Computer Science Students "Break Ground"

Three members of Hamilton's computer science department have spent their summer researching ways to make computer programming an easier task for their colleagues.

On Wednesday, July 24, Julie Parent '03 presented her research to a group of more than 40 summer science researches and faculty at Hamilton. Parent, a recipient of a grant from the Ralph E. Hansmann Summer Science Student Fund, is working on a project with Computer Science Professor Mark Bailey titled "Automatic Derivation of Microprocessor Scheduler Constraints."

Parent's research is aimed at writing software that can systematically test the hardware it is running on and discover the hardware's properties. Presently software engineers must manually write instruction schedulers (software that enables programs to run optimally on different computer processors) each time a computer chip's architecture is revised. Writing software to automate this process will allow new computer chips to reach consumers more quickly and function reliably faster.

Doing independent research is like going on treasure hunt. I know what I'm after and I get to find the series of steps that will take me there," said Parent.

For Parent, who graduated third in her high school class in Lebanon, New Hampshire, summer research at Hamilton is one of the steps that will help her reach her ultimate post-graduate goal of becoming a computer science professor.

Fellow Hansmann Summer Science Grant Recipient Eric Hansen '03 presented research he is conducting with Geoff Catto '03 at the luncheon as well.

In a world of many languages Hansen and Catto are hoping to bridge semantic environments though visual representations. The two have been working on LIVE (Language Independant Visualization Environment) a tool that allows data structures to be extracted from any parsed programming language, visually displayed and returned to code in any other programming language.

Hansen and Catto have focused on making LIVE language and platform independent. Running in the JAVA environment, they have designed their software to be used by programmers in all languages and on all platforms to visualize all types of data structures. Such visualization will allow for better programming and easier debugging of the software programmers write.

While programs for representing data structures have been developed before, Catto said that theirs is the first attempt at writing such a universally applicable tool.

Hansen and Catto have been conducting their research under the guidance of Computer Science Professor Alistair Campbell.