Lord Chair and Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony attended the 21st International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering in Valencia, Spain, in September. She presented a paper co-authored with Mark Mueller ’24 on “Course scheduling made easier: A user-friendly web-based timetabling tool using PyGLPK,” which is available here. The article details how, using ideas from operations research, it is possible to develop an integer linear program capturing constraints on course schedules, use Python and PyGLPK to find a solution, and package that within a more user-friendly and publicly available web interface.

Lord Chair and Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony co-authored a paper, titled “New Bounds on the Performance of SBP for the Dial-a-Ride Problem with Revenues,” that was presented on September 5 at ATMOS 2024, the Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modeling, Optimization, and Systems. The paper, published in the Dagstuhl Open Access Series in Informatics, has co-authors Christine Chung of Connecticut College, Ananya Das of Middlebury College, and David Yuen.

Lord Chair and Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony co-authored a paper in the journal Optimization Methods and Software. “Maximizing the number of rides served for time-limited Dial-a-Ride” shows that for a particular variant of the offline Dial-a-Ride problem, no polynomial-time algorithm will serve the optimal number of requests, unless P = NP. It then describes k-Sequence, an approximation algorithm that repeatedly serves the fastest set of k remaining requests, and bounds its performance. The paper can be read here.

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.

Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony co-presented “BA versus BS Degrees in Computer Science” at the Innovations and Opportunities in Liberal Arts Computing Education-affiliated event at SIGCSE 2024, the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in Portland, OR. The working group considered the computer major requirements of 100+ liberal arts colleges, highlighting commonalities and differences in the BA and BS offerings as well as some of the implications for programs and students.