Computer Science | Grinnell College

The Glimmer Labs pages are currently under development.

Faculty

Samuel A. Rebelsky. SamR directs Glimmer labs and has a hand in most of the projects.

Current Research Students

Marsha Fletcher '15.

Alexandra Greenberg '16.

Evan Manuela '16.

Spencer Liberto '15.

Lea Marolt Sonnenschein '15.

Daniel Torres '15.

Christine Tran '15.

Kimberly Spasaro '14.

Alumni

Faculty

Janet Davis. Dr. Davis served as a guest faculty member in Glimmer Labs during her first year at Grinnell. At the time, she worked closely on an early version of the Mediascripting project.

Post-Bac Researchers

Soren Berg. Soren spent a year working on the Mediascripting project, primarily on the IDE used for the first major Mediascripting implementation. His IDE was used for about six years by hundreds of students in Grinnell's CSC151 course.

Grinnell Students

Forthcoming.

Other Students

Zarni Htet. Zarni visited Glimmer labs from Cornell College in Summer 2012. Zarni contributed to the new architecture for mediascript (named RAMS, for both Re-Architecting Media Script and the Cornell college mascot).

[ Glimmer | People | github | CSG-CS2@github ]

The Glimmer Labs pages are currently under development.

Mediascripting is a project of Grinnell College's Glimmer Labs. In this project, we are building resources to support interactive scripting of media applications.

The student researchers currently working on CSG-CS2 include Alexandra Greenberg, Mark Lewis, Evan Manuella, Jennelle Nystrom, Kimberly Spasaro, and Christine Tran.

Further information is forthcoming.

[ Glimmer | People | github | CSG-CS2@github ]

The Glimmer Labs pages are currently under development.

Computing for Social Good in CS2, aka CSG-CS2 is a project of Grinnell College's Glimmer Labs. In this project, we are developing resources to include topics of computing for social good in the CS2, the introductory course in data structures and algorithms. (At Grinnell, CSC207, Object-Oriented Problem Solving and Algorithms, corresponds to the traditional CS 2 course.)

In our first version of the CSG-CS2 course, we are using Ushahidi as a component of the course. Students will use a local Ushahidi installation as the source for data and will build a simple Ushahidi installation for clients towards the end of the semester.

The student researchers currently working on CSG-CS2 include Spencer Liberto, Lea Marolt Sonnenschein, and Daniel Torres.

Further information is forthcoming.

[ Glimmer | People | github | CSG-CS2@github ]

The Glimmer Labs pages are currently under development.

The Grinnell Laboratory for Interactive Multimedia Experimentation and Research, aka "Glimmer" aka "Glimmer Labs" is a research laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at Grinnell College. Samuel A. Rebelsky serves as the director of Glimmer Labs, which has a host of student researchers.

Current Research Projects

Glimmer Labs currently supports two primary research projects. In the Mediascripting project, we are building tools and resources to explore interactive scripting of media applications. While our emphasis is on using functional approaches to scripting, we support a variety of languages and paradigms. In the CSG-CS2 project, we are building a curriculum for data structures and algorithms that emphasizes computing for social good.

Historical Information

From 1997 to 2006, the research focus of Glimmer Labs was interactive hypermedia, particularly targeting the World Wide Web. The three main projects of Glimmer Labs at the time were Project Clio, a suite of resources to gather and analyze information about student Web usage, SiteWeaver, a tool suite for building Web sites, and TrailBlazer, a tool set for annotating and linking arbitrary Web pages. All of those projects have been discontinued.

[ Glimmer | People | github | CSG-CS2@github ]

On Thursday, January 24, Hart Russell 2014 and Prashanna Tiwaree 2014 will present the results of their summer 2012 research project:

This project sought to replace the MediaScheme console used in CSC 151 with a more versatile system that consists of DrRacket, a Scheme development environment, communicating with the GIMP through D-Bus, an inter-process communication tool that is found in modern Linux systems.

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

On Thursday, November 15, Sarah Henney 2013 and Martha Fletcher 2015 will describe their summer internship work on the MediaScheme project:

Self-Disclosing GIMP(SDGimp) is an ongoing project with the goal of adding self-disclosure functionality tailored to the MediaScheme library into the GIMP. In short, SDGimp will allow a user to perform an action in the GIMP and then view the Scheme expression which can be used to duplicate that action.

In this Extra, we will discuss and demonstrate our work from this summer on SDGimp, including our expansion of the MediaScheme library to include more actions from the GIMP.

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

Computer science faculty maintain active programs of scholarship and often involve students in this work. During a semester, this work may involve one or two students; in the summer, teams of four or more students are common.

Separate faculty research labs allow these long-term projects to progress efficiently and effectively.

• Workstations can be configured for specialized software and environments.
• Faculty and student researchers have access to systems, independent of class schedules and demands for teaching labs.
• Teams can post notes, brainstorm ideas, develop "to-do" lists on white boards, without interfering with class notes in classrooms and teaching spaces.
• When teams meet in different labs, discussions by one research team do not disrupt work by other teams.