Colloquium

New Professor Spotlight: Daniel Barowy

Dan Barowy is a PhD candidate in the PLASMA Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, supervised by Professor Emery Berger. His research interests are in new language abstractions, end user programming, and new debugging techniques, particularly for spreadsheets and with crowdsourcing. Daniel regularly collaborates with industry researchers, and has ongoing collaborations at Microsoft Research and IBM T.J. Watson.  His work has appeared at PL (PLDI and OOPSLA) and HCI (CHI) venues and was selected as a Research Highlight for the June 2016 issue of Communications of the ACM. Daniel’s work on FlashRelate was also awarded PLDI 2015’s top honor for software artifacts, the Distinguished Artifact Award.  Nearly all of Daniel’s research is available as open-source software (http://people.cs.umass.edu/~dbarowy). A little Q & A with Dan: How did you become interested in CS? Or in your area of study specifically? I've dabbled in programming as long as I can remember, but I did not find my way into CS until after college.  One of my hobbies at the time was brewing beer.  Like many homebrewers, I wanted to control every aspect of the process, and that required doing a lot of calculations.  I thought "a computer should be doing this," so I set out to write a program to handle the details for me.  But the program did not behave the way I expected.  To my horror, I found that when I added 0.1 and 0.2 on a computer, the result was not 0.3.  At some point, I discovered a paper titled "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg that explained the problem.  I had never considered before that the way one represents a number in a computer might affect the way you can use it.  After that I was hooked. Continue reading »

ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games

Prof. McGuire, Mike Mara ’12, and Jamie Lesser ’17 attended the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games in San Francisco this February of 2017. Prof. McGuire presented work on Light Field Probes with Mike Mara, Prof. Nowrouzezahrai  of McGill, and Dr. Luebke of NVIDIA that received the Best… Continue reading »

Grace Hopper Conference 2016

Williams College students and faculty attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing October 18-22, 2016. L to R: Prof. Jeannie Albrecht, Julia Goldman ’18, Miranda Chaiken ’19, Jamie Lesser ’17, Melanie Subbiah ’17, Prof. Andrea Danyluk, Emily Hoyt ’17, Stephanie Liu ’18, Anjali Pai ’19… Continue reading »