Computer Science | Grinnell College

Welcome back!

On Thursday, January 26, the faculty of the Department of Computer Science will discuss opportunities for students to participate in research projects in computer science at Grinnell in summer 2017. We'll present overviews of the projects, explain how students with various levels of expertise and background can contribute, summarize the benefits and rewards of the summer research experience, and explain how to apply.

At 4:00 p.m., refreshments will be served in the Computer Science Commons, Noyce 3817. The discussion will follow at 4:15 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, November 11, in Noyce 3821, Andrew Hirakawa 2012 and Russel Steinbach 2012 will discuss the software development project that they worked on last summer, under the direction of Professor Henry Walker:

We developed a system to place incoming students in classes based on high school transcripts. Development included an coding an inference engine in PHP that queries a MySQL database and produces a letter created in L^AT_EX, as well as an online interface for prospective students.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk, Placing incoming students in classes, will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

At 4:15 on Thursday, April 22, in Noyce 3821, Jordan Shkolnick 2011, Nora Coon 2010, Jillian Goetz 2010, and Cyrus Witthaus 2010 will present the results of their summer 2009 Mentored Advanced Project, Interactive MediaScripting.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

On Thursday, March 4, Nathan Levin 2010, Andy Applebaum 2010, Alex Cohn 2011, and Jeffrey Thompson 2010 will describe their Summer 2009 Mentored Advanced Project, StatsGames.

Refreshments will be served at 4:15 p.m. in the Computer Science Commons (Noyce 3817). The talk will follow at 4:30 p.m. in Noyce 3821. Everyone is welcome to attend!

Students work with faculty on a range of research and development projects. Much activity takes place in the summer, when Grinnell College provides fine support to students (stipend, credits). Other work takes place during the regular semester. Although not complete, the following listing illustrates many of the projects involving student-faculty collaborations.

Fall, 2013

Designing Technology for Wellness Behaviors
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Bluetooth Communication with C.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2013

Designing Technology for Wellness Behaviors
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Scene text image binarization.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Scene text word guideline detection.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Fall, 2011

Refining C-based Materials Supporting Robots.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2011

Scene text image normalization.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Using Robots in CSC 161: an Exploration.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Improving User Experience for the Local Food Coop Web Site
Faculty Director: Janet Davis

Fall, 2010

Multi-device GPU learning
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Text recognition and alignment of historical maps.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Placement of Incoming Students in Computer Science, Statistics, and Mathematics.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2010

Persuasive Web Communities
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Text recognition in historical maps.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Fall, 2009

User-centered software development.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2009

GPU learning and character recognition.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Designing multifactor experiments.
Faculty directors: Shonda Kuiper and Samuel A. Rebelsky

Interactive media scripting.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Visual category recognition.
Faculty director: Jerod Weinman

Spring, 2009

Compression algorithms and techniques.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Software Development for an Interactive, Accessible Campus Map.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 2008

Participatory design of ambient pervasive technology.
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Summer, 2007

Higher-order media computation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Usable functional media computation.
Faculty director: Janet Davis

Spring, 2007

Restoring Greek.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Summer, 2006

Functional multimedia.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Functional approaches to multimedia.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Scripting, databases, and the Web.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

Visualizing multivariate data.
Faculty director: Shonda Kuiper

Fall, 2005

Experiments in programming languages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 2005

Syndication software development.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Automating athletic recruiting.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

Spring, 2005

Arjun Guha 2006: Compiling functional languages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Fall, 2004

Automating athletic recruiting.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

Summer, 2004

Automated group scheduler.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Freedweb: a peer-to-peer Web server.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Automating athletic recruiting.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

A stand-alone spam filter.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Web mediation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Spring, 2004

Ray tracing.
Faculty director: David Bishop

Fall, 2003

Advanced Java development.
Faculty director: David Bishop

Robotic art.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 2003

Educational Web technology.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Visualizing Web data.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Web mediation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Spring, 2003

Online football statistics and commentary in real time.
Faculty director: David Bishop

Heuristics for Tutorial placement.
Faculty director: Ben Gum

Computerizing Room Draw.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Auto glossary linking.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Fall, 2002

A multi-protocol mail client.
Faculty director: David Bishop

Summer, 2002

Massive data computation.
Faculty director: Ben Gum

Data mining Web usage logs.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Clio's worlds: 3D visualizations of personal Web logs.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Web mediation tools (Web Raveler).
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 2001

Web Raveler: reconfiguring Web pages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Clio: analyzing Web navigation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Annotations: attaching notes and comments to Web pages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 2000

Clio: analyzing Web navigation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Web Raveler: reconfiguring Web pages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Preserving static locations in changing documents through structural analysis and string approximation.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Spring, 2000

FLIP: an extended study in software design.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Summer, 1999

Project Ravel: An architecture for reconfiguring web pages.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Interactive facilities for networked hypertexts.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Evaluating the variability of ratings of conference papers.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

A neural network to place incoming students.
Faculty director: Henry Walker

Siteweaver: Tools for building and supporting large-scale hypertexts.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Summer, 1998

Siteweaver: Tools for building and supporting large-scale hypertexts.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Animated algorithms on the World Wide Web.
Faculty director: Samuel A. Rebelsky

Spring, 1994

Software design and implementation: GNU sed.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Developing a Scheme interpreter.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Summer, 1994

An expert system to place incoming students in mathematics and computer science.
Faculty director: Henry M. Walker

Summer, 1993

Grinnell Scheme.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Spring, 1993

A character-recognition system.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Functional programming languages.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Computational linguistics.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Summer, 1990

A German spelling checker.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Fall, 1988

Denotational semantics.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Spring, 1984

Recognizing printed characters.
Faculty director: John David Stone

Data retrieval and file tools: DRAFT-11.
Faculty director: John David Stone

MAX (1982-1990)

At different times, students contributed to the development of a matrix computation package that was published in 1988 by Brooks/Cole as MAX -- the MAtriX Algebra Calculator. Professor Gene Herman is the principal author of the package and directed the students' contributions. Professor Herman and Professor Charles Jepsen wrote the text of the book.

The Core System (1979-1981)

Several students worked with Professor Gene Herman to create device-independent graphics subroutines in FORTRAN and Pascal, implementing a 1978 proposal (Bergeron, R. Daniel; Bono, Peter R.; and Foley, James D., Graphics programming using the Core system, ACM computing surveys 10 [December, 1978], pp. 389-443) for a graphics standard.

You Solved It! (1979-1981)

Under the direction of Professor Gene Herman, several students developed a collection of computer-aided instruction programs providing drill and practice in precalculus mathematics.

telephone: +1 641 269 3169
fax: +1 641 269 4285 and +1 641 269 4984

US mail:
Department of Computer Science
Noyce Science Center
Grinnell College
Grinnell, Iowa 50112-1690

private delivery services:
Noyce Science Center
1116 Eighth Avenue
Grinnell, Iowa 50112

How to find us

Take Interstate 80 to Iowa; keep going until you reach exit 182. Taking the exit, drive 0.4 miles and turn left (north) onto Highway 146 (which is called West Street when you get into town). Drive 3.8 miles into town. Turn right (east) onto Eighth Avenue. Proceed three blocks (0.4 miles), crossing Main Street, Broad Street, and Park Street. In the middle of the long block that follows you'll see the Rosenfield Center on the left (the north side of the street) and the Noyce Science Center, where we are, on the right (the south side).

As you enter the Noyce Science Center from Eighth Avenue, you find yourself in a long north-south corridor (the "1800 corridor," because all the rooms along it have numbers of the form 18xx). Turn left and walk to the (north) end of the corridor. At that point there are stairs to your left, through a pair of double doors, and there is an elevator about fifteen steps to your right, a little way down the 1500 corridor. Take either to the third floor, where there is another long north-south corridor, the 3800 corridor. That's where you'll find us.

MapQuest link
Grinnell College campus maps and directions

Students and faculty work together on many Mentored Advanced Projects (MAPs) and other scholarly endeavors, both during the academic year and in the summers. For example, about a dozen students work as research/development teams with faculty in a typical summer. Some on-going projects include:

• Software performance and effective cache use
• Program reasoning in the computer science curriculum and semi-automated programming
• Fostering inclusivity in early computer science activities for youth
• Evolution simulations for research and education
• Extracting meaning from images, such as character recognition in historical maps

Christine Wang '08 presents two posters at ITiCSE 2007 in Dundee Scotland, based on work with students Monica Ugwi, Eric Omwega, and Jonathan Tsu and with faculty member Henry Walker.