Department Facts

Key Allegheny Benefits

• Ability to analyze ideas, to think logically, and to communicate ideas clearly and concisely.
• Understanding of the capabilities, limitations, and ramifications of computing and current research and development in the discipline.
• Preparation for graduate study and/or entry into the profession.
• Programs facilitate students' adaptation to changes in hardware/software technology and to new application areas.
• State-of-the-art equipment and research activity.
• Opportunity to contribute to current research and development in the discipline.

Allegheny Distinctions

• One of the first computer science programs offered at a small liberal arts college.
• Two distinct major programs: computer science and applied computing.
• Emphasis on disciplinary breadth, as opposed to a narrow focus on programming skills.
• Intellectual inquiry and research encouraged through faculty-student interaction and supervised Senior Project.
• The Department has been a pioneer in undergraduate computer science education, playing a key role in the development of "A Model Curriculum for a Liberal Arts Degree in Computer Science" and "A Revised Model Curriculum for a Liberal Arts Degree in Computer Science" published in CACM, 1986, 1996.
• Team-taught Junior Seminar emphasizing research methods in computer science.
• One of the highest percentages of women graduates of all colleges in the Liberal Arts Computer Science Consortium.
• Integrated laboratory component: the Department was among the first to implement labs in introductory, core and advanced courses.
• Small classes, individual attention, and close student-faculty working relationships.
• Consistently one of the most active student chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the professional association in computing.

Endorsements

• Consistently high percentage of Allegheny computer science students continue their studies at the graduate level.
• " The Chronicle of Higher Education calls the productivity of Allegheny's computer programs 'staggering' given the institution's size." - Fiske's Guide to Colleges

Facilities' Strengths

• Computer laboratory in the department includes (in addition to faculty machines):
  • 14 Sun workstations
  • IBM PC compatibles and other work-stations
• Departmental library
• Parallel computing research laboratory featuring a Sun SPARCStation IPX with 32 processor network of transputers.

Student Research

The team-taught Junior Seminar provides a solid introduction to research techniques appropriate to computer science. After reading and reporting on existing research literature, students learn how to discover, isolate, and describe research problems in computing and to write, present, and defend proposals to explore that problem. This is excellent preparation for the Senior Project. The Senior Project or 'Comp' is a significant piece of original work, designed by the student and a faculty advisor, which demonstrates the ability to work independently, to analyze and synthesize information, to complete a major assignment, and to write and speak persuasively. In computer science, students draw on the experience of the Junior Seminar and apply research techniques to an area of computer science in which they are particularly interested.

Recent Senior Projects

Some recent Senior Project titles indicate the level at which independent research is conducted by Allegheny's computer science students:

• "Distributed Systems: Process Migration for Increased Efficiency"
• "Automatic Parallelization of Sequential Programs"
• "Java Remote Method Invocation & The Common Object Request Broker Architecture: A Comparison"
• "Dynamic Genetic Operators and Local Optimum Escape"
• " Maintaining Integrity Constraints in a Multidatabase System"
• "Meta-Rules and Conflict Resolution Strategies Within Expert Systems"
• "The Use of Pattern Matching Algorithms to Analyze DNA with the LINDA Software Tools"
• "AlleGO: A Palm-Based Information Distribution System"
• "Improving Web Latency with Prefetching of HTML Documents and Data"
• "Steady State Versus Generational Genetic Algorithms: A Comparison in Performance for Two Graph Theoretic Problems"
• "Passing Object Behavior Using Java RMI, CORBA, and the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol"
• "An Object-Oriented Model for a Simple Distributed File System"