Faculty Research

Nancy Ide

The American National Corpus Project (ANC)
This project is a major activity funded by the National Science Foundation that is building a massive corpus of texts and spoken transcriptions of contemporary American English. All of the data are annotated with linguistic analyses of various kinds so that computational linguists can build language models to assist in machine understanding of human language.

The project is based at the Department of Computer Science at Vassar; Princeton University, Columbia University, and the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley are partners. As many as 8–10 Vassar students are involved in ANC research projects, ranging from computer and web programming to linguistic analysis, during both the academic year and the summer.

Jenny Walter

Hexsim
This project is funded under National Science Foundation grant IIS-0712911. The project involves the development and simulation of motion planning algorithms for a particular type of mobile robot: hexagonal metamorphic robots. We are currently working on the development of a complete, deterministic planner to reconfigure a system of these lattice-type robots from any initial shape to any final goal shape. The project will fund students for the academic year and/or summer months and provides funds for students to attend robotics conferences.

Marc Smith

The following two projects are interdisciplinary with Jodi Schwarz in Biology. Work began with students during URSI 2008, and continues. Students interested in working on new phases of these projects should contact me.

• AiptasiaBase
  AiptasiaBase is a database of annotated ESTs from the symbiotic sea anemone Aiptasia pallida.
• AiptasiaWiki
  The goal of AiptasiaWiki is to create a resource for building custom bioinformatics pipelines and storing the output as wiki pages. Users are able to upload scripts, tools, and datasets, and then chain them together to create pipelines.

Luke Hunsberger

Luke is currently collaborating with researchers from the University of Verona, Italy, on applications of temporal networks to the healthcare domain.

Undergraduate Research Summer Institute at Vassar College (URSI) Projects

Computer science faculty also participate in Vassar’s Undergraduate Research Summer Institute (URSI). This ten-week paid internship program matches students who have an interest in pursuing research with Vassar science faculty mentors. A total of approximately 50 Vassar students participate in the program every summer, of whom ten on average are computer science students. The program culminates in a research symposium held at Vassar in the fall and frequently leads to students co-authoring research papers with faculty. View past projects.