Computer Science Department

About 30 people joined us for our annual reunion get together in the Vertica Lounge, going all the way back to our first class of 1975. Click on the photo to go to a Picasa Album of photographs. If it doesn’t work due to Brandeis-Google interference, here is a link to the same album on Facebook.

Last semester we kicked off the first pilot of a Computer Science Industry Field Project with Adobe. We’re doing it again this semester, this time with another local company, Streambase.

Final Presentations at Adobe Offices, December 2014

Last month, the four students who ran the field project had the opportunity to present their projects to their counterparts at Adobe. There were two projects:

• A research project to learn the gaps in Adobe product offerings aimed at the educational space. More specifically, the students ran a series of focus groups and developed a series of product mockups around Adobe “PDF”, resulting in a report to Adobe about product usage, feature set and pricing around the family of Adobe “pdf” related products: Reader, Acrobat and Acrobat.net.
• A prototyping project to produce a totally alternative way of reading .pdf files on mobile devices. Instead of following the conventional approach where PDFs show up as miniature renderings of a full page, the objective was to provide more useful flexible rendering of the information with a focus on readability and best use of the small screen.

The feedback from Adobe to our students was very positive. Let’s just say that resumes were exchanged, and Adobe was eager to do another similar project with Brandeis students this semester!

Continue to read about the 2015 StreamBase Industry Field Project

Continue reading →

This event has been cancelled due to Brandeis Closing for Snow. We hope to reschedule it but do not yet have a date and venue.

On January 8 and 9, computer science professor Harry Mairson ran a workshop for a group of luthiers (string instrument makers) on using software he is developing for the design and historical analysis of instruments from the violin family.  His software is based on the extraordinary research and book of French luthier François Denis, “Traité de lutherie”, which explains the historical methods of design, founded on classical ideas from architecture and geometry in the tradition of Vitruvius, Alberti, and Palladio.  Denis’s text is a tour de force synthesis of practical lutherie with the history and philosophy of both science and art.

What if you were asked to allocate $16,000,000 among 7 student led projects? Ok, the money was funny, but we suspended disbelief!

On December 15, 2014 students of Cosi 165a – IT Entrepreneurship presented their projects to a panel of experts and an audience of classmates and others of the Brandeis community.

The course, taught by Pito Salas is based on the “Lean Startup” methodology focuses on “getting out of the building” to refine and validate product concepts and design growth models that can lead to sustainable businesses.

THE PROJECTS

The format of the day was that the students were given timed slots of 8 minutes to present as a team the basic business concept, product, user interface, business model and pricing for the ideas. 8 minutes seems like very little but similar pitch event in the industry often limit entrepreneurs to as little as 5 minutes!

And to keep it interesting, the judges were given $16,000,000 (in funny money) to invest in any of the projects that they deemed worthy. No further instructions were given: they could put it all in one, or give each project an equal chunk. They did neither.

Read past the break to see the projects and results. Continue reading →

On October 21, we held a Career Fair in conjunction with the Hiatt Center as well as an alumni networking event. We named David Litwack ’68 as our 2014 entrepreneur of the year.

David Litwack ’68 received his BA in Mathematics and worked as a software developer, an executive and a director at numerous companies. He is best known as the founder of Powersoft in 1989, which was acquired in 1995 by Sybase, in one of the largest high-tech mergers at that time.  He went on to found Silverstream Software in 1997, which was acquired by Novell in 2002. Mr. Litwack recently began an entirely new career as a speculative fiction author, and he has published three novels, well reviewed on Amazon.

On October 21st, we held a career fair for our students with about 30 high-tech companies, many who employ our alumni, and then in the evening presented our Computer Science Alumni Entrepreneur of the year award to David Litwack, ’68. Click on the picture for a picasa slideshow of the evening.

• “What is the future of documents?”
• “How would you disrupt Acrobat?”
• “If you were to start clean with Reader, what would it look like?”

Professor Harry Mairson has received two grants, one from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and one from the National Science foundation for his research on developing a programming language for describing the body shape of stringed instruments such as violins and cellos. He presented his work recently at the Violin Society of America.

This year’s summer Justice Brandeis Semester was about building voice enabled applications. On 8/7 five student groups presented their projects to a public audience in Olin Sang Auditorium.

B-improved will improve the quality of life on campus. With B-improved, any Brandeis student, faculty member or administrator can file an improvement and it will be recorded. With the speech feature, filing an improvement is quick and convenient. Then, facilities will review what needs fixing and take action. Members of the Brandeis community will have confidence that their voices are being heard.

Fridgebay is a website created to give students on various campuses a platform to buy and sell their items to other students on a simple, clean interface. As a part of our innovative interface, students can use our virtual speech assistant to navigate and browse our site. Our website has been created to be used on chrome browsers across all platforms using responsive web design and speech recognition native to the chrome browser.

Jeeves is a voice-powered personal assistant designed to help optimize your time by allowing you to listen to the news, email, or weather through a conversational dialogue. Jeeves is designed for “hands-busy, eyes-busy” environments. Forget about finding 20 minutes to shut yourself away to face your ever-increasing mountain of email. With Jeeves, simply listen to them on your morning commute!

The Rose Art Museum App (or RAMA) allows visitors of the Rose Art Museum an opportunity to learn more about the art and artists without disrupting the intended experience of a museum by seamlessly integrating speech commands to play audio. This ensures that the visitor is able to focus on the art!

YoWakeUp! is a social, interactive alarm clock which sends a text message to your friend when you snooze or miss an alarm. By alerting your friends, they can take action to ensure you wake up!!