18th Annual Women in Computing Day

The Association for Women in Computing (AWC) hosted the 18th Annual Women in Computing Day on Friday, April 1st.  About 80 middle school girls from five area schools attended. This  year, Abigail Bartolome and Angel Pak co-chaired the event. Marina Kiseleva (AWC chapter president), Jisu Park (AWC chapter vice president), and Deborah Tatar (AWC faculty advisor) were also instrumental in making the event successful. A special thanks is due to our friends from IBM who offered their time, to professor Wu Feng who led one of the demonstrations, and to all the graduate and undergraduate student volunteers.

Click here to read about the 2015 event.

 

 

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Kurt Luther contributes to Civil War Weekend

The 25th anniversary of the Civil War Weekend will be held at The Inn at Virginia Tech the weekend of March 18. Kurt Luther, an assistant professor in computer science, will offer tips for solving photographic mysteries. One example he likes to use is an iconic poster used to recruit African American soldiers into the Union Army. Investigations by a series of Civil War historians led to the discovery that the image was based not on the artist’s imagination, as had been assumed for nearly 150 years, but on an actual photo. Further research helped debunk a version of the photo that had been altered to misrepresent the recruits as Confederate soldiers.

Luther’s own contribution was in scrutinizing both biographical details and visual cues – a cap insignia, a set of whiskers, a single row of buttons – to identify the white officer pictured. This finding, he hopes, will help him identify the other soldiers in the photo. “The discovery process is one of the great joys of photo sleuthing,” said Luther, who supplements his more traditional detective work with crowdsourcing techniques and facial recognition software. “It allows us to restore meaning to images and personal histories that would otherwise remain forgotten.”

 

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Dr. Kurt Luther
Dr. Kurt Luther

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SeeMore headed to SXSW

Dr. Kirk Cameron and a group of CS students are heading to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas this month.  SeeMore, an animatronic sculpture designed by sculptor Sam Blanchard and computer scientist Kirk Cameron to illustrate the concept of parallel computing, will be featured at the trade show March 13-16.  The name is a reference to supercomputing pioneer Seymour Cray.  SeeMore is designed to simultaneously educate and inspire computational thinking, SeeMore is part kinetic sculpture and part giant parallel computer. Built with 256 single-board computers, called Raspberry Pis, the living sculpture physically demonstrates conceptual elements of computer science, showing how a parallel computer carries out many calculations simultaneously. As a computation propagates and evolves across the surface of the form, it visually represents the architecture modern supercomputers use, helping people understand the abstract concepts involved.  Read more about Virginia Tech at South by Southwest Here

SeeMore was also one of the centerpieces of the 2015 World Maker Faire in New York City. Read More

 

Kirk Cameron, Seemore, Sam Blanchard (SOVA), and Ebon Upton (Founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi Foundation).
Kirk Cameron, Seemore, Sam Blanchard (SOVA), and Ebon Upton (Founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi Foundation).

 

 

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