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Computer science students demonstrate research on anomaly detection at the SURP poster session

Even during the summer, Rowan’s students in the Computer Science Department are hard at work. Nowhere is that clearer than with the SURP Program. Through the SURP Program, students have conducted research on various topics over the course of several weeks during the summer. On July 21, students had the opportunity to demonstrate the culmination of their work at the Poster Session. It was at this Poster Session that some of the brilliant minds at Rowan got to show off their research and discuss it with visitors. This article will provide a spotlight on some of the Computer Science projects that were present at this event.

Two of the projects in question were on the subject of anomaly detection. At the Poster Session, Owen Anderson and Nirav Patel both shared their individual takes on this research topic. In short, an anomaly is essentially any data point that stands out as unusual, though the implications vary depending on what you’re measuring. It’s important to know when something like that happens so that the problem can be addressed as soon as possible. This is what the research conducted by Owen and Nirav seeks to accomplish, as they developed and tested a system that can help detect these anomalies.

Read more about what CS students were up to at SURP here...

Computer science student creates community for empowering female students and professionals in STEM

Talia Tomarchio, along with some friends, has developed a competitor to websites like Chegg and LinkedIn to give women in STEM access to knowledge and resources to further their careers. Steminist Squad is creating a community for female students and professionals in STEM to aid them and give them resources to become more successful. Steminist Squad was launched around September and currently has 70 members.

Talia went through the Rowan IDEA Challenge last year and KPMG’s Ideation Challenge in January where she learned foundational business skills. Winning the IDEA Challenge gave Talia hope that her small Summer project will grow into a successful nonprofit that will help young women all across the country, and she is planning on reaching out to other schools outside of Rowan.

In the next year, Talia hopes to get at least 20 partnerships with other universities, have a national all women stem conference in five years. She is currently working on creating a data model of a “model student” (pun intended) to identify the relevant gaps in industry prep by analyzing the success of Steminst Squad members over time, and hopefully this data model can be combined with industry and academia input to create the most efficient and successful “model”. This will be able to predict trends and pivot how we prepare young women for stem careers.

When asked how her education and experience at Rowan aided her in the process of creating Steminist Squad, she stated that a lot of it couldn’t be done without her professor’s support. If she hadn’t experienced the hands-on environment at Rowan, Talia believes she wouldn’t have known or been prepared to take the steps to start the project. She says, “being in school isn’t just textbooks, it's about being open to opportunities to grow and create and find a support system for big career goals.”

Read more about Talia and the Steminist Squad here...

Posted 2020.04.05

Rowan Computer Science students win Hackathon!

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!!

Posted 2021.04.14

GAANN Award

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
Read more about the award HERE.

Posted 2020.01.30