Game Jam is a month-long video game-making competition hosted by ACM. This semester's theme was Unsung Heroes. Students will present their games to a panel of ACM guest speakers and professors, judged across several categories. Refreshments will be provided. 

Date: December 5, 2024

Time: 6:30 - 8:00 p.m.

Location: Savitz Hall, Room 341

Questions? Please join discord for more information at Discord

Speaker: Craig Porter (Former FBI and Senior Account Executive at Opentext)

Topic: Craig Porter will pass on knowledge about how students can get started in their Cybersecurity and Digital Forensic careers. Along with this, he will be discussing previous experiences and cases he was involved within the Digital Forensics/Cyber Crime world of US Federal Law Enforcement, along with some war stories, lessons learned and Q&A.

Date: December 6, 2024

Time: 12:30 -  2:30 p.m.

Location: Business Hall, Room 225

Who: Open to all students and faculty 

Questions? Please contact Coby Totland at Discord

As many Rowan students may know, the Makerspace is a place for Computer Science students to unwind and get some hands-on experience with real machines. Last month, the Makerspace hosted a special event to kick off the spring semester. The meeting was held on Friday, February 4th in Room 201 of Robinson Hall.

The event focused on the use of Raspberry Pi computers, for the purpose of developing a game. In this article, you can find a brief overview of the event, as well as what the plan is for the Raspberry Pi game moving forward.

ProfHacks is an annual Hackathon hosted by Rowan's IEEE club. Teams compete to create interesting software and/or hardware projects over the course of a 24-hour period. This event often draws teams from universities around the Philadelphia region. This year’s CS team was composed of Steven Jiang, Alex Lam, and Matthew Schofield. They won first place and each team member received a Quad-Copter drone.

Their idea was to use machine learning to generate interesting works of art. The team utilized a pre-trained style transfer network based on the Magenta model to style public domain images of animals coupled with public domain artwork. They extended this by incorporating an instance segmentation model based on the U-Net model to transfer the animal between styled scenes. This creates an interesting visual crossover effect as seen in the bottom right of output images. Congratulations to Steven, Alex and Matthew!!

The Department of Computer Science at Rowan University has been awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) program.

Our first recipient of the GAANN Award is Cameron Thatcher.  He will receive full coverage of tuition and fees, an annual stipend of up to $34,000, and funding for research equipment, travel expenses and books. Congratulations Cameron!

There are at least 2 positions starting in the fall. Applications for Fall 2020 are accepted from April 1st - June 1st, 2020

On Saturday, November 9, 2019, Rowan University’s Computer Science department sent three teams of three programmers to compete in the International Collegiate Programming Contest. The teams, Rowan Silver, Purple, and Green, headed by Professor Darren Provine and Dr. Nancy Tinkham, traveled to Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland to compete in a regional competition. At the end of the day, Rowan Green, composed of Brian Chesko, Joseph Leclerq, and Marcus Penate, made it out as site champions. For their efforts, they were awarded a plaque for first place.

Every year, the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) holds a contest for college students worldwide to see who can solve the most real-world problems. Teams are composed of three students representing their university to compete at their regionals. If a team solves the most problems the fastest, they win the site that they attended. To learn more about the competition, see past/future competitions, visit their website here. If this seems appealing to you and you want to get involved, you can email Professor Darren Provine at kilroy@rowan.edu or Dr. Nancy Tinkham at nlt@rowan.edu.

Recently, our department was happy to host another speaker event, this time exclusively featuring our partners over at Lockheed Martin. Hosted on November 3rd, this was a wonderful opportunity for students to learn about working at one of the biggest weapon contractors in the country. Students learned the ins and outs of the company from daily routines, work life balance, internships, and opportunities to move up and around the corporation.

To learn more, click here. 

The CS department had the lucky opportunity to host several speakers from the military last Thursday, for the biggest speaker event of the semester so far! Hosted in the student center, students got the opportunity to talk with a brilliant software engineer at Lockheed Martin, and the bright minds over at the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC).

To learn more, click here.

2/28 @5pm via Webex
Mike Berenato
ASRC Federal Mission Solutions (AFMS)

Lecture Abstract:

The Aegis System is a centralized, automated, command-and-control (C2), radar and weapons system whose unique requirements dictate a real-time operating environment. As a result, the tactical applications that comprise the system are validated against a set of functional and performance requirements. This talk will address some of the issues faced and techniques employed by the ASRC Federal Mission Solutions software development team to ensure our delivered capabilities meet those requirements. Topics covered:

1. The “cornerstones” of Aegis System performance
2. Core Resource Monitoring (CPU, Memory, Storage, Network)
3. Collection Techniques and Tools
4. The Value of Instrumentation
5. Tuning the Operating System for Determinism

Speaker Bio:

Mike Berenato is a Solutions Architect with ASRC Federal Mission Solutions (AFMS) in Moorestown, NJ. He participates in engineering, development, and support activities for the U.S. Navy’s Aegis Weapons System. Mike has 40 years of diverse software experience on Aegis as well as other AFMS projects. He holds a BBA in Computer Information Sciences from Temple University and a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Villanova University.

Link:

https://rowan.webex.com/rowan/j.php?MTID=m0a538e2e83e48a57d8b23e683deebd43

Thursday, March 26 @ 6:30 pm in Wetsby 111- Performance Engineering by Mike Berenato & Justin Read of AFMS

The talk will discuss the following:

o   Provide an understanding of why Performance Engineering is needed

o   Introduce Performance Engineering concepts

o   Discuss how we apply these concepts to ensure that we meet our performance requirements

o   Provide practical examples of how we tune our core resources: CPU, Memory, Storage and Network

On Friday, February 28th, 2020 and Friday, March 13th, 2020, there will be an Information Session for various Student Funding Opportunities. These opportunities include: Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN), NFS SFS, and Teaching Fellows. The time of the sessions will be at 2:00pm room theses sessions are occuring in are to be determined, so keep an eye out if you are intereseted in learning more.

Thursday, February 27, 2020 in Westby 111 - Next Generation APIs with GraphQL by Chris Mathews, Executive Director, Distinguished Engineer and Kung Fu Coder at JP Morgan

GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data created originally at Facebook. GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more, makes it easier to evolve APIs over time, and enables powerful developer tools. Join us to learn about GraphQL and how it is being used to deliver the Next Generation of APIs.

Thursday, February 6 @ 6:30 pm in Westby 111 – Agile Software Engineering, by Kim Davis of AFMS

Fundamentals of Agile Software Development will provide students with an understanding of the principles of Agile and the various ways it can be implemented and executed.   This overview will cover the following areas to allow the audience to understand the importance of the fundamentals. 

• How Agile is different from Waterfall
• Key terminology and roles
• Process Overview & Techniques
• Fundamental driven exercises

Thursday, November 7 @ 6:30 pm in Westby 111 – Configuration Management and Technical Debt, by Doug Taggart of Lockheed Martin

This seminar will cover topics ranging from configuration management and continuous integration to static code analysis and technical debt tracking. To many software development ends with the final commit or check-in, usually followed by a brief moment of satisfaction and self-congratulation. But to others this is only a temporary hiatus before the next stage of the software development process begins: configuration management, and software quality assurance. A process normally shunned by most software engineers, CM and SQA play a vital role in the delivery of a polished software product and is a cornerstone for most companies in the aerospace and defense sector. For many customers testing alone is not the only requirement needed to guarantee the quality of a deliverable.

Thursday, October 24 @ 6:30 pm in Westby 111 – Secure Coding, by Joseph Patarcity of LM-RMS

Secure Coding is writing computer software with the perspective of security. Defects, bugs and logic flaws are the traditional source of exploitable vulnerabilities. In an internet-of-things age, it is important now more than ever to consider the security implications of the code we write on a day to day basis. We will review key terms, notable exploits and their consequences, and look at C/C++ examples of commonly exploited defects, bugs and logic flaws, providing the perspective needed for secure coding.

The goal of this presentation is to inform students of the concept of test-driven development (TDD), its benefits, applications, and pertinence to object oriented software development. Concepts to be discussed include the TDD cycle, as well as TDD styles, TDD practices, and tools for implementing TDD concepts. Following the presentation, the floor will be open for a Q&A session where students can raise questions or thoughts for further discussion with the presenters.

May 1st, 2019-11am - 12pm Robinson 330A

Click HERE for more information

The following is a list of upcoming talks. Please make efforts to attend these talks as they will provide you with opportunities to establish contacts with potential employers as well as to learn about the kind of things that some large companies such as JP Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, and ASRC Federal Mission Solutions are doing or care about.

April 10th, 1 pm- 2 pm CS Conference Room

We have invited out an industry professional from ASRC Federal.  Please take this opportunity to network with an industry professional regarding the Cyber Security Field or to learn more about the various duties within! We will have pizza and drinks for those who attend! Hope to see as many of you there as possible!

April 10th, 2019-11am - 12pm Robinson 330A

Click HERE for more information