FOX
LOGIC
Marist College | School of Computer Science & Mathematics
Fall 2012 •Vol. 1 No. 1
www.marist.edu/compscimath
Associate professor Richard McGovern discusses a geometrical
problem with students.
LOGIC
Ten of the eleven NSF scholars gather together for a photograph
after meeting the school’s advisory board.
Samantha Sprague shows her solution to the daily
mathematics challenge at her St. Mary’s REU.
CONTENTS
16
20
FOX
2
28
NSF students exhibit
extraordinary skill set
Alumni network builds
strong bridge
3 From the Dean.
4 Faculty Round Table. School professors discuss hot technology trends.
6 Success Stories. Our students are
going places.
10 What We’re Doing. In the classroom, CSM students get practical learning experience.
12 What We’re Doing. Our
Mathematics Department offers clubs
and competitions.
13 Curriculum. New changes in the CS
& ITS degree offer new opportunities to
incoming students.
Cutting-edge
Technology Center
14 Research. The Marist/IBM joint
study program is going strong.
24 Grants. CSM is a leader on campus
in grant awards.
31 Logically Yours. A math teaser to
challenge and inspire you.
The School of Computer Science & Mathematics hosted faculty from Shenzhen University, China, during the Spring
2012 semester. Dean Roger Norton (third from left, back row) with Executive Vice President Geoffrey Brackett, Vice
President for Academic Affairs Thomas Wermuth, Director of Large Systems Education Angelo Corridori, Project
Manager for Marist/IBM Joint Study Howard Baker, Associate Professor Xiaogang Peng, Executive Dean Ming Zhong.
Cover photo by Cynthia Shuttleton, ‘12
I
Photo by Al Nowak
FROM THE DEAN
Welcome to our inaugural issue
n the 32 years I have been at Marist
College, the college has grown in
the number of students, the size
of its physical plant, the quality of its
students, and its reputation, which can
all be attributed to the leadership from
the college’s president, Dennis Murray,
who has been at the college for 33 years.
Marist has gone from a regional college
to a nationally recognized college.
Marist also has one of the most beautiful campuses in the country, where the
new home of the School of Computer
Science & Mathematics, the Hancock
Technology Center, adds significantly to
that beauty.
Our students have interned at Facebook
and Goldman Sachs, to name just two.
They have participated in NSF funded
research experiences at both Marist
and other institutions including the
University of North Carolina and Texas
A&M. Our graduates have gone on
to jobs at IBM, Apple, Microsoft and
Morgan Stanley, or have gone to graduate schools at places like RPI, Carnegie
Mellon, Columbia and Wesleyan. And
what’s also impressive about these students is their loyalty to Marist College.
When these students become success-
ful, they don’t forget where they started.
They come back to the college to give
talks and recruit. In fact, our most
important resource for getting our current students jobs and internships is our
former students.
Marist College is also recognized as a
national leader in higher education with
respect to technology. The Princeton
Review and Forbes named Marist one of
the 25 “Most Connected Campuses” in
America. This ranks Marist College in
the top 1 percent of colleges and universities in the country in the use of technology. Universities on this list included
MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and
the University of Pennsylvania. Only
one college appeared on this list, Marist
College. The technology available to
our students is incredible; rivaling what
would be available at a large research
university, without the large class sizes,
the graduate teaching assistants, and
faculty teaching hundreds of students.
And speaking of faculty, the School’s
faculty members are outstanding teachers and researchers who take a personal interest in each of their students.
Quoting from the most recent edition
of the Princeton Review, “students gush
about their professors.”
So read on, find out more about the
great work being done in the School of
Computer Science & Mathematics.
I hope you enjoy our magazine.
Roger Norton, Dean
Editorial Director
Dr. Lyn Lepre
Director of Corporate Outreach
Susan Scanlon
School of Computer Science &
Mathematics
3399 North Road
Marist College
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
www.marist.edu/compscimath
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12
47
34
36
38
25
60
23
Logically Yours Solution, from page 31.
3
FACULTY ROUND TABLE
What we’re thinking
about right now
WRITER LAURA LACY SAT DOWN
WITH PROFESSORS EITEL LAURIA,
MATTHEW JOHNSON, AND
ALAN LABOUSEUR TO CHAT ABOUT
HOT NEW TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
AND WHAT IT ALL MIGHT MEAN
EL: [One of] the most interesting
things from 2007 onward is this idea of
predictive analytics. A prediction may
be being able to decide you are going to
give a loan or not to some customer, for
example. Or whether a football team is
going to win or not.
AL: Or how the weight training might
affect their rate of injuries over the
course of the season.
EL: Predictive analytics in general took
the whole idea of analytics by storm.
And again, this is an industry where…
we go by fads. We jump from one buzzword to the other. But that’s the nature
of the business.
MJ: So we need your predictive analytics to figure out which of the new
technologies we should be focusing on.
(Laughter)
EL: More good research is being done
in artificial intelligence, for example, to
develop these kind of predictive algorithms. Three of the coolest companies
in the world—Apple, Facebook and
Google—gather data from you and they
do stuff with that data for you. When
you are hooked up in iTunes, what do
you think they are doing with your data?
AL: They’re keeping track of everything.
4
EL: We don’t pay much attention, but
just go look at what’s happening to the
right side of Google and Facebook. You
get all this very customized, precise
advertising.
AL: There’s a plus side to that if we don’t
think about the potential for misuse for
a moment. Some of those ads—the best
ads, the targeted ads—can be thought
of as services. I’ll give you an example.
Apple knows that I listen to a lot of
Rush, the Canadian rock trio, on iTunes.
When Rush releases a new album, I’m
going to get a new ad for that. I might
not have known that, and so to me,
that’s actually helpful.
EL: Two students did an application
on what is called sentiment analysis-
-opinion mining—on Twitter. You put
in a brand related to a Twitter account
and create an environment that would
actually learn from the data to measure
the sentiment of that brand.
Interesting. Are there any other trends you
see on the horizon that interest you?
AL: Two or three days ago, I found out
about a technology from a company
called SIFTEO. It’s a start up. SIFTEO
makes small cubes, about an inch and
a half square. They have a battery and
a screen that you can press, but it’s not
touch sensitive, you can just press it up
and down, and a bitmap display and a
wireless radio.
They come in groups of three or six.
And if they’re within five feet of your
computer [because of Bluetooth], then
the cubes know where they are in space.
So it’s a platform for educational gaming. The computer plays the sound and
sends the code and the instructions for
the games to the cubes. Some games are
really simple, like they all have numbers
and you have to put the cubes in order.
Other games—there’s a spelling game
where you get six letters and have to
make the word, and I couldn’t do it! I
had one minute to figure out what the
word was. I made a bunch of smaller
words, but that wasn’t what it wanted, it
wanted one six-letter word.
EL: It comes in a set of nine cubes so…
AL: …So you can throw 3 out the
window. (Laughter) As an educational
platform it could be really interesting.
MJ: I’ve been looking at GPGPU.
GPGPU is general purpose programming on graphics processors. The idea
goes back a few years when people
recognized that graphics hardware had
developed into a flexible programming
platform. It used to be specialized, and
all the functions were hardcoded right
into the circuits for things like matrix
transforms and coordinate transforms
and the usual stuff you would do with
points and triangles.
Then game developers and graphics applications had higher demands so they
made it programmable to keep up with
real-time graphics and full 3D graphics on HD displays. They had to have
greater throughput so suddenly a few
different cores expanded to over 100,
over 200 cores, even more…
AL: Really?
MJ: Yeah, they’re not general purpose
cores like you find in a CPU but they’re
called stream processing units. A midrange Nvidia or ATI graphics card these
days has typically 200 or over 200…
EL: So you have massive…
MJ: Massive data parallelism. That’s
what you’re doing with graphics. You
have all these points, these vertices, and
you’re going to do the same thing with
many of them. So an object is defined
by a few thousand or a few hundred
thousand—depending on how complex the object is—points. And that
object is going to rotate in space, and
the same transformation gets applied to
all of them. Or those objects are being
shaded with a given equation or lighting
parameters.
AL: But there’s some sort of processor
fire power in there that’s doing the math.
MJ: There are these little streamprocessing units. So you can program
several different stages in the pipeline
so once it’s done with, let’s say, a matrix
transform, it goes and can do a shading
computation. There are at least three
programmable stages now. There used to
be two, now there’s another one that allows you to actually generate new points,
generate new data.
graphics in mind, and now that’s evolved
into what they call compute-languages.
So Nvidia came up with something
called CUDA. Intel had this Larrabee
architecture. ATI had their approach.
And then of course those vendors are
all members of the Khronos group who
manages OpenGL standard, and now
there’s an OpenCL standard that first
came out two years or so ago. So basically that provides that general purpose
API for leveraging the hardware.
It sounds really promising and there’s
a lot of excitement around it, but so far
there hasn’t been a whole lot done with
it. I’ve seen demos of researchers who
have used it for some new graphics applications; things like volumetric shading
in real time. The hidden overhead is that
you have to pass the data to the graphics card. The memory bandwidth on the
graphics card is pretty good these days.
AL: These cards came into existence so
we could play video games. They’re in
the Xbox.
EL: They were just the kind of device
that was used for graphics. Now it’s discovered they are powerful enough they
are a computer in themselves.
AL: So instead of just playing Halo,
which admittedly is fun, we might be
able to do nano molecular modeling or
massively parallel computing. And once
you have massively parallel computing,
we can talk about modeling things like
gene sequences. Really world changing
stuff that started as ‘Let’s play some cool
games.’
Well, that’s about all the time we have.
Thank you for telling us about some of the
exciting topics of conversation in your fields.
AL: Are you ready for the quiz?
(Laughter)
EL: What do you program that on?
MJ: There have been these shading
languages that were designed with
5
SUCCESS STORIES
Students Going Places
by Laura Lacy, Michelle Carpenter and Michelle Harrop
Perhaps every college and school is proud of its students and recent graduates, but we feel
as if we really have something to brag about. Our Computer Science & Mathematics
students are among the finest in the country and are accepted into
prestigious internship programs, competitive graduate schools, and highly soughtafter jobs. In fact, trying to select just a few to focus on for this feature was a challenge,
when just a walk down the Hancock hallways yield any number of exceptional men and
women. Take a look at some of whom we are especially proud.
Thomas Murphy, ’12,
a Summa Cum Laude
Marist College graduate,
has broadened his knowledge of mathematics during
his time at Marist through
a variety of programs and
achievements.
Upon graduation, Murphy
received the Baccalaureate
Award for Excellence in
Mathematics at Marist
College. In his participation in the Putnam Exam,
Murphy broke the standing
record for Marist College
and scored in the top 500
individuals in the country.
In continuing his education and passion for mathematics,
Murphy will be attending Carnegie Mellon in the fall studying toward his Ph.D. Murphy is in a full scholarship five-year
teaching program at the school. Following this, Murphy plans
to pursue a career in mathematics as a professor in probability
and analysis.
Patrick Cummings, ’12, graduated Magna Cum Laude from
Marist with a 4.0 GPA in mathematics. His achievements in
the field of math both within and outside of the classroom
reflect not only his dedication to the field, but also a true appreciation for the subject. He is a member of Pi Mu Epsilon,
the Mathematics Honor Society, and has been named on the
Dean’s List every semester at Marist College. “I really like the
problem-solving aspect,” he said. “Just being able to be handed
a problem you might not know the answer to—or maybe no
one knows the answer to—and having the ability to solve it is
really amazing.”
In the summer of 2011 he completed research experience for
undergraduates at California State University. He worked with
seven students and two professors for eight weeks on research
6
in mathematics theory. His work later was presented at a national conference in Boston.
In his spare time, Cummings was a head tutor in Math Lab,
where the tutors offer mathematics help to those in need. He
was also the team captain and president on the executive board
for the Marist College Ultimate Frisbee intramural team,
which he led to victory spring 2012 in the High Tide Frisbee
Tournament held in Georgia. Does his proficiency at mathematics (and ability to make complex calculations) give him
an edge in ultimate Frisbee? “I can’t really say,” he said with a
laugh. “I don’t know.”
Cummings will be working on his Ph.D at Boston University,
where he has a teaching fellowship beginning in fall 2012. He
said he “wants to be a professor after graduate school.”
Joseph Carmello, ’12, and Gregory Guida, ’12
The five-year bachelor’s/master’s program for computer science
majors is a popular program. And for Joseph “Joey” Carmello,
it was a long process. He started at Marist College as a communications major, but switched to computer science before his
sophomore year.
Carmello, who graduated with his master’s in software development, is a “strong believer in pursuing education outside
of class… I’m a self-learner, but the [computer science] coursework gave me the direction I needed to figure out what to
learn.”
He worked at Marist in IT; at a local startup, Mixpool; and
at a marketing company, Spectrum Creative Solutions. At
Mixpool, Carmello said, he was “able to have an active role in
the product direction with some cool new social networking
ideas. At Spectrum, he became a lead technical developer for a
college marketing platform that sells for six-figures to numerous universities.”
Carmello got an internship with IBM in Poughkeepsie,
where he worked on a transactional framework for WebSphere,
which he described as “a great learning experience.” The next
summer, he got an internship at Apple in Cupertino, Calif.
“I was able to work on some pretty cool things at Apple that I
unfortunately cannot talk about,” Carmello said.
From that internship, he was able to attain full-time employ-
ment with Apple, which he started in June 2012. Carmello
concluded, “I’ve been fortunate enough to have some pretty
great opportunities. I always try to remember how important
self-learning has been to my success.”
Gregory Guida wasn’t planning to move from the East Coast
where he grew up. But when he was offered a “dream job”
at Apple after graduation, he packed his bags and headed to
Silicon Valley.
“It was pretty surreal,” he said. “It’s pretty scary to think
you’re moving three thousand miles away from everything
you’ve ever known.”
Guida is a web developer with the company. He works on the
OSX product release team. He’s found that each day working at the technology giant is different, but one thing never
changes—the team he is a part of works hard to meet their
goals and push things out quickly. While the setting may not
be as formal as other companies, employees are responsible for
meeting their personal deadlines.
Prior to working at Apple, Guida interned as a web developer
at a local design company and worked on an internal project at
IBM.
Guida believes that the environment at Marist helped prepare
him for his current career. The community created by the
school where faculty and students talked to one another about
the subject matter gave him a good jumping-off point.
7
Jennifer Kile, ’12, was an Applied Mathematics
major with a concentration in Chemistry and a
Chemistry minor.
Her experience with mathematics and chemistry continued in her position as a teacher’s
assistant for a chemistry course. Kile is also a
member of Pi Mu Epsilon, the Mathematics
Honor Society, a Math Club participant and a
tutor for Math Lab. She graduated with honors for completion of the Honors Program for
Mathematics and is also a Dean’s List recipient.
Kile was selected to participate in the Putnam
Exam for the Marist College team, as one of only
three students selected.
In addition to her achievements at Marist,
Kile also completed research programs at other
schools. She was selected to participate in very
competitive paid research programs at Texas
A&M University and Bard College. These programs only select eight to ten students for their
research studies each year. At Texas A&M, she
“studied how signals are understood by computers
and how they can be rearranged, interpreted, and
reused to create cleaner sounds.”
Kile plans to continue her studies in mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she
has a fully funded teaching fellowship for her
Ph.D. Kile said that ideally she would like to be a
professor teaching a combination of mathematics
and biology or mathematics and physics.
Michael Cohoon, ’12, is currently completing his fiveyear program from which he will graduate with a M.S. in
Computer Science with a concentration in Game Design.
Cohoon’s experiences and achievements at Marist have not
only contributed to his education, but also to his ability to
further his career in computer science.
Cohoon was the recipient of both the Baccalaureate Philip
C. and Karen A. Murley Award for Computer Science
Internship and the Marist Technology Scholarship. In addition to this he is also a member of the Marist Ultimate
Frisbee team, the Deans’ Circle, the Math Computer Society
and the Marist College Honors Program.
As an Honors Program member, Cohoon was required to
present a senior project to culminate the honors experience at
Marist. Cohoon’s project was a two-dimensional side scrolling game that could be run on both a computer and an Xbox
360. Cohoon said that this project took a few months because
he had to learn C#, a computer language, and a new framework, the Microsoft XNA framework. Cohoon worked on
the game throughout the summer in order to refine the game
engine and gameplay.
Cohoon has furthered his computer knowledge while working at Residential Networking - ResNet - at Marist. He has
also interned at IBM both in 2011 and 2012, and will begin
work full-time with IBM as a software engineer working as a
system/solution tester on IBM’s Smart/Cloud entry product,
which is a self-service portal for the Cloud end user. Cohoon
hopes to use the experience gained in the classrooms of
Marist to one day become a game designer or developer.
8
Colby Rabideau, ’13, has another year until he graduates, but
he’s already adding impressive points to his resume; For one, he
spent the summer of 2012 in California interning for Facebook.
The summer before, Rabideau was interning at Digital
Variant, a small web development company. During that time,
he worked on an application that showed him how challenging it is to make a good product that can still support outdated
browsers. He wrote a blog post about the experience. “Basically,
I was just whining,” he joked.
He also posted his writing on Hacker News, where it was
the top link for two days. “Over the two days, I ended up with
40,000 hits on my website,” Rabideau said. Shortly thereafter,
while watching TV with friends, he got a surprise email—from
a Facebook manager who had read the article and wanted to
put him in touch with a recruiter. A few phone interviews later
Rabideau was slated for the Facebook intern team.
During his internship, Rabideau was a user interface engineer
on the identity team. While he can’t share many of the details
of his work, he can say that his role with the identity team
involved privacy issues and Facebook’s timeline. He also mentioned that he wrote code that went live on the site, which was
a learning experience. When his mentors reviewed his code,
they did so with “a fine-toothed comb,” going deeper into what
worked and what didn’t than a classroom experience might.
His time with the social media site reinforced his notion that
he is on the right career path. He considered graduate school,
but thinks instead he’ll jump into working fulltime after
graduation. He did receive an offer to return to California and
work for Facebook again, which he is considering. Of course, if
there’s anything his Facebook experience has taught him, it’s to
be ready for pleasant surprises when planning your future.
“Because stuff like that happens—you get a random email.”
Most people hear
about the site
Etsy.com and think
of handmade crafts
and other goods.
But Daniel Miller,
’13, is currently
working at
Etsy.com, not on
crafts or selling
goods but as a core
platform engineer.
Miller is a junior
computer science
major who is enrolled in the fiveyear bachelor’s/
master’s program
at Marist College.
After a few weeks
of his summer
internship, he was
already learning
more than he had
expected.
Etsy.com is a site
where people sell work they have hand made. “Our mission
is to empower people to change the way the global economy works,” Miller said. “We see a world in which very,
very small businesses have much, much more influence in
shaping the economy. Local living economies are thriving
everywhere, and people value authorship and provenance as
much as price and convenience. We are bringing heart to
commerce and making the world more fair, more sustainable, and more fun.”
As a core platform engineer, Miller works with both
engineering and operations teams. They focus “on the site’s
underpinnings like caching architecture, large-scale data
migrations, front- and back-end site performance, image
storage, monitoring tools, development environments, and
code deployment tools,” said Miller.
Miller works with changes in code that happen every day
to fix problems in the site. This is exciting for him, because
it is “in stark contrast to other engineering cultures where it
is common for bug fixes and new features to take months to
make their way to the customer,” he added.
For Miller, another benefit of the job at Etsy.com is that he
gets to work with many other engineers in the field. Some
of these engineers include Rasmus Lerdorf , the creator of
PHP; Peter Seibel, the author of “Practical Common Lisp
and Coders at Work;” Kellan Elliott-McCrea, the former
chief architect of Flickr and original developer of OAuth;
and John Allspaw, the author of “The Art of Capacity
Planning.”
The other people working at Etsy.com are just as impressive, and Miller has already learned a lot from them.
“Behind these headliners is an extremely solid team of
engineers who have not only taught me a ton of Computer
Science skills, but have also shown me what it takes to run
an excellent engineering organization,” Miller said.
9
WHAT WE’RE DOING
“The students did extensive interviews
and requirements analysis to provide
Family Services with the information
they needed to improve and further
develop these systems.” Matheus said.
“Some of the students are planning to
take the Project course in the fall of
2012 to actually implement the system
that they designed.”
The Client: Office of Undergraduate
Admissions at Marist
In the classroom and on
the cutting edge
OUR STUDENTS GAIN
DAILY REAL-WORLD
EXPERIENCE
by Laura Lacy
S
teal a quick peek at the resumes
of Marist students both past and
present and you’ll probably see a
long list of impressive jobs and
internships, from Facebook to Goldman
Sachs to IBM. But you also might glance
an entry for something else on the list—
real-world experience that they gained
in the classroom during their time here.
Students in the School of Computer
Science & Mathematics at Marist have
unique opportunities to work with
various businesses and organizations on
projects during the semester.
Take, for instance, the students who
have found themselves in class with
Anne Matheus, assistant professor of information technology and systems. Each
semester in Matheus’ class, the skills
students have learned about in textbooks
jump off the page and into the commu-
10
nity. Clients from the area commission
Matheus’ students to use their computer
science know-how in order to better an
area of their operations.
“I am contacted on a regular basis,” said
Matheus. “We have a great reputation in
the community.”
Students from the School of Computer
Science & Mathematics are only
matched with paid internships. So if a
nonprofit organization or another business with no intern budget approaches
Matheus with an interest in having her
students work for them, she’ll tell them
that while they can’t intern for no pay,
she’ll turn their commission into a class
project. Want to see a few examples of
the fascinating projects Matheus’ students have undertaken in the classroom?
Read on!
The Client: Family Services
The Details: In spring 2012, the
Information Analysis class worked to
analyze the payroll system, client services and the asset management systems.
The Details: When Brian Apfel, the
associate director of Marist’s Office
of Undergraduate Admissions took
Matheus’ Information Systems Project
class, he created an opportunity for his
fellow students to help improve upon his
office’s systems. The class completed two
projects: The implementation of the office’s ambassador program and a method
by which prospective students could find
out if credits they earned at other institutions could be transferred to Marist.
Apfel became the project manager of the
ambassador program project and “two
other graduate students created a new
online site for students to apply to become ambassadors, and create their own
schedules and monitor their efforts,”
Matheus said. Five other undergraduate students (the class is a mix of grad
and undergrad students) created a basic
system by which a prospective student
could import the classes they had taken
elsewhere that had been previously approved by the university and could see
where it might apply at Marist.
“This project helped better me as a person in creating relationships with group
members as well as clients,” said student
Patricia Tow. “We were so excited at
the end of this project because we realized we had made an impact. Now, the
Admissions Office has a product they
continue to develop and enhance to help
transfer students be able to check if their
previous college’s courses transfer to
Marist College.”
The Client: Habitat for Humanity of
Dutchess County
The Details: The Systems Analysis and
Design course tackled a project at the
behest of the chairman of the board
for Habitat for Humanity of Dutchess
County. They hoped to revamp their
website and wanted Marist students
to present what that might look like.
Students consulted with the chairman
and then researched the need for a new
site. “At the end of the semester, they
provided Habitat with a full analysis
listing the requirements, the desired
components and a prototype design for a
new website,” Matheus said.
The students involved expressed great
satisfaction with the practical experience. “This ‘real-world’ project was much
better than a textbook project because
we were actually able to apply principles
learned in the course to problems that
we will soon face in the workplace,”
student Michael Janofsky said. “The
design of any system is a complex
process and the designers must have a
thorough understanding of the process
they are implementing before completing any work. It was also nice to have an
actual client to communicate with and
ask questions of as opposed to guessing
based on book information.”
The Client: Hudson River Boat and
Yacht Club Association
The Details: The Hudson River Boat and
Yacht Club Association reached out to
Matheus’ Data Communications class in
an effort to explore better communica-
tion between law enforcement and boats
on the Hudson River. After 9/11, the
river was heavily monitored by various
law enforcement officials. As a result,
multiple officials would board boats
independently of one another, unaware
that a particular boat had already been
checked. “People who were boating
recreationally were being boarded several
times a day,” Matheus said. Students researched various ways in which officials
might communicate with one another
after boarding a boat. While the police
would not have been able to implement
a system like the one this undertaking
would require, students still examined
several options including hypothetical
cell phone and/or satellite usage and
applications that might have made an
impact.
The Client: Dutchess Outreach
The Client: The Center for the
Prevention of Child Abuse
The bottom line? When a class of students helps out the local businesses, it’s
a win-win. The businesses walk away
with a better understanding of their
systems and, often, better operations.
And the students are flexing the muscles
that they will use in the years to come
as they leave college and hunt for a job.
Not to mention they relish this type of
project, Matheus said. “There’s just a
lot more enthusiasm with real clients.
The students tend to treat the textbook
examples as ‘Oh, another assignment.’
But this has real importance…there is
a whole different emphasis on ‘I have
to get this done, and I have to get this
right.’”
The Details: The Center for the
Prevention of Child Abuse wanted to
find out more about their supporters,
so they asked for help from the students of Matheus’ Information Systems
Project class, who created a database
for all donations. “They wanted to keep
better track of who their donors were,”
Matheus said, to get a clearer picture of
who was helping out the organization
with funds, clothing, etc. They were surprised at the number of donors who were
repeat benefactors rather than unique
donors, and had a better idea of how to
expand based on that information.
The Details: One semester, Matheus’
Information Systems Project class
teamed up with Dutchess Outreach,
an organization committed to helping
low-income citizens meet their needs
and raise awareness in the community
about hunger and other social issues. The
group upgraded their system.
“As people came in and received services, they would track their information
and comments in an Access database.
Over the years, because of poor maintenance of the system, it had become
polluted with bad data. Our task was
to clean up the existing data, import it
into a new database system, and allow
for future scalability of the system,” said
student Richard Mejia.
11
WHAT WE’RE DOING
Mathematics Department offers
experience for every student
CLUBS, COMPETITIONS
AND RESEARCH OFFER
STUDENTS WIDE CHOICE
by Colleen Kopchik
M
12
athematics majors have much
more to look forward to than
just calculus and geometry
class. The Math Club at Marist has created a place where students of all majors
(nearly half of Math Club participants
are not mathematics majors) can come
together and ‘get geeky.’
According to the Marist College
Mathematics Department website, Math
Club “is a student organization whose
activities include exploring employment
opportunities, sponsoring professional
lectures and projects emphasizing the
widespread applications of mathematics...” But Marist assistant professor of
mathematics and Math Club advisor
Matthew Glomski perhaps stated it best
when he said, “Math Club is like an
academic neighborhood where everyone
is getting their hands dirty doing mathematics together.”
Math Club is about much more than
the kind of math you learn in the classroom. Math Club sponsors events such
as Origami Day, where students learn to
make different pieces of origami, Pi Day,
a lecture series and even a movie night.
But the department has not forgotten
the true purpose of college: academics. The Mathematics Department is a
regular at national and regional conferences including the Joint Mathematics
Meetings, MAA Mathfest, Spuyten
Duyvil Undergraduate Mathematics
Conference and the Hudson River
Undergraduate Mathematics
Conference. Math students not only
attend these conferences but also present
the mathematical work that they have
completed at Marist.
Two years ago, the Mathematics
Department began a chapter of Pi Mu
Epsilon, a mathematics honor society for math students. Each student is
nominated by a faculty member and goes
through what Glomski calls a “pretty
rigorous application process” to be inducted. To date, the Marist chapter of Pi
Mu Epsilon has inducted 40 members.
Some students like Samantha Sprague,
’15, have taken their mathematics ca-
reers one step further and participated
in a REU or Research Experience for
Undergrads. During an REU, a student
has the opportunity to conduct mathematical research while visiting another
college or university. Sprague was accepted to an REU at St. Mary’s College
of Maryland. “I could not be more excited to represent Marist,” Sprague said.
Glomski said an REU is an “intense
first contact with original mathematics
research. It’s more competitive than getting into grad school.”
During summer 2012, Sprague studied
discrete optimization, one of the three
research options offered at her REU.
She explained, “I worked with Legos to
take a deeper look into the mathematical
formulas that correlate with how much
area we can enclose with a certain type
of Lego.”
Other Marist students have conducted
their REUs at universities including
Texas A&M, Bard College, SUNY
Potsdam, and UC-San Bernadino.
Whether a student is a mathematics
major or not, it is clear there is something for everyone in the Mathematics
Department.
CURRICULUM
CS & ITS degree gets
curriculum overhaul
CHANGES STREAMLINE
COURSES; REFLECT
TECHNOLOGY IN PRACTICE
by Abbey Scalia
A
fter three years, countless meetings, and a document totaling
over 100 pages, the Department
of Computing Technology of the School
of Computer Science & Mathematics
implemented a new curriculum for
both computer science and information
technology and systems students beginning fall 2012. In addition, two five-year
bachelor’s/master’s programs will be
revised for the 2014-2015 academic year.
For the undergraduate programs new
classes will be rolled out over four years,
until the freshmen who entered in the
fall 2011 semester graduate, said Jan
Harrington, associate professor and
chair of the Department of Computing
Technology.
Computer science majors are able to
choose between two concentrations:
software development, and game design
and programming. Information technology and systems degree students also
choose between two concentrations:
information systems, and information
technology.
While there are two majors and four
concentrations within the program,
Harrington said, “all students in the new
program have the same core curriculum
in their first two years.” Previously, CS
and ITS students shared just one common first year. The first two common
years in the new program are meant to
provide a firm foundation in technology and programming concepts. With
the new curriculum all students in the
department will graduate with a solid
foundation in technology, programming,
networks and web development.
Harrington said the common first two
years also benefit students that might
want to change concentrations or majors
within the department. “It’s hard to ask
an 18-year-old to make a decision like
that right away,” Harrington said.
Assistant professor of information
technology and systems Anne Matheus
agreed that just one common year was
not enough for students.
“We went through the assessment process and reviewed outcomes and goals,”
Matheus said. “It became obvious that
there are some core subjects that are
central to success in both majors.”
Another major change to the curriculum is that many classes are now four
credits. Many of these four-credit classes
include labs, allowing for more hands-on
work for students. In addition, all capping classes are four credits. Harrington
said students take three credits of capping in the fall and the remaining one
credit in the spring. Like the first two
common years, students from both computer science and information technology and systems come back together and
form groups for a larger, collaborative
capping project.
Matheus said the change in the capping course serves many purposes. “The
information technology and systems
students have one set of skills and the
computer science students have a different set,” she said. “Both of these skills
are necessary in completing a complex
capping project.” In addition, it gives
students the chance to work with an
integrated team, which is something
they will most likely experience after
graduation.
Students indeed get real-world experience, not only by working with others
on a team, but by doing design work for
real clients through the revised capping course. Students do the hands-on
work for clients in the fall semester; the
one credit in the spring gives students
time to complete implementation of the
program.
While the change in the first two years
and the capping course are the most significant, Harrington said changes were
made throughout each major’s upper
level classes as well.
For incoming freshman who will
be experiencing the new curriculum,
Matheus said students will be exposed to
more labs, more practical experience and
more hands-on programming experience, which will help when finding a job
when they graduate. “The good news is
our students already are very successful
in finding a career that interests them,”
Matheus said. “But the new curriculum
will fill in the holes.”
13
RESEARCH
Marist and IBM join forces
for creative projects
MARIST/IBM JOINT STUDY
PROGRAM OFFERS MANY
EXCITING OPPORTUNITIES
by Michelle Carpenter
arist College has long been
recognized for its ability to
help students figure out what
they aspire to be in life and then achieve
those goals. For students who have
chosen the path of computer science or
information technology and systems,
the Marist College Joint Study program
with the IBM Corporation provides an
opportunity to develop those skills, gain
relevant work experience and prepare for
the future. IBM is a leader in technology
innovation and the Marist students who
participate in the joint study program
are able to collaborate with leading-edge
technologists on real-world projects.
The Marist/IBM Joint Study is a
program that officially began in the mid1980s as a cooperative venture between
Marist and IBM. The program involves
IBM employees, Marist faculty and
students working together on projects
M
14
supporting technology trends. The result
may be the development of a hardware
or software prototype, or a new cuttingedge application.
Howard Baker, an IBM employee and
project manager for the Marist/IBM
Joint Study Program, said “there’s an
aspect of research to it. The work we
do may eventually lead to a solution or
product that will be of value and use.”
Baker has been managing the joint study
program on-site at Marist College for
over a decade and has seen, first hand,
the benefits to IBM, Marist College
faculty, and students.
Baker explained that the student activity in the program is an integral component because at any given time six to 10
students could be part of the joint study
team working to develop a particular
solution. One example of an early project
is the digitization and hosting of the
FDR Library materials. Another key
project involves the adaptation of the
open-source learning management software used by Marist College (iLearn)
so that it could run effectively on IBM
software. As a result, the software is
now accessible to external groups such
as local school districts or governmental
organizations to use for education or
collaboration.
The IBM Academic Initiative has been
another main focus of the joint study
program over the past years. Through
this, Marist faculty can develop a course
for students and then the course materials can be given back to IBM, where
they will be put online for other schools
to use in their classrooms. Through the
joint study program, Marist College
has been the leader in providing courses
and certificate programs in z/OS, AIX
and other critical technologies required
to run large enterprise computing
environments.
With support from the National
Science Foundation, Marist College was
able to build an enterprise computing research lab and purchase the newest and
most versatile IBM mainframe called
the zEnterprise System with a zBlade
Extension (zBX). This system has enormous computing power and versatility
and is managed by joint study students
and Marist IT experts to support a
wide variety of academic and industrybased research projects. Some examples
include: a cancer research project from
a Johns Hopkins University researcher;
a study to improve the speed and degree
of accuracy on seismic wave propagation;
an open academic analytics initiative
funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation to predict student success in
online courses; and many more.
Through their participation in the joint
study program, students are introduced
to brand new emerging technologies.
For example, students and faculty
from Marist College are working with
key IBM employees and other major
networking companies to develop an
OpenFlow certification testing lab at
Marist. OpenFlow is an example of
software defined networking, and is a
technology that is of great interest to
companies like Google and Amazon.
In order to stimulate the minds of
joint study participants and foster their
progress, an area in the lower level of the
Hancock Center next to the enterprise
computing research lab has been dedi-
cated to innovation and new ideas. There
the students have office space where they
can conduct research and have handson access to the enterprise computing
research lab just down the aisle.
The benefits of these innovations are
evident in the classroom for Marist
students. IBM, working with Marist
IT, has support in place for professors
who want to use IBM technology in
their courses. In many of the computer
science courses at Marist, there has been
an ongoing process to update labs so that
they can support IBM technology. These
updates have the advantage of providing
students with exposure to leading products and technology in the field.
For example, Baker explained, in a set
of courses that focus on business intelligence and analytics, there are many
projects students could work on that
would have them analyze large amounts
of data. IBM and Marist IT would work
with the professors of those courses to
help them develop lab exercises that
could be used with IBM products. This
would provide students with real experience with leading products in the field.
These include notable names such as
Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence
and SPSS Modeler, which are leading
products used in business to mine large
data sets.
“We’ve had a lot of progress on all
fronts,” Baker said.
In addition to the experience and
training that students receive through
participation in this program, it also
provides a potential employment op-
portunity. After completing the joint
study program, students are often taken
on as IBM employees. Baker said that
“a fair number of students go to IBM or
other prominent companies in the field.
It’s a win-win as Marist gets access to
IBM hardware and software for teaching
and research as well as funding for new
course development and the students
get outstanding experience, internship
and career opportunities. IBM is able
to recruit top talent and collaborate on
research enabling the development or
refinement of innovative products.”
Roger Norton, dean of the School of
Computer Science & Mathematics, is
proud of the Marist/IBM partnership.
“Poughkeepsie, the home of Marist
College, is also the home of the IBM
Corporation. Marist and IBM have had
a long and strong relationship, partnering on many Marist/IBM Joint Study
projects, bringing together Marist
faculty and students, and IBM technicians and researchers,” he said. “Marist
College and IBM have worked together
on joint projects in a variety of areas
including Sakai, K-12 Educational
Platforms, Cloud Computing, digital
libraries, and a recent project on Open
Flow networking and business analytics, and of course, one of our largest and
most successful, our zSeries education
and training program, offered through
the college’s Institute for Data Center
Professionals. These projects give both
students and faculty the opportunity to
work with some of the most cuttingedge technologies in the world.”
FloodLight OpenFlow
GUI Applet
The Marist College/IBM Joint
Study OpenFlow research
team collaborated to create
a new FloodLight OpenFlow
SDN controller GUI. This applet allows one to instantiate a
flow from the GUI. The project,
called Avior,
was designed to fill a void in
the realm of floodllight administration while propelling
forward development of open
source Floodlight applications.
The application runs independently of the controller and
communicates with the controller using the default restAPI.
Currently, the application
supports the display of basic
network information (switches,
hosts, controller information),
and more importantly, it has a
complete flow manager that
will allow the user to add, modify, and delete current flows on
the network, all without having
to glance at python scripting or
the rest API JSON.
See highlights at:
http://openflow.marist.edu
15
16
Marist Scholars Hone
their
Talents
With a grant from the National Science Foundation, eleven students follow their dreams
and pursue a future in computer science and information technology
by laura lacy
photographs by lyn lepre
mapping out the hometowns of the eleven Marist recipients
of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF)
would require an atlas of the entire United States. They hail
from distant places like Hawaii, Los Angeles and Kenya (by
way of Minnesota) and from places close to Marist’s backyard
including New York and Pennsylvania. Their backgrounds are
extremely varied, but they all have one important thing in common—their education is being financed by funds the School
of Computer Science & Mathematics received from an NSF
S-STEM grant.
“I think what strikes you most about the group initially is
diversity,” Jane Fiore, director of Marist’s Academic Learning
Center said. “They’re just this wonderful, creative, bright,
funny group of unique individuals.” Fiore led the psychology of
self development class the students were required to take their
freshman year to fulfill a social behavioral requirement and
ease their transition to college life.
The students—James Arama, Stuti Bhatt, De’Ron Billups,
Julio Cabrera, Mark Logan, Morgan Machuta, Martin Mena,
Gabriela Rosales, Garrett Sutcliffe, Justin Svegliato and Jason
Wong—began their freshman year in the fall 2010 and will
graduate in the spring of 2014. Marist recruited the cohort
after the School of Computer Science & Mathematics was
awarded the S-STEM grant by the NSF in 2009. Per the NSF
website, S-STEM grants are awarded “to institutions of higher
education to support scholarships for academically talented
students demonstrating financial need, enabling them to enter
the STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] workforce or STEM graduate school.” The grant pays for a
large portion of each student’s academic expenses, and Marist
covers the rest, making a top-notch degree in technology a
financial reality for these students.
“First of all, the goal of the funding was to bring in a diverse
group of students,” Roger Norton, dean of the School of
Computer Science & Mathematics, said. “Gender, race—it’s a
diverse group. They had to be students who were in strong economic need. It’s probably a group of students for whom Marist
wouldn’t otherwise be a real recruiting option.”
Ron Coleman, associate professor of computer science, was
the principal investigator for the grant. After the grant was
awarded, Coleman traveled nationwide to meet students and
pique their interest in the program.
“It is always interesting to see how students from a school in
the mountains of Hawaii get here,” Coleman said.
He looked for these potential Marist students in underrepresented populations, teens who might not otherwise pursue a
career in science and technology. This is critical from a national
viewpoint as well, Coleman said, as not enough graduates are
currently entering this field—a fact that could affect business
and national security.
The students applied as regular Marist applicants while indicating they were interested in this grant. Working with the admissions office, Coleman, along with Norton, and Mary Ann
Hoffmann, assistant dean of the School of Computer Science
& Mathematics, narrowed down the applicants to this field of
Marist quality scholars.
“These students needed to be people who were going to be
strong students,” Norton said. “We have students in this
group—the faculty will tell you they are the best students we’ve
ever had at Marist College.”
Both in and out of the classroom, these students have been a
welcome addition to the Marist community. “I think they’re
just wonderful representatives of the school,” Fiore said. “We’ve
certainly benefitted from having these motivated, bright students as part of our community. And we’re sending out really
spectacular people to big companies [for internships] and that
represents Marist very well.”
17
M eet
t
Stuti Bhatt
Field of study: Information Systems
Hometown: Cape Cod, MA
Why computer science? My high
school teacher really encouraged a
lot of people to go ahead with this
major, and especially recommeded
it for women. I am very happy with
my decision.
the
scholars
t
Garrett Sutciffe
Field of study: Game Programming
Hometown: Newburgh, NY
Why computer science? To pursue
the knowledge needed to achieve my
goal of creating innovative games.
Marist favorites: I like having the
freedom of choice; the ability to do
what you want, when you want with
few restrictions.
u
Justin Svegliato
Field of study: Computer Science
and Philosophy with
Mathematics minor
Hometown: Massapequa, NY
Why computer science? In fourth
grade, I introduced myself to web
development by messing around
with some basic HTML. My interest grew exponentially as I began
looking into other topics of computer science.
u
Mark Logan
Field of study: Computer Science
Hometown: Bradenton, FL
Why computer science? I see and
use software and web apps all
around the place that are just wrong.
I want to be able to make them
because I know I can make them
better.
18
p
James Arama
Field of study: Computer Science
Hometown: Originally from Kenya,
but currently in Minnesota
Why computer science? I was introduced to programming by a great
friend of mine in high school.
Marist favorites: The environment is
just beautiful!
t
Martin Mena
Field of study: Computer Science
Hometown: Croydon, PA
Why did you choose Marist? I love
all the opportunities Marist offers in
terms of career options.
p
u
Jason Wong
Field of study: Computer Science
with a concentration in Game
Design and Programming
Hometown: Honolulu, HI
Marist favorites: The fantastic
clubs we have here. The Computer
Society has hosted hackathons (in
which participants program a working application over a short period
of time) judged by employees of
companies such as IBM and Etsy.
Gabriela Rosales
Field of study: Computer Science
and Information Technology minor
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Why computer science? I enjoy
the challenge, and when I write
a program that does what I want
it to do, its the best feeling of
accomplishment.
u
Morgan Machuta
Field of study: Information
Technology Systems with a minor in
Global Studies
Hometown: Honolulu, HI
Why computer science? I’ve always
had an interest in computers from a
very young age. It only seemed logical to follow through with a profession that incorporated something I
enjoy working with.
p
De’Ron Billups
Field of study: Information
Tecnology with an instrumental
music minor
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Why computer science? I have been
interested in technology since I
was a child. I’m fascinated with the
idea that I could create an entire
software system from scratch and
employ it for the world to enjoy.
t
Julio Cabrera
Field of study: Computer Science
Hometown: South Beach, FL
Marist favorites: My classes are
my favorite. My second favorite
would be the people. Coming from
a Hispanic-driven community, I
thought it would be difficult to
adapt to Marist but I was wrong.
I met a bunch of new friends with
interesting backgrounds.
19
Ou r s tu d ents
FOLLOW THESE
LEADERS
Starting from the Hancock Center, today’s
Marist student can go anywhere. These
successful alums provide a roadmap.
by Laura Lacy
20
JOSEPH Verderame, ’00, is a vice president at Morgan Stanley; he is the Global
Head of Windows Virtualization and
Remote Access Engineering. As such,
he said, he is responsible for the virtualization technologies across the desktop
environment and for remote compute
strategies for the global company.
“Any time any of Morgan Stanley’s
almost 60,000 employees log on to work
from home or anywhere outside to work,
they are using the systems my team has
created,” Verderame said.
While Verderame completed the fiveyear bachelor’s and master’s program at
Marist, he interned twice at Morgan
Stanley over the summer. After graduating, he entered the company’s training
program, which rolls its trainees into a
company position in IT. Since that time,
he has held many roles with the firm.
Verderame’s current role requires training and mentoring his 28 employees as
well as working directly with engineers
and developers.
In addition, for the past couple of
years, Verderame has been designing
and implementing a virtual desktop
strategy for the Morgan Stanley Smith
Barney business within Morgan Stanley.
Approaching 50,000 desktops, it is the
largest virtual desktop implementation
ever done, he said.
“This is a very extensive project with
enormous financial as well as franchise
implications,” Verderame said. “There
were a great deal of technology challenges since we were doing things that
had not yet been done. It has been a very
successful and rewarding experience.”
Verderame stays involved with the
Marist community. He recruits at the
college and sits on the school advisory
board. His involvement stems from
his strong belief in Marist’s principles
regarding education and the college’s
continued dedication to technology.
“The students that attend Marist simply
have far more opportunity and exposure
to practical technology than I have seen
in any other undergraduates that I interviewed for full-time jobs.”
JEFFREY Nick, ’97, is the senior vice
president and chief technology officer
of EMC Corporation, a major presence
in information processing and storage
technology. In his role as CTO, Nick is
responsible for emerging technologies
initiatives and new strategic initiatives; he also leads the company’s efforts
in advanced system design for cloud
computing.
“Innovation is a key part of my job,”
Nick said. He is responsible for the technical vitality of the company. In other
words, he pays attention to trends in the
industry and monitors the creation of
products. He also personally has over 80
patents in the field of computer science.
During his tenure at EMC, he has
started two programs from scratch to
foster that technical vitality. He began
the company’s Innovation Conference,
where EMC’s 53,000 employees are
encouraged to submit new ideas ranging
from new applications to improved tools.
The conference, Nick said, has generated
$400 million in revenue for the company. He also founded EMC’s Fellow
and Distinguished Engineers program,
which honors exceptional technical
employees. The company currently has
58 fellows and distinguished engineers,
both of which are VP positions.
“In the end, my technical interests
were pulling me back into this field of
computers,” Nick said. “The thing about
the industry that I love so much is that
it’s so dynamic, and it’s constantly evolving, and it’s never been dull.”
VINCENT Amatulli, ’89, is the
chief technology officer of The Ayco
Company, LP, a subsidiary of Goldman
Sachs, and a member of the Investment
Management Division Technology
Team. Prior to this, Amatulli was
the global head of Prime Clearing
Technology, which supports Listed
Derivatives Clearing, Prime Brokerage
and Derivatives Clearing businesses and
associated Operations groups.
Before this position, Amatulli worked
in several other positions at Goldman
Sachs, the company he joined as a new
associate right after graduating from
Marist.
“I’ve been working here since I graduated from Marist,” Amatulli said. “So
I’ve been here 23 years. A lot of what I
learned at Marist has been very applicable to my current job in terms of
logical thinking and preparing myself
for a career.”
He has helped to build the firm’s
technology in far off places, including
London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore,
Beijing, Brazil and India.
When looking at schools, Amatulli
chose Marist for several reasons. He said
the school’s relationship with IBM convinced him of their serious investment
in technology education. Furthermore,
he liked the size of the school and the
atmosphere.
Goldman Sachs has been a dream job.
“Leveraging technology to help businesses grow was more of my passion.”
STEPHEN Tedford, ’97, teaches
mathematics at Misericordia University
in Pennsylvania. An associate professor,
Tedford teaches 24 credits each year,
ranging from freshman-level introductory courses to senior-level major courses.
Another component of his job is
research in combinatorics, an area of
mathematics. “In particular, I study
mathematical objects called greedoids
and how they are related to other mathematical objects. These objects have a
collection of ‘good objects’ where the
collection must satisfy some basic rules,”
he said.
Tedford attended graduate school immediately after graduating from Marist,
earning both a master’s and doctorate
degree from Binghamton University.
After graduate school, Tedford taught
as an assistant professor of mathematics
at Franklin & Marshall College. He has
also been an adjunct faculty member at
various other colleges, including Marist.
Tedford hopes that he inspires his current students as much as his professors
at Marist inspired him. In fact, he has
actually applied some of the techniques
used by Marist professors in his own
classes. The way Marist professors made
the material interesting and understandable resonates with him today.
21
22
JOSHUA Matheus, ’99, serves as the
vice president of network architecture for
data communications at Goldman Sachs.
In other words, “my team is responsible
for all product and strategy for data
communication,” he said.
Some of the issues he deals with daily?
How data is securely transported and
firewalled, how Goldman employees
use their network from home, how they
use it at the office, wired and wireless
networking.
His career at Goldman Sachs thus far
has included designing and engineering projects that impacted the firm on
a worldwide scale. “One of the biggest
projects I managed was converting
what was, at the time, the third largest
bridged global internetwork to a routed
infrastructure,” Matheus said. “It was
two-year project spanning 80 cities. In
the last five years, I was the lead architect of our low latency high frequency
trading network.”
Matheus spends part of his workday
consulting on long-term tech strategies
for the company. He also works with the
company’s vendors, reviewing pricing
and contracts. Employee management—
their technical abilities and opportunities both in and out of the firm—is part
of his job description as well.
Matheus truly comes from a Marist
family. His father Henry is a Marist
graduate, his mother Anne is a professor in the School of Computer Science
& Mathematics, and his wife Carolyn
(pictured with him above) also teaches at
Marist.
The foundation Marist helps students construct has been invaluable for
Matheus. “They prepare you to learn
continuously, and this field we work in
is not history—we have to keep up,” he
said.
LINDA BETZ, ’88, the chief information officer for Travelers. She is
responsbile for the company’s security
policies and strategy, employee security
education, third party assessments and
security operations.
Prior to joining Travelers, Betz worked
for IBM for 29 years in a variety of
positions, most recently as director and
a certified project management professional. Betz was responsible for setting
the company’s internal security strategy,
leading security initiatives to protect IT
infrastructure and driving transformational change. She also helped improve
the company’s disaster recovery and
business continuity plans.
Betz served as president of
the Industry Consortium for the
Advancement of Security on the
Internet, a group co-founded by IBM,
Microsoft, Intel, CISCO, Juniper
and Nokia to collaborate on improved
security.
She holds a bachelor’s devree in computer science and mathematics from
State University of New York at Albany
and a master’s degree in computer science from Marist College.
“At the time when I decided to work
toward my master’s in computer science,
there were a few places in the area where
I could have studied, including a Union
College extension,” Betz said. “However,
I was attracted to Marist because the
college offered a real campus, not a representative satellite location.”
STEPHEN Vendetta, ’11, took a job as
a data quality associate for the energy
management company EnerNOC after
graduating from Marist.
“Our goal is to make energy management as integral as accounting to the operation of every organization,” Vendetta
said. “We help commercial, institutional
and industrial organizations use energy
more intelligently, pay less for it, and
generate cash flow that benefits the bottom line through our complete suite of
technology-enabled energy management
solutions.”
Vendetta’s job involves making sure
that EnerNOC’s customers are receiving
high quality data. “I work with multiple
teams across the company, providing
technical expertise, and constantly striving towards a culture of error prevention
rather than data cleanup,” Vendetta said.
His days can vary by case and by season. He manages approximately 30 to 50
cases each day. In the summer, he tends
to be busier as electricity usage is higher.
Vendetta credits his time in school with
helping him after he started work. In
addition to having a skilled set of professors who taught him the technical tools
he needed, the education he received at
Marist was broad. Being able to expand
his focus, Vendetta said, allowed him to
prepare for life in the professional world
where he often has to think creatively.
“You make sure that you can handle
these curve balls that come at you.
Marist is a breeding ground for bigger
ideas and new thinking,” he said.
Upon his graduation from Marist, ROSS Mauri, ’80, began a
long, successful career at IBM. He currently serves as IBM’s vice
president of Enterprise Process Transformation.
“Leveraging IBM’s advanced analytics and process techniques,
I am responsible for leading enterprise productivity initiatives
across IBM,” he said. “These initiatives are part of IBM’s internal
transformation and goal of becoming the premier globally integrated enterprise in the world.”
Prior to this position, he held many others—including management positions involving design, development, quality assurance
and marketing—during his 30-plus year career with the industry
leader. The company’s size enables its employees to work in many
different areas, Mauri said. “You’re never going to get bored.”
During his time at IBM, Mauri has worked on several significant projects. He was involved in the “rebirth of the mainframe
in the early 90s.” And he was instrumental in IBM’s move into
e-business. He also ran the company’s Power Systems group,
IBM’s primary UNIX servers, and was responsible for making
these servers the core of IBM’s Watson technology.
Mauri also worked abroad for the company in Paris. He and his
family moved there for two and a half years—one of his children
was actually born there. “We savored every moment we were in
Paris,” he said.
While at Marist, Mauri both attended classes and worked in the
data center. That combination of education and hands-on experience prepared him for his career, he said. He still maintains a
close relationship with the college; he is vice chair of the board of
trustees.
“Other than my parents,” Mauri said. “Marist was the single
most formative experience and reason that I am who I am today.”
JENNIFER LoVerde, ’07, graduated
from Marist having earned her degree
in mathematics, as well as a minor in
Spanish and a certificate in secondary
education.
After completing her degree, LoVerde
applied for a job at Eisenhower Middle
School in Wyckoff, NJ. She secured the
position and began teaching the seventh
grade. Since then, she has taught students in four different levels of mathematics and a few other elective courses.
Along with her teaching team of three
other teachers versed in language arts,
social studies and science, she imparts
her math expertise to 100 eighth graders
during the five or six periods of the day.
“I enjoy the interactions with my students as well as my coworkers, and most
days are a ton of fun,” LoVerde said.
LoVerde’s involvement in the school
doesn’t end in the classroom. She is the
softball and basketball coach as well as
the math club advisor. She and another teacher began the club four years
ago. They’ve quickly become a force to
be reckoned with at the MathCounts
competition; this year they earned
second place and competed in the state
competition.
“I love to be able to extend my passion
for mathematics outside of the classroom
with eager students who have that thirst
for knowledge,” she said.
LoVerde fondly remembers her time at
Marist. “From the minute I stepped on
campus I fell in love with it,” she said.
She was pleased with the opportunity
to have small classes and to know her
professors as a result. And looking back,
she realizes how successful the faculty
was at creating a department that fosters
learning.
23
Grants offer
opportunties
by Laura Lacy
T
he students, faculty and staff are not the only ones who think
that Marist’s School of Computer Science & Mathematics
is top notch. Time and time again, our program has been
acknowledged by organizations outside of academia, receiving
praise, awards and competitive grants and funding.
In fact, since 2004, the School of Computer Science & Mathematics
has received not one, but six major grants from the National Science
Foundation. In addition, Marist has received several research grants for
undergraduate students and local K-12 teachers. “Honestly, the NSF
gets their money’s worth when Marist is awarded a grant,” said Mary
Ann Hoffmann, assistant dean of the school. “When the NSF gives
Marist a grant, we deliver.”
In other words, when the NSF awards a grant, they hope that it will,
at the conclusion of the grant, allow the institution to take the ball and
run with it. “You build on your success. They want to give you the seed
and you grow,” said Susan Scanlon, director of corporate outreach at
Marist’s Institute for Data Center Professionals. “And we do that very
well.”
The following are some of the major grants and awards that have helped
us stand apart from the crowd over the past few years.
24
]
[
National Science Foundation Partnerships
for Innovation grant
Awarded 2004
The funds from the PFI grant were used to create The Marist
College Institute for Data Center Professionals (IDCP),
founded in 2004. As baby boomer professionals retire, large
data center mainframes used by institutions like the government, banks and even commercial businesses like Wal-Mart
will see a critical skills shortage, according to Hoffmann. “We
need a really secure, resilient computer infrastructure,” she said
and therefore, the mainframe is not going away.
Unfortunately the skills required to maintain and manage the
mainframe and the data center infrastructure are no longer
being taught in the traditional undergraduate curriculum. The
IDCP has been successfully addressing this issue by offering a
wide array of 100% online and asynchronous educational programs for students and working professionals across the globe.
As a matter of fact, students from 24 countries have participated in the IDCP courses.
Although the grant offered funding through 2007, the IDCP
continues to operate and thrive on a tuition basis and is selfsustaining. Major multinational corporations and governmental agencies have utilized the IDCP to train their employees.
Examples include the US House of Representatives, the
Canadian Department of Defense, Progressive Insurance,
Depository Trust, Citigroup, Intel, Emerson Network Power
and many more. This program has been so successful, in fact,
that when the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering
at the University of Albany decided to apply for their PFI
grant, they asked Marist to partner with them based on that
success.
[
New York State Office of Science,
Technology & Academic Research
(NYSTAR) grant
]
Awarded 2004
Marist was awarded funding from NYSTAR’s College Applied
Research and Technology (CART) program with the directive
to spur technology-based economic growth and collaboration
between New York based businesses and academic institutions.
With support from the NYSTAR funding, Marist created
the Center for Collaborative and On-Demand Computing
(CCODC). As director of corporate outreach for the CCODC,
Scanlon would connect with companies from across the state,
“who would collaborate with Marist students and faculty to
help their businesses grow.” Students would work with the
businesses, either under a faculty mentor or by going to the
company in person or virtually in an intern-like capacity.
The CCODC served a wide variety of companies from large
public corporations to brand new start-ups with the goal of job
creation, capital investment, revenue growth, cost savings or
workforce development. In many cases, the students involved
with the company project were hired after graduation by the
firm as full time employees. Projects were focused on the
exploitation of innovative technologies but the companies were
not necessarily information technology firms. Some examples
include the creation of a data driven wine-on-demand function for the Dutchess Wine Trail website and the creation of an
automated, database driven, power plant simulation process for
GE Global Research. The program was a success; in fact, by
year four of the grant, the Marist CART generated more than
$4 million in economic benefit to New York State.
25
[
National Science Foundation
CPATH grant
] [
Awarded 2008
The purpose of the CPATH grant was to revitalize undergraduate education in large enterprise systems, Hoffmann
said. Marist used these funds to lead a partnership with eight
other universities and nine corporations. Together, this group
formed the Enterprise Computing Community (ECC), with
the following mission: “To improve undergraduate education
in large systems and graduate a new generation of talent that
will provide industries with the ability to secure, sustain and
grow their operations. Filling the skills shortage will stabilize a
vulnerable technology environment before the problem reaches
crisis proportions.”
Each year, Marist holds the ECC Conference over two days in
June, bringing together faculty, students and industry professionals. Although this was originally a two-year grant, the
ECC continues to grow (now over 1,000 members) and the
national conference has continued with corporate sponsorship.
National Endowment for
the Humanities (NEH) grant
]
Awarded 2008
This NEH grant was awarded to fund a collaborative project
between the Department of Computer Science and Marist’s
Department of Communication and the Hudson River Valley
Institute. The Digital Pathfinder for Historic Sites Projects,
led by associate professor Ron Coleman, provides self-guided
tours of the Staatsburgh Estate in the Hudson Valley through
the Red Fox Walker, an app for mobile devices that uses GPS
to interact with users, providing digital maps, navigation and
interesting facts and information about Staatsburgh as tourists
explore the estate. This system also allows tourists to choose
how long and how in-depth they want their tour to be. The
template for the app could be adapted at other historic sites in
the future.
[
National Science Foundation
S-Stem Grant
]
Awarded 2009
Grants from the NSF S-STEM program are awarded “to
institutions of higher education to support scholarships for
academically talented students demonstrating financial need,
enabling them to enter the STEM [science, technology,
engineering and mathematics] workforce or STEM graduate
school,” according to the NSF website. The $550,000 S-STEM
grant awarded to Marist allowed the college to recruit 12 diverse students, who entered as freshmen in the fall of 2010, for
study at the School of Computer Science & Mathematics. The
goal of the CS/ITS Cohort Scholarship Program is to increase
the number of students in the computer science and information technology and systems undergraduate majors.
For more information on the S-STEM recipients, see page 16.
26
[
[
Office of Naval Research Grant:
Underwater Acoustics Waves
]
Awarded 2010
In summer 2010, Scott Frank, associate professor of mathematics, was awarded a grant from the Office of Naval Research to
study computational ocean acoustics. In particular, current
numeric solutions of the parabolic equation do not properly account for sources such as explosions or earthquakes in an elastic
ocean bottom. He successfully implemented a Fortran program
on Marist’s Enterprise Computing Research Lab (ECRL) machines and used it extensively to study the interaction of underwater acoustic waves with an elastic ocean bottom. Specifically,
the application solves the acoustic parabolic equation to obtain
accurate transverse and horizontal wave displacements in the
solid material as well as acoustic pressure in the water. The
figure shows acoustic transmission loss results for an acoustic
source in the water (upper layer) interacting with an underwater mountain (second and third layers). The ECRL machines
should continue to provide an important resource for continuing these studies and for expanding these studies for broadband
calculations, which use tremendous computational and storage
resources.
Frank is running a Linux virtual server on an HS5 xblade. His
server has 16 processor cores running at 2.4 GHz allocated
to it (these are shared cores with other servers), with 45G of
memory and 150G of storage. Frank utilizes the software program Matlab on the Linux server.
National Science Foundation Academic
Research Infrastructure Grant
]
Awarded 2010
Using this $696,931 grant, Marist was able to create a “home”
for the incredible technology currently residing in the lower
level of the Hancock Technology Center. “With that grant we
were able to expand the research lab downstairs,” Hoffmann
said. “The funding had to be used for fixed assets.” Some of
those fixed assets included the backup power supply, specialized monitoring equipment, temperature control, and the raised
floor required for the equipment.
This is “one of the more difficult types of grants to get,” said
Roger Norton, dean of the School of Computer Science &
Mathematics, “because it’s a construction grant.” By awarding
money for construction, the NSF is indicating that it rates the
school highly enough to invest in new construction. “It’s not
something they do lightly,” he said.
The NSF reviewers were impressed with “the already impressive list of research streams and funded projects executed by
faculty and students at Marist.”
[
National Science Foundation
Major Research Instrumentation Grant
Awarded 2011
]
The three-year, $678,880 MRI grant paid for the equipment
that went into the lab built with the ARI grant. Using these
funds, the School of Computer Science & Mathematics was
able to purchase the zEnterprise mainframe system, with the
zBlade Extension (zBX) enabling faculty, students and business leaders to conduct intensive computing related research
projects. This technology is located in the newly built NSFfunded Enterprise Computing Research Laboratory in the
Hancock Center. Faculty have identified research areas for the
new equipment which include large-scale business analytics,
converged networking for storage and internet devices, classical
thermodynamics, mathematical epidemiology, computational
projects in underwater accoustics and wave propogation, and
enterprise level virtualization of system resources.
For more information about this technology, see page 28.
27
Technology
Trailblazers
28
A
by Laura Lacy
An amazing piece of technology lives on
the lower level of the Hancock Technology
Center. A 2010 National Science
Foundation Academic Research Initiative
grant allowed a special room to be outfitted for what are lovingly referred to as “the
black boxes” and the students who are fortunate enough to be able to work with this
efficient, powerful machine will tell you
that it is far friendlier than it may appear
from the outside.
Funded by an NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant
along with support from the IBM Corporation, the IBM
zEnterprise 114 mainframe was delivered in December of
2011 to Marist, so you could say it was a hi-tech holiday gift
of sorts to the students and faculty. The zEnterprise and the
zBlade Extension (zBX) attached to it form a super computing
system that helps students in the School of Computer Science
& Mathematics train on world-class equipment that puts the
standard personal computer to shame.
“Students run the system as much as possible,” said Howard
Baker, IBM project manager of the Marist/IBM joint study
program. “We’ve had other mainframes at Marist, but direct
access by students is something new.”
This equipment allows us to “run very high computational
research projects and supply a very high-end research environment to Marist professors and students as well as other outside
researchers,” said Douglas Rohde, an information technology
and systems major. In other words, a mathematics professor
running very complicated math problems might wait a long
time for results on his or her office computer. The zEnterprise
system can yield results much faster without the threat of
crashing or freezing up, and a faculty member can run multiple
problems simultaneously.
29
School of Computer Science & Mathematics Dean Roger
Norton said he believes this facility is helping to make Marist
a leader in the field. “This laboratory, exclusively used by our
students and faculty, contains some of the most sophisticated
hardware and software in the world, giving our students access
to computational power rivaling that of large research organizations,” he said.
Some examples of how Marist uses the system? The Open
Academic Analytics Initiative project is funded by the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation to help predict student outcomes
in online courses. “It’s collecting data from our Marist iLearn
site,” said Christopher Cordisco, computer science major. “This
project gathers student data such as how many times they log
on, post on forums, send messages to professors, etc. It tries
to predict how well a student will do while there is still time
for the professor to intervene if necessary and help the student.
Another example is a cancer research project submitted by a
Johns Hopkins University researcher requiring a computer
intensive environment. There are currently 14 research projects
utilizing multiple platforms including z/OS, AIX, Windows
and Linux on zBlade. This work would not be possible without
the versatility, reliability, resilience and security of the zEnterprise 114 with the zBX.
In other words, while this massive machine might be living on
the lower level, it offers incredible opportunities that reach far
beyond the walls of the Hancock Center and Marist College.
30
LOGICALLY YOURS
MATH TEASER
Complete It
A magic square is a square matrix where the sum of the numbers in any column, any row, or
either of the two main diagonals is always equal to the sum of the numbers in any other row,
column, or main diagonal in the square. Complete the following magic square:
12
38
25
23
The solution appears on page 3.
31
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32
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