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.
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)
Making Virtual Reality Connections @ Lafayette’s News
By Bryan Hay
Imagine sipping coffee at Skillman Café, and, in an instant, you’re transported to Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the deepest part of the seas, back in time to see the rise of the Great Pyramids of Giza, or onto the floor of a manufacturing facility to test a new assembly process.
With virtual reality (VR) becoming more affordable and sophisticated, Christian Lopez, assistant professor of computer science, sees limitless possibilities for the technology to enhance students’ learning and engagement and apply it in the arts, humanities, sciences, and engineering..
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:
Earlier this month, I participated in the XV International Scientific Research Congress organized by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology of the Dominican Republic (DR). In this congress, there were more than 300 presentations given by researchers from over 20 countries. I had the honor to present as one of the 5 keynote speakers of the event, and discuss how Machine Learning and AI technologies are key elements of the 4th Industrial Revolution. I also presented our unsupervised machine learning method to cluster patients based on their genomic signatures.
During this trip, I met with multiple deans and department heads from universities in DR interested in developing innovative research in the area of ML and intelligent decision support systems. However, the most gratifying moment was to see all the students interested in learning about ML. Specifically, how to train and evaluate ML models during the workshop I gave at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.
Looking forward to next year (here are some pictures of the congress and the workshop).
Thanks to Penn State Engineering for the Best Paper Award at their Research Symposium, I got the chance to present some of my work on Gamification, Deep Generative models, and Machine Learning for personalized apps.
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