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 49 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 Don’t let another year pass by without getting your master’s degree. Graduate Programs • • • • • • • • • • • • • Accounting(M.B.A.) BusinessAdministration(M.B.A.)* BusinessAnalytics***+ Communication(M.A.)* ComputerScience(M.S.) SoftwareDevelopment Education(M.Ed.) EducationalPsychology(M.A.)* InformationSystems(M.S.)* IntegratedMarketing Communication(M.A.)* MentalHealthCounseling(M.A.) MuseumStudies(M.A.)** PublicAdministration(M.P.A.)* SchoolPsychology(M.A.) Asoneofthenation’sleadersintheuseoftechnologyineducation,Marist Collegeistheperfectfitforpeoplelookingtoadvancetheircareers.Weoffer 12programsleadingtoamaster’sdegree,inonlineaswellasoncampus formats,designedtoprovideyouwiththeskillsandvisionneededtoadvance yourcareer.Regardlessofyourlocation,MaristCollegemakesqualityhigher educationhighlyaccessible. *OnlineFormatAvailable **OfferedOnlyattheFlorence,ItalyCampus ***CertificateAvailable + PendingapprovalbytheNewYorkStateDepartmentofEducation 32 Learn more at www.marist.edu/thinkmarist or call 888.877.7900 Italy ∙ New York ∙ Online