Computer Science majors Caleb Highsmith ’24, Alejandro Medina ’24, Travis Rafferty ’24, and Noah Zamarripa ’24 presented a poster on “SNITCH: Southwestern’s Newest Innovation to Cultivate Honor” which earned 3rd place at the 34th Annual Conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges: South Central Region on April 5 in Nacogdoches, TX. Their work, done in Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony’s capstone course, develops a web-based tool allowing a person to upload assignments and make judgments about the likelihood of the result having been generated by AI, with machine learning models that are constantly being evaluated and are automatically configured based on their performance. Travis also presented a poster on “Using Multi-Objective Quality Diversity to Evolve Complex Machines in Minecraft” that was joint work with Joanna Lewis ’24 done through a SCOPE project with Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum attended the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, from July 15-19 with his former SCOPE students, Melanie Richey ’23 and Mark Mueller ’24. Melanie and Mark jointly presented their paper, “Evolving Flying Machines in Minecraft Using Quality Diversity,” co-authored with Dr. Schrum and fellow student Alejandro Medina ’24, based on their SCOPE research experience in Summer 2022.

Students Alejandro Medina ’24, Melanie Richey ’23, and Mark Mueller ’24 attended the South Central Regional Conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges at Stephen F. Austin State University to present two research posters based on their SCOPE 2022 summer research with Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum. The poster “Using Quality Diversity to Evolve Flying Machines in Minecraft” describes the use of artificial intelligence to generate flying machines in Minecraft and won 3rd place in the Student Poster Competition. The poster “Interactive Evolution of Novel Shapes in Minecraft” described an interactive system for automatically generating large artistic structures in Minecraft and received Honorable Mention.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum served as associate editor of a Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Games on the topic of Evolutionary Computation for Games. Schrum worked with several external editors on the issue, which is being published in March 2023. These fellow editors were also co-authors with Schrum on a Guest Editorial for the issue. The issue also contains a peer-reviewed contribution from Schrum, external collaborators, and some of Schrum’s former SCOPE students, Kirby Steckel ’21 and Benjamin Capps ’22. The article “Hybrid Encoding for Generating Large Scale Game Level Patterns with Local Variations” was already available via Early Access on IEEE Xplore but has now been officially published.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum and the Texas Alpha chapter of Alpha Chi National College Honor Society were awarded the prestigious designation of Notable Chapter for the 2021–2022 academic year. This award acknowledges Schrum and Texas Alpha’s high level of involvement and Southwestern’s commitment to and support for Alpha Chi’s high academic standards and their mission to make scholarship effective for good. Schrum ensured that multiple benchmarks of exemplary chapter health were met and exceeded.