Penn State Harrisburg Seminar Series

You are invited to the talk "Introduction to the Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control," to be given by Dr. Ilya Shvartsman, Associate Professor of Mathematics.  The talk will be held on Wednesday, March 19th from 12 noon - 1:30 pm in the Gallery Lounge, Olmsted Building.

Academic Perspectives on Current Events: Cybersecurity

Penn State Harrisburg will host an Academic Perspectives on Current Events discussion on cybersecurity on Wednesday, March 5, from noon to 1:30 p.m. in the Olmsted Building Gallery Lounge. The event is moderated by Dr. Jeremy Blum, associate professor of computer science.  Panelists include:

• Dr. Linda Null, associate professor of computer science
• Gregory Madden, associate director of information technology services
• Russell Houseknecht, III, digital forensics examiner, Pennsylvania State Police and adjunct professor, Penn State Harrisburg

The event is free and open to faculty, staff, students, and the public.  For more information, please contact Anton Mulder at aum28@psu.edu. 

Blum research paper selected among decade’s top ten in the IEEE ITS Journal

From the Penn State Harrisburg News Release:

A research paper by Dr. Jeremy Blum, associate professor of computer science, was recently selected as a Top 10 Research Paper from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE )Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for the decade from 2000-2009.

The paper, “Challenges of Intervehicle Ad Hoc Networks," was co-authored by Dr. Lance Hoffman and Dr. Azim Eskandarian, and detailed the security and scalability challenges faced by wireless vehicle-to-vehicle networks.

The IEEE Intelligent Transportation System Society appointed a group of experts to select the best papers from 2000-2009, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the transactions, which are the official journals of the IEEITS Society. Statistical and social network analysis were used to choose the papers with the highest impact that were published in the transactions.  The results were announced in the September 2013.

“I am very honored and humbled to have had our paper selected for this honor,” said Dr. Blum, “especially out of the many that have been published in the transactions over this decade.” 

Link to the Announcement in the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Penn State Harrisburg Team Programming Team Places 120th in the World (out of 1838) and 17th in the USA (out of 251)

The IEEEXtreme 7.0 Programming Contest is 24-hour programming contest, which was held on October 26, 2013.  More than 1,800 teams competed in this worldwide contest, including more than 250 teams from the United States. 

The official results, which were just released, show that the Penn State Harrisburg team of Austin Barket, Isaac Polinsky, and Siddharth Dahiya placed 120th in the world, and 17th in the USA.  Congratulations!

Penn State Harrisburg teams have competed in the IEEEXtreme contest for the previous three years.  This year, Penn State Harrisburg fielded thirteen teams, each comprised of three undergraduate or graduate students.

The official results for the IEEEXtreme contest can be viewed at:http://www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/students/competitions/xtreme/index.html

In addition to hearty congratulations for all of the participants, we would also like to thank the proctors:  Prof. Julie Lobur, Dr. Omar El Ariss, and Dr. Jeremy Blum.

Robotics Competition Sponsored by Penn State Harrisburg and HACC is featured in the Patriot News

The South Central PA Robotics Competition was covered in the Patriot News.  Thank you to the Computer Science students, who served as mentors and judges for the competition, including Christopher Cope, Siddharth Dahiya, Tyler Derr, Kevin Joseph, Viplav Patel, and Isaac Polinsky.

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/11/results_are_in_for_todays_sout.html

For more information about the contest, please see the contest website.

Penn State Harrisburg Students Mentor Local High School Students for Robotics Competition

Penn State CS students Tyler Derr and Siddharth Dahiya are mentoring Middletown Area High School (MAHS) students in preparation for the upcoming South Central Pennsylvania Robotics Competition. As described in the MAHS blog post below, this competition is sponsored by Penn State Harrisburg, HACC, and local high schools. The event has also received support from the IEEE and local industry.

Robots Invade MAHS

More information about the Robotics Competition can be found on the competition website.

IEEEXtreme 7.0

From 8 pm October 25th through 8 pm October 26th, teams from Penn State Harrisburg competed in the IEEEXtreme 7.0, a 24-hour programming contest.  The Penn State Harrisburg teams included 39 students in 13 teams, who competed against almost 1700 teams in this global competition.

Photos from the competition can be viewed on the PSH Math and Computer Science Facebook page.

Career Development Workshop Recap

On October 4, the ACM Student Chapter at Penn State Harrisburg organized a Career Development Workshop. Four recent graduates shared their experiences with the job search and interviewing process. The presenters were Nazia Latif from Intel, Mandeep Singh from Microsoft, Ben Leto with IBM, and Peter Okosun from Intel.

Pictures from the event are available on the PSH Math & Computer Science Facebook Page.

Fun with Fibonacci: Using Matrices to Prove Identities for Recurrent Sequences

You are invited to the following talk presented by the Penn State Harrisburg Math Club:

Speaker:  Dr. James Sellers 

When/Where:  W338 Olmstead 4:30 pm October 1, 2013

About the talk:

"In this talk, we will return to one of my favorite topics - Fibonacci numbers. We will "discover" a number of identities which are satisfied by the Fibonacci numbers, and then we will look at an extremely effective way of proving many such results using elementary facts we know about matrices. The talk will be completely self-contained and accessible to anyone interested in mathematics.”

About Dr James Sellers:

Dr Sellers is a Professor and the Associate Head for Undergraduate Mathematics at Penn State University at University Park. He has contributed to well over 75 mathematical publications in years past. 

Open to campus community. Funded by SAF.

Food will be provided.

Questions? Contact Alex Milbrand at anm5469 (AT) psu (DOT) edu

Game Development Workshop

The ACM Student Chapter at Penn State Harrisburg is holding a Game Development Workshop, open to all.  The workshop will be held on Friday, September 27 from 5-8pm.  The workshop is open to anyone 18 or over, and there is no cost to attend, but preregistration is required.  More details can be found at the website:

http://psh.acm.org/activities/game-development-workshop

Capital Region Internship Fair

Meet with representatives from over 85 Central Pennsylvania organizations!

Check out hundreds of opportunities for Spring and Summer!
Distribute your resume to prospective employers!

Date:  Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Time:  10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Location:  Capital Union Building, Penn State Harrisburg

For more information, see www.messiah.edu/crif

Check the web often – Employer list updated frequently!

Vint Cerf Talk on "Reinventing the Internet"

Vint Cerf, one of the "fathers of the Internet," will be addressing the DC Chapter of the ACM on Monday, May 13th at 6:30 pm.  His talk is entitled "Reinventing the Internet."  The talk will be held at Google DC at 1101 New York Ave NW at 6:30 pm.  If you are interested in attending, you will need to preregister at:

http://meetup.dcacm.org/events/106916812/?eventId=106916812&action=detail

Also, if you are interested in attending if a carpool can be arranged, let Dr. Blum know.  He will be helping to organize transportation.

Math and Computer Science Students Honored at Student Awards Ceremoney

Congratulations to math and computer science students who were honored at the 2013 Student Awards Ceremony on April 19, 2013.  Mark Romanak received the Computer Science Outstanding Student Award.  Beverly Brown received the Mathematics Outstanding Student Award.

Math and Computer Science Students Win First Place in the Undergraduate Research Exhibition

Congratulations also to Siddharth Dahiya and Tyler Brown.  Their poster at the annual Penn State Harrisburg Undergraduate Research Exhibition won first place in the physical sciences category.  Their poster was titled "Mapping Through the Elements" and was about the project they began last spring with Joseph Roberge. Alexandra Milbrand and Viplav Patel also worked on the project.

Penn State Harrisburg Students Present at Talks at EPaDel Spring 2013 Meeting

Congratulations to Alexandra Milbrand and Tyler Derr who both gave talks at the spring meeting of the EPaDel section of the Mathematical Association of America, on April 6th, 2013. 

Alex's talk was titled, "Truncated Pyramid: A Problem from the Moscow Papyrus."

Tyler's was "Archimedes and his Approximation of the Square Root of 3."

For speaking at the meeting, each was given a one year membership to the MAA.