News

New website!

If you’ve visited this site in the past, you may notice that things look pretty different. Now that it’s summer again, I’ve spent most of my nights working on completely overhauling this website. Why this change? Over the last couple of years, I have grown increasingly dissatisfied about how I maintained and updated my website, and the fact that my technical blog was a wholly separate entity from my main site.

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Dive into Systems is now an NSF-funded project!

Kevin, Tia and I are so happy to announce that Dive into Systems is now officially an NSF-funded project! Over the next three years, we plan on building out our free online text to include interactive content, including exercises, worked solutions and an upgraded instructor portal. We hope that all these changes will make Dive into Systems even more useful for the CS Ed community. Here are the links to our collaborative research awards:

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2022 Jean Bartik Computing Symposium

The 2022 Jean Bartik Computing Symposium was held on February 10-11, 2022 at West Point. This is the third iteration of this conference. Adina, Traci and I are so thrilled that we could put on this conference for our students. Despite all the challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic, we were so happy to have such successful and safe conference! I am so grateful to everyone who helped plan this year’s conference, especially everyone at West Point who was part of the local planning committee this year.

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I Won Best Paper at EduPar'20!

Wow, the world is different. I was supposed to attend the 10th NSF/TCPP Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education (EduPar-20) in conjunction with the 34th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium in beautiful New Orleans, LA but then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and IPDPS went virtual. The EduPar'20 team did a fantastic job transitioning the conference to a virtual format, and I really enjoyed attending. I was delighted to learn at the end of the conference that my paper, “PDCUnplugged: A Free Repository of Unplugged Parallel & Distributed Computing Activities” won the Best Paper award!

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2020 Jean Bartik Computing Symposium

On February 27th – February 28th, 2020 the second Jean Bartik Computing Symposium (JBCS) was held at the U.S. Naval Academy. The event was co-chaired by myself, Dr. Adina Crainiceanu (U.S. Naval Academy) and Lt. Col. Traci Sarmiento (U.S. Air Force Academy). In addition to co-chairing JBCS, we are also the founding chairs of the conference. The goal of the Jean Bartik Computing Symposium is to bring women and underrepresented minorities studying computing at the service academies with their counterparts in government and military.

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Dive into Systems receives SIGCSE Special Projects Grant!

I am so pleased to announce that Tia, Kevin, and I received a 2019 SIGCSE Special Projects Grant for the Dive into Systems book project in the amount of $5,000! We heard from the Special Projects committee that our project was one of 5 chosen out of 39 applications (13% acceptance rate). What an honor! We are planning on using the money toward proof-reading/copy-editing, and running an Early Adopter program. Faculty who are part of our mailing list, please keep your eyes peeled for an announcement soon!

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CSinParallel NSF Award!

Man, I have been waiting for nearly a year to write this post! I’m thrilled to announce that I am the West Point PI on the Collaborative Research Grant entitled, “Collaborative Research: CSinParallel: Experiential Learning of Parallel and Distributed Computing Through Sight, Sound, and Touch”. While I have been part of the CsinParallel leadership team since 2015, this is the first time I am participating as a PI! I am really excited about this award (especially since it is my first NSF grant), and looking forward to working with the CSinParallel team on this new endeavour!

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Invited Talk at Skidmore College

On March 22, I was invited to give a talk at Skidmore College! My 60-minute talk, “Maximizing Computing with Minimal Hardware”, discussed how single board computers can be used for data analysis and education. The talk was attended by approximately 40 students and faculty from the department of computer science at Skidmore College. There were so many wonderful students there and I got some really great questions! I also had the opportunity to have lunch with some of the great ladies majoring in computing at Skidmore.

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2019 Jean Bartik Computing Symposium

What a week! On January 31 to February 1st, West Point hosted the inaugural Jean Bartik Computing Symposium. The goal of the symposium is to bring women and minorities in computing at the service academies together with their counterparts in government. This 1.5 event is filled with mentorship, inspiration and hands-on technical workshops that prepares our students for careers in service to the Nation. Our inaugural symposium had 80 attendees, including 50 students from West Point, the U.

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I won the Curtis W. Mcgraw Research Award!

I’m in a state of shock… I was just notified today that I just won the ASEE Engineering Research Council’s Curtis W. Mcgraw Research Award in the non-PhD granting program category! I will be receiving the award at the ASEE ERC’s annual business meeting in March. This award means a lot to me. I was selected as a McGraw-Hill national merit scholar my senior year of high school. It’s amazing to receive an award as an associate professor that is named after one of the founders of McGraw-Hill, a company I credit with giving me one of the most valuable scholarships I received as an undergrad.

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Invited Talk at RIT

Last week, I was invited to give a talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology on October 5th, 2018. My 55 minute talk, “Leveraging Single Board Computers for Low-Energy Computing” discussed the burgeoning nature of data and how single board computers can play a valuable role in edge environments by assisting with localized data analysis. My talk was attended by approximately 80 students and faculty in the departments of computer engineering and electrical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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West Point TEDx Talk - Tomorrow's Personal Computer

On February 1, 2018 I had the fantastic opportunity to give a talk at TEDx West Point. I was selected to represent the Academy in November of 2017 at the event. It was a huge honor, since most of the selected speakers were cadets (by design), and very few faculty were selected. Today, my TEDx talk was finally posted! A link appears below. It is titled “Tomorrow’s Personal Computer”, and makes the argument why computers must stay personal in order to inspire the next generation of computer scientists.

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HERS Leadership Institute

Earlier this year, I was selected to participate in the 2018 HERS Leadership Institute at the University of Denver. The Higher Education Resource Services (HERS) was founded in 1972 to help provide leadership training and opportunities for women in higher education. Since 1976, the HERS Institute has been providing summer leadership training experiences for women faculty. Over 5,000 women faculty and staff have attended the HERS Leadership institute over the last 40 years.

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TeenTech Conference Workshop

On Sunday, November 19th I had the opportunity to be an invited speaker at the TeenTech NY conference! Hosted at the Microsoft Center in New York City, the goal of TeenTech NY is to create an interactive tech community that connects students to professionals in Industr and Academia to expose them to all the possibilities in tech. My workshop, “Parallel Computing on the Raspberry Pi”, was designed to introduce high school and early college students to parallel computing usin ga Raspberry Pi single board computer.

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Best Paper Award at IEEE URTC'17!

Since 2014, I have been one of the advisors of an interdiscplinary capstone team that works on building out an emulated power grid. Our goal is to try and publish with the students every year, but this is the first year that a student-led paper won Best Paper! My student, Spencer Drakontaidis presented the paper “Investigating a Raspberry Pi Cluster for Detecting Anomalies in the Smart Grid”, at the IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC'17).

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We won Best Paper at UEMCON'17!

Yay! The paper that Dr. Aaron St. Leger and I wrote entitled, “Leveraging Single Board Computers for Anomaly Detection in the Smart Grid” won the Best Paper Award in the Information Security track at the at the 8th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON’17) . Dr. St. Leger and I have been working together since 2014, and this paper shows the application of a single board computer (specifically, the Raspberry Pi) for real-time anomaly detection of synchrophasor data, and proposes a distributed architecture for detecting anomalous behavior in Wide Area Monitoring Systems (WAMS) for the smart grid.

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The Grid Iron Directive -- SECARMY's Spirit Video!

So, somehow I accidentally ended up playing a part in the Honorable Eric Fanning’s (22nd SECARMY) Army Navy Spirit Video! Watch it here This was super fun to participate in, and I really am awed by the amazing team of cadets I had the opportunity to interact with during the filming. They were fantastic actors! Update: Holy cow, we won!! Go Army football, and thank you SECARMY for lifting the GridIron directive!

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