Computer Science student to present at UW-L

Gabriel Grundtner will join more than 3,000 undergraduate students expected to present findings at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse this week for the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.

The event started Thursday and runs through Saturday, with displays from 60 disciplines, from biology to theater. Undergraduates from 48 states and seven countries are displaying work for the event.

Grundtner will present “Using Optical Character Recognition and Ajax to Bring Legacy Images to Life” from 9:30 to 9:50 a.m. today. He is working with Rob Gordon, Computer Science, on the project.

Grundtner has been working with the Office of Residence Life to augment images. He states,  “Many institutions have a repository of images of their physical plant available from either an intranet or internet site. Unfortunately, these legacy images provide a static, two-dimensional view of the physical plant.

“We our currently working with the Residence Life Department at Saint Mary’s to integrate student photos with residence hall images. A Residence Life staff member will be able to select a room from an image of a residence hall and view the photos and names of the residents of that room. After completing our work with student photos, we plan to generalize our solution to allow incorporation of video.”

Computer science year-end projects to be presented May 5

On Thursday, May 5, at 1 p.m. the Computer Science students will be presenting their year-end projects in the Common Room.

Don’t miss the public debut of “Radar,” the award-winning system for remote data collection for ResLife staff; the unveiling of “Healthy Mario,” a one-laptop-per-child (OLPC) game developed as part of a Health and Wellness Education initiative for first-graders in rural communities; or the host of Android platform applications that allow you to do such useful things as play checkers with a colleague via Bluetooth during a dull meeting, study vocabulary words for the GRE, organize your baseball card collection, browse a library of interesting Catholic articles, organize your course assignments, and download weekly quizzes from your professor for self-directed study.

Saint Mary’s University has an App for that

Two students in Saint Mary’s iPhone programming class have created an SMU Application (or ‘App’) for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Christopher Engesser and Stephanie Valentine have designed a new App that allows students, parents, alums and others easy access to SMU news and information.

The students, taught by Ann Smith, chair of the Computer Science Department, completed the project in April. The App (named iSMU) will be available for free iTunes download by early summer and includes the following features:

• Access to campus news and blogs
• Live sports updates
• Activities calendar
• Performance calendar and ticket information
• Daily Chartwells menu options
• Campus YouTube videos
• Donate to SMU opportunities

“Mobile devices like the iPhone give our students the opportunity to develop interesting, useful and educational applications that are accessed via their cell phones,” Smith said. “The beauty of this class is that students can build applications for their peers from the perspective of what is important to students. For example, all of my students loved the Chartwells menu feature — today’s dinner entrees accessible immediately with the touch of a button!”

Valentine selected for summer research program

Stephanie Valentine, a junior computer science major, has been selected to participate in the CDC/CRA-W Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) this summer. Valentine was matched to do research with Prof. Tracy Hammond of Texas A&M University. She was one of 80 students selected from 500 applicants.

DREU is a highly selective program that matches promising undergraduates with a faculty mentor for a summer research experience at the faculty member's home institution. DREU’s objective is to increase the number of women and students from underrepresented groups entering graduate studies in the fields of computer science and engineering. The DREU experience is valuable for students who are considering graduate school, providing them with a close-up view of what graduate school is really like and also increasing their competitiveness as applicants for graduate admissions and fellowships.

Biology, Computer Science departments co-host seminar

The Biology and Computer Science departments will be co-hosting a seminar at 4:10 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 5, in Hoffman Hall, Room 112.

The speaker, Harry D. Rowland, co-founded Endotronix in June 2007. He currently serves as Endotronix’s Chief Technology Officer and is responsible for strategic planning and execution of technology development, overseeing all engineering operations.

He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007. He received a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.A. in economics from the University of California-Santa Barbara in 2002.

Dr. Rowland has been active in research and development of micro- and nanotechnology fabrication methods for the past seven years. His projects have led to invited research at Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico and Trinity College, Ireland, where he co-developed local temperature-controlled instrumented nanoindentation for the study of polymer manufacturing processes on the molecular scale. Dr. Rowland has authored or presented over 15 conference and journal papers in internationally recognized peer-reviewed publications such as Science and Nano, among others.

The title for his talk is “Engineering Challenges & Biology: A Closer Look at Implantable Wireless Sensor Development.”