm must also incorporate the hard constraints of physical systems. “If you put out a solution for power optimization but it doesn’t respect the fundamental physics of how electricity works, you could have outages and system failures.” Donti credits her time at Harvey Mudd with giving her the kind of interdisciplinary approach to learning that she applies to her work now. That includes in her experiences in extracurricular groups while in school too. She was a member of HMC’s Engineers for a Sustainable World and Mudders Organizing for Sustainability Solutions (ESW/MOSS), but also
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
DUCK!, an improv group, and Midnight Echo, an acapella group. She’s keeping that wider view of the world in mind for after she earns her PhD in 2022, and is considering options in academia, policy and industry. She wants to create a feedback loop between all groups that must work together on climate change. “Right now, there’s a lot of interesting and potentially impacting research that gets done in academic that stops there,” she says. She wants to break that bottleneck, so work developed in academia can be deployed in the real world, while also fostering pathways that would let industry and policy makers tell academia what they need. That way, academics can use what they’re learning in their research to create in-demand solutions. “With climate change, we’re working with very short time scales, where we’re hoping to reduce emissions over the next decade,” says Donti. “I want to figure out how we can work together to do that and also how we can adapt to the amount of climate change we’ve already locked in.”
19
ALUMNI NEWS
1972
2000
2009 David Beydler:
John Sell: I recently joined Intel as chief architect of the Security Architecture and Engineering group after close to 15 years as the chief hardware architect for the Microsoft Xbox. The photo is at a San Francisco Asian Art Museum event shortly before the pandemic in which I happen to be wearing an HMC shirt.
1997 Joe Beda: So much has happened! Rachel
Donahue ’97 (bio) and I are 21 years married with two kids in Seattle. I’m currently a principal engineer at VMware after selling my startup, Heptio, in late 2018. Beyond Heptio, I also help found the Kubernetes open source project and started Google Compute Engine, all while at Google for over 10 years. Dallas Kashuba: After 20-something years
running DreamHost I recently joined a music startup called NoCap as CTO. We create ticketed online music events using live video streaming and give fans a way to support their favorite artists and engage with each other. The music industry has been going through a dramatic shift for decades, and this is the next step in that progression.
1998 Ben Elgin: These days I’m a senior software
engineer at Bantam Tools, a machining manufacturer based in Peekskill NY (though I’m still living in the Triangle region of NC). If you need a desktop CNC milling solution, look us up! It’s been a lot of fun working with machines that let people make all kinds of things.
After working as a software engineer at a company called Paracel for a few years, I developed a repetitive stress injury in my hands (don’t let this happen to you!) and had to stop working. I rested my hands for about three years, traveling to Europe, China and New Zealand, then went back to school and got an M.S. in mathematics from Cal State LA. I’ve been a math professor at Mt. SAC since 2011. It has been a joy sharing the wonders of math with my students, many of whom are first-generation college students. I like to challenge them to learn programming (my primary passion!), and sometimes create fun little programs with them during breaktime. My favorite students are my two sons, who are currently enduring endless quizzing on circle properties and for loops.
2002 Donald Lawton: Since 2011, I’ve been an
independent app developer, specializing in apps that sync contacts across accounts such as iCloud and Google. Prior to that, I spent eight years working on the Medal of Honor video game franchise where I was the lead gameplay engineer, specializing in AI and animation systems.
2004 Erika Rice Scherpelz and Jeff Scherpelz: In
addition to continuing to work and live in the Seattle area, we recently had the opportunity to fulfill a longtime dream of bringing the Whidbey Island cabin Erika’s grandparents built back into the family. We’re looking forward to spending many happy weekends there with our kids, friends and family!
Heather Justice: I am still at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, currently a member of the robotic operations team for the newest Mars rover Perseverance which landed on Mars during February 2021.
2010 Joshua Swanson: PhD (University of
Washington), postdoc (UCSD), postdoc (USC)!
2012 Aaron Gable: I’ve finally returned home to the Pacific Northwest, and have taken a new role at Let’s Encrypt (part of the non-profit ISRG, the Internet Security Research Group), working to make the internet safer for everyone by offering free (as in beer and as in speech) SSL certificates to everyone.
2015 Helen Woodward: I have been living in the Bay
Area, working for Akamai for the last few years. I work on their real-time user monitoring (RUM) product, mPulse, to collect data at large scale and present meaningful analysis of it in real time.
We Love Hearing From You Thank you for your enthusiastic response to the Computer Science Department’s request for alumni news. We’ll be in touch each spring by email, or you can send updates at any time to chair@cs.hmc.edu.
2007 Kapy Kangombe: I recently left Microsoft to
join Amazon Web Services as a senior software engineer. I’m currently working on the Domain Name System service called Route 53.
HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | COMPUTER SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS 2021
20