HomepageMathematics and Computer ScienceSpring Semester ’17 Round 1 of 350 Presentations

Spring Semester ’17 Round 1 of 350 Presentations

A variety of topic and industries are dicussed at this 350 presentation. Everything from cyberbulling, radiology, politics, education to quality assurance.
Jacob Bigelow

Detecting Cyberbullying Using Latent Semantic Indexing
Abstract: Cyberbullying has proven consequential to youth Internet users and previous methods relied heavily on the use of manually developed dictionaries. This project describes preliminary results for a system that uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for the detection of cyberbullying in a labeled collection of posts from Formspring.me. After preprocessing to account for variations in spelling and use of emoticons, a search system was developed. Our system significantly outperforms the baseline with a very simple query and is not dependent on a dictionary of bullying terms.

 


Thomas Carey
The Implications of High School Geometry
Abstract: This talk will address the strengths and weaknesses of high school Geometry. Paul Lockhart’s “A Mathematician’s Lament” challenged my perception of math education and more specifically high school math. This talk will challenge the current Math education system and focus specifically on Geometry. I student-taught for one semester at the Spring-Ford Area School District. Through this experience I developed unit and lesson plans on a daily basis, and I thoroughly expanded my understanding of math education. An unnecessary bureaucracy causes math education to be used as a tool which forces students to memorize definitions and formulas. Math should instead be used as a tool for students to develop their critical, creative, and logical thinking skills.


Jose Colon
A Day in the Life of a Radiological Worker
Abstract: This past summer, I was given the opportunity to work at Brookhaven National Laboratory as a radiological worker. Brookhaven is home to a 5265 acres campus where the motto is “Passion for Discovery”. For ten weeks, I was given the responsibility to survey various building on site to see if there was any radioactivity present. The process behind the survey is fairly tedious and involves a team of workers. Towards the end of my ten week period, I was assigned a short project to see whether dose rate correlates with on-site injuries. Throughout my ten weeks spend at the laboratory, I was not only able to use mathematics in a practical way (such as using conversations and statistical analysis provided by co-interns), I was able to increase my knowledge in areas outside as math as well i.e. material science, physics, etc.

Brian Kropilak
Going Beyond One’s Major and Growing
Abstract: This spring I interned with Democracy Matters as an organization branch manager. Democracy Matters is a non-partisan, non-profit political activist advocacy group. Although I am a Computer Science major, I have learned a great deal from my internship and the course modules offered by Ursinus. I have learned various skills and habits from that my internship that greatly add to my career opportunities. In my presentation I will detail how I progressed through my internship, the highlights of what I learned, and how my internship has helped me gain employment at another company.


Olivia Tierney
Quality Assurance Engineering Internship
Abstract: My job at Comcast involved working in the quality assurance department. I was assigned to a team that focuses on automating manual tests for video on demand through a software platform called Fitnesse. This platform allowed code to be imbedded in wiki pages to create verification tests. The focus of this project was to customize Fitnesse so that the entire quality assurance team could adopt the automated test process. My tasks included creating and organizing automation tests and managing memory on the team’s repository. I also worked with financial data to provide information to upper management on how to properly purpose the new budget.

 

Watch the presentations on our YouTube channel! 

 

Bigelow: 

 

 

Carey: 

 

 Colon: 

 

Kropilak: 

 

 

Tierney:

 

 

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