“I am delighted to welcome three new faculty members to join the department. They are Dr. Anne Mulhern (Lecturer), Dr. Anna Rumshisky (Assistant Professor), and Dr. Kate Saenko (Assistant Professor).

Dr. Mulhern will be primarily teaching lower-level undergraduate core courses.

Dr. Rumshisky is an expert in natural language processing and Dr. Saenko is an expert in computer vision. These two areas have many important applications and funding opportunities from federal funding agencies and industries.

All three bring much needed new talents to the department that will benefit our students and help increase our visibility.”

  

(L-R) Profs. Mulhern, Rumshisky, and Saenko.

• Sanjay Anbalagan (doctoral student): Extending the Open-source Weave Analysis and Visualization Platform for the Biological Community. Sanjay designed a process that accesses multiple publicly available gene expression data sets, imports that data into Weave and uses Weave analysis features to examine, visualize and compare gene expression profiles.

• Andrew Dufilie (doctoral student): Asynchronous Rendering to Support Large Data Sets in Weave. Andy improved Weave performance by developing a threading system for its single-threaded ActionScript code base. This means the interface remains highly responsive even when visualizing large data sets of 300,000 records or more.

• John Fallon (senior): Collaboration in Visualization. John created, implemented and tested the first version of collaboration in the Weave environment, allowing multiple users to work together, simultaneously and remotely, when creating visualizations and performing data analysis in Weave.

• Heather Granz (doctoral student): An Accessibility Module for Visualizations Using Weave, an Open- source Visualization Platform. Heather developed and tested a Weave-to-JAWS interface that provides descriptions of Weave visualizations in text format. This work is a first step in a larger, more ambitious project that will eventually allow Weave to generate natural language text descriptions of interactive visualizations that are compatible with the JAWS screen-reading system.

• Sebastin Kolman (doctoral student): InfoMaps: A Tool for Personal Information Management and Analysis. Sebastin implemented InfoMaps, a visualization tool for personal information management, in the Weave environment and extended its support for document visualization and analysis including local file systems.

• His paper “Twitter improves Seasonal Influenza Prediction" at the fifth annual International Conference on Health Informatics, Portugal, February 2012, received the Best Student Paper Award. This is a prestigious and competitive conference with a 9% full-paper acceptance ratio.

• His paper titled “Predicting Flu Trends using Twitter Data” at the International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Networking Systems (CPNS) 2011, in conjunction with IEEE INFOCOM 2011, held in Shanghai, China, April 10–15, 2011, is considered to be a foundational research for flu tracking with OSN data and has received many citations.

• The paper titled “A Spatio-Temporal Approach to the Discovery of Online Social Trends” at the fifth Annual International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications (COCOA), Zhangjiajie, China in August 2011 provides insights into using online social network data to discover trends in other domains. 

• Also “Vision: Towards Real Time Epidemic Vigilance through Online Social Networks” was his first ACM Workshop paper at Mobile Cloud Computing & Services: Social Networks and Beyond (MCS), in conjunction with ACM MobiSys, San Francisco, California, June 2010, that explains the SNEFT architecture for flu tracking and pandemic outburst detection using online social network data.

Dr. Achrekar’s committee included Cindy Chen (Computer Science), Georges Grinstein (Computer Science), Yan Luo (Electrical and Computer Engineering), and Jie Wang (Computer Science).

• Jeremy Poulin’s Data Walk App, which “records GPS coordinates once every ten seconds and pushes it to iSENSE.”
  

• Evana Gizzi’s Toxic Tour App, which “facilitates data collection regarding environmental conditioning and uploads this information to the iSENSE website.”

• Michael Stowell’s Car Ramp Physics App, which “records y-accelerometer data at a rate of 20 Hz and upload it to iSENSE” for classroom physics experiments.

Full abstracts for the students’ posters are on the NEUCS site.

NEUCS provides students with the opportunity to explore diverse areas in computer science, network, and embrace a creative environment of math and science. UMass Lowell plans to continue its participation in the years to come.

• Elizabeth Wu, a junior at AMSA Charter School (Marlborough, MA)
  

• Ramya Ravindrababu, a junior at Shrewsbury Senior High (Shrewsbury, MA)
  

• Serena Thomas, a junior at Bay Path Regional Vocational Technical High School (North Brookfield, MA)
  

We offer all three students our congratulations on their achievements, and we wish them the best in their future careers!

(L-R): Elizabeth Wu, Ramya Ravindrababu, Serana Thomas, and Prof. Jesse Heines.

• A mobile publishing platform which took existing RSS feeds (or other feed types) and generated a mobile-friendly rendering of it which can be customized by publishers was presented.

• A visualization tool showing the sharing of links through the Google Plus social network was demonstrated.

• A talk on search quality and features highlighted a few subtle search parsing tricks (like “picture of sunset” vs. “picture of dorian gray”), and live visual iterative refinement of search results.

• A “symtom search” feature for detecting when a user is searching for a disease was discussed. The speaker related a story about when he was observing live Google search logs of a person searching for “chest pain,” then “chest pain right arm,” which are the characteristic symptoms of a heart attack. He said that the experience humbled him, and gave him a strong sense of responsibility for his product.

• The SPDY protocol, which optimizes many aspects of HTTP, was presented.  SPDY is in production use in Google Chrome and Firefox, and is being proposed as the new HTTP2 standard.
  

• The YouMath team produced a fun sports game that teaches kids math skills with different difficulty levels.

• ThumbsUp took a different approach educating kids by creating a series of mini-games that tests math, logic, and memory skills.

• The ParentGuard team aimed to help parents block certain apps on their kids’ devices, so they can ban age-inappropriate apps and won’t get surprising bills.

• Tractivity team went after the goal of encouraging people to be more physically active by developing an algorithm to monitor the number of steps the user has taken (leveraging the built-in accelerometer) and integrating incentives, such as virtual walks.

I learned that they had gone home and introduced themselves to trigonometry by searching the web. ... These students had taken responsibility for their learning, and became self-directed problem solvers. They had taken a subject disliked by most students and [...] learned the essence of an important math concept. ... They were motivated by their own problem, a problem within a context about which they cared, the game they were making.

Video games were programmed in MIT Scratch and Game Maker. In this Scratch program snippet, a student has used knowledge of X and Y coordinate axes, and positive and negative numbers, to program a game character to move up, down, left, or right, in response to arrow key presses.


“Haunted Mansion,” a student-created game in response to the maze challenge. Student games had to have a “hero” character which moved using the arrow keys, and at least two “good” and two “bad” non-player characters (NPCs). When the hero struck a good NPC, its number of lives had to increase, and when it collided with a bad NPC, it would lose a life. When all lives were lost, the game had to end.