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By Bryan Hay LINK TO ARTICLE

“Engineer Jelissa Kamguem ’23 broke out of her comfort zone this summer, applying data-science skills to develop a software to help those leading virtual meetings”…

Motivated by her experience last semester in an Introduction to Engineering Design & Data Mining course taught by Christian López, assistant professor of computer science, Kamguem wanted to learn more about interactive technologies and pursued the program at Affectiva….

…Kamguem credits López for inspiring her to learn more about computer science and the value of data mining, skills that can apply to many disciplines. “After the course with Prof. López, I wanted to know more,” she says.

“Jelissa’s experience shows that if you get out of your comfort zone and put in the time and effort, you can achieve anything,” López says.

As high school seniors look to college in the fall, their minds are often full of questions: What will it be like to be away from home? What will the campus be like? How tough will my new professors be? Will I make new friends?

Incoming first-year and 2020 recipient of the Lafayette-Easton Scholarship Anna DiFelice already knows the answers.

“That class, Intro to Computer Science through Gaming, was what drew me to Lafayette because I saw how genuine the people and the professors are,”

See full article here

Computer science students create data visualizations to share critical information about COVID-19 (making COVID19 a unique learning opportunity)

Right after the transition to online classes this spring, Christian López, assistant professor of computer science, challenged students in his Introduction to Programming class to design simulations that illustrate the importance of social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19.

See Full article here

Christian López is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science with an affiliation in Mechanical Engineering at Lafayette College.  Christian is the Tapia 2020 Academic Workshops and Panels Co-Chair.   We spoke with Christian about his work and what he’s looking forward to in this year’s Tapia.

Full article here

By Bryan Hay (article here)

A multidisciplinary Lafayette duo has been collecting tweets related to the novel coronavirus pandemic to gather insights that may prove valuable to mitigate the outbreak and manage future pandemics.

Millions of tweets from around the world and in multiple languages—often several gigabytes a day of data—have been collected since Jan. 22, when total reported cases of COVID-19 stood at below 600. Tweets about the pandemic carry opinions, information, and misinformation, a reflection of how people are responding to the crisis, their altered lives, and official directives.

See dataset website

Honored and grateful to be part of this great Lafayette College community. Excited that my #VirtualReality research (2:24) and the cohort of new faculties are shown in this #HappyHolidays video (2:03)

Celebrating Rockwell @Lafayette’s News

Meet Our New Faculty @Lafayette’s News

What drew me to Lafayette

During my initial visits to Lafayette, the thing that impressed me the most was the student-faculty relationship. Coming out from a Big 10 university, I was thrilled to see how faculty have time to get to know students, what motivates them, and their passion, something that reminded me of my own undergraduate institution. Even now, I am impressed to see how alumni make the effort to visit Lafayette to see not only their alma mater but their old professors as well. Another big reason that drew me to Lafayette was the president’s strategic plan of growth, for which I am excited to contribute and work toward making this vision a reality….

We received the Virtual Environments & Systems committee’s Best Paper Award at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Computer Information & Engineering Conference, celebrated in Anaheim, CA August 18-21, 2019. We propose an artificial intelligence approach to generating content automatically for Virtual Reality (VR). The paper title “Reinforcement Learning Content Generation for Virtual Reality Applications” introduces a novel method that uses reinforcement learning to automatically generate new content for VR applications. Our method has a lot of implications for advancing VR educational applications since it could help reduce potential novelty effects and improve students’ engagement. This work was part of an NSF supported project that aims to leverage VR to help teach and connect the course knowledge of Industrial Engineering courses (CLICK project).  We also presented our work done on “Semantic Network Differences Across Engineering Design Communication Methods”.

Here are some pictures of the event: