The curriculum is designed to provide students entering the University without previous background in computing with the deep understanding of computing and critical thinking skills that will enable graduates to pursue careers in a wide variety of possible fields and to become academic and industrial leaders.
BACS Blog
With Digital Mapmaking, Scholars See History
The New York Times has an article [With Digital Mapmaking, Scholars See History, NY Times, 26 July 2011] on the use of Geographic Information Systems in history research.
Benjamin Ray, the director of the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive at the University of Virginia, said visualizing data helps you to analyze it. “The eye is a very good sorter of patterns,” he said. Mr. Ray had wondered why witchcraft charges spread so rapidly and widely in 1692 from Salem across 25 communities, whereas previous incidents had remained small and localized. When he plotted the accusations on a digital map that showed a progression over time, it struck him immediately: “It looked like a kind of epidemic, almost a disease.”
New Course Flowchart
There is an version of the BACS requirements and dependencies course flowchart available: [PDF, for printing]
BACS Alumna Profile – Sara Alspaugh
I’m hoping to post profiles of recent BACS alumni on this site. Sara Alspaugh (BACS 2009, now at Berkeley) was kind enough to be the first to be profiled!
I signed up for that first computer science course because I wanted to join the U.S. Foreign Service. As a Foreign Service Officer, you are assigned to a location abroad based on where you are needed. I believed having technical skills would improve my placement options. I was also driven by a niggling desire to understand how my laptop functioned, through and through, as well as the Internet. … [Continued]
If you are a BACS graduate and would like to be profiled for this site, please contact me.
2011 Graduates
The diploma ceremony for the Interdisciplinary Major in Computer Science will be Sunday, 22 May at 1pm (immediately following the lawn ceremony) in Gilmer 130.
Congratulations to our 2011 BACS Graduates!
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Daniel William Andrino
Erik Arvidson
Jason Timothy Baumgartner
Isaac Kofi Acheampong Bawuah
Brody Christopher Black
Austin Lammers Blanton
Casey Joe Bowling
Brielin Chase Brown
Highest Distinction
Nathan James Brunelle
William Ashton Butler
Michael Oxford Chen
Sheila Bernadette Christian
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Travis Hayden Cook
Andrew Benjamin Crute
Evan Wingfield Davis
Taylor Jane Deutsch
Rebecca Ann Edney
Ethan Joseph Fast
High Distinction
Brandon Jeffery Groves
Allison Kathryn Gurlitz
Justin Michael Holmes
Matthew James Kruszewski
Kiran Raj Kumar
Stephen Zi-Jing Lam
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Christopher Ting-Kuang Lee
Steven Antonio Massetti
Daniel James Mehler
Nicholas Stephen Modly
Ian Shire Nathan
Steven Norum
Amy Peng
Scott Landis Russell
David Allen Sawchak
Rebecca Kathryn Zapfel
Muzzammil Hussain Zaveri
Qihan Zhang
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Brielin Brown wins NSF Fellowship
Brielin Brown (BACS 2011 and Physics) was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship! This is a very prestigious national award that provides three years of funding for graduate work. Brielin will be pursuing a PhD in theoretical computer science at Stanford University.
NYT: Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science
John Markoff, Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science, New York Times, 25 April 2011.
The physical technology of scientific research is still here — the new electron microscopes, the telescopes, the particle colliders — but they are now inseparable from computing power, and it is the computers that let scientists find order and patterns in the raw information that the physical tools gather.
Computer power not only aids research, it defines the nature of that research: what can be studied, what new questions can be asked, and answered.
