The computer science department hosted the eighth annual Dartmouth Computer Science Research Symposium in the basement of Moore Hall on Sept. 21. The symposium exhibited faculty and graduate student research in the form of talks and poster sessions.
Keynote speaker Javed Aslam, a computer and information science professor at Northeastern University, opened the event with a discussion of vehicular sensor networks. Using data collected from 16,000 taxis and over 12,000 loop detectors in Singapore, Aslam discerned general traffic and mobility patterns.
This data could be helpful to urban planners in areas that experience similar levels of vehicular traffic.
Computer science major Shuyang Fang '14 said he enjoyed seeing the application of computer science knowledge to traffic data.
"You can infer a lot of things that wouldn't be readily apparent," Fang said.
Another talk discussed the potential implications of Dartmouth's 10-week term. Computer science professor Andrew Campbell spoke about correlations between the demands of the term and lower levels of sleep and activity among students.
Campbell said faculty members frequently have little idea of the impact that a heavy workload can have on mood, stress levels and physical and mental health.
"The term feels like a sprint," he said. "They go into this tunnel called a term and they come out the other end."
The study was conducted using 60 students from Campbell's spring programming class, from whom Campbell collected entry and exit surveys, experience sampling, smartphone sensory data and an online discussion forum.
While Campbell was unable to definitively establish the existence of a "Dartmouth biorhythm", he found several interesting correlations in the course of the study. Higher stress levels correlated with higher depression levels, while activity levels decreased as the term progressed, and students began to sleep and exercise less.
The symposium concluded with a dinner in Occom Commons, where prizes for the best talk and best poster were awarded.
Graduate student Rebecca Shapiro won first place in the talks category for "Weird Machines' in ELF: A Spotlight on the Underappreciated Metadata" and first-year PhD student Mohammad Baig won for his poster on the estimation of depth in a single RGB image.
The annual symposium exposes faculty and students to the depth of computer science research at the College, department chair Tom Cormen said.
"They gain a sense of excitement about the research going on in the department," he said, adding that the symposium affords his colleagues the rare opportunity to learn about and evaluate each other's work.
Jonathan Denning, a graduate student and one of the event's organizers, said he hopes the symposium will continue to act as a resource that fosters discussions and future research topics.
"We are a fairly large department in terms of the number of graduate students, so the [symposium] has become a quite important venue for staying current with ongoing work," Denning said in an email.
Fang said he wished that the audience, primarily composed of faculty and graduate students, had been larger.
"I hope next year there will be more undergraduates," Fang said. "They definitely advertised it to majors, but maybe should have advertised to main campus more."
Approximately 60 individuals attended the event.
Fang said the symposium highlighted important findings in a field where the research process is usually slow and gradual.
"There's a lot of work that goes into just finding something new, something novel," he said. "It's the incremental changes that pave the way for a breakthrough."
