Department of Computer Science @ Earlham College

Research and Applied Groups

The Computer Science Department at Earlham is not solely composed of professors and computer maintenance folk. Students, too, are integral to the running, upkeep, and continued growth of all aspects of the department. In Earlham's applied and research groups, students work together with a faculty advisor to both learn a (sometimes completely new!) skill set and apply it in a way that is useful to the entire CS department and sometimes the whole College. The content applied group, for example, made and maintains this webpage.

The Applied Groups:

	the Content Administration Group, the wonderful people responsible for the page you are viewing now.
	the Hardware Interfacing Project (HIP), who connect us to devices and gadgets
	the Pedagogical Tools Group, who generate teaching devices for the lower-level CS courses.
	the System Administrators, who keep 50+ computers and their associated software running for the use of three departments.
	and the WebDB Group, who make looking up your class schedule oh-so-much easier

The Research Groups:

	the Cluster Computing Group, who connect many computers to solve large problems
	and the Theory Group, who are currently studying the parsing of obscure grammar formalisms

More About Computer Science at Earlham

Earlham CS is a growing and exciting department. Our excellent faculty and rich facilities provide an environment that fosters an interdisciplinary approach to theory and practice in the field. Computer Science works closely with Mathematics and Physics and has ties to linguistics and logic.

Our curriculum is built on the fundamental paradigms of the discipline: theory, abstraction, and design. These three are woven throughout the Department, binding the sometimes disparate topics of Computer Science into a cohesive body of knowledge and experience. Because of the rapidly changing character of the field, we review the curriculum regularly. Our work is heavily influenced by the liberal arts mission of the College, in particular our interdisciplinary approach and our inclusion of the cultural, legal, and ethical issues surrounding computing within the curriculum. We provide our graduates with the ability to make informed decisions about the appropriate use of technology in a variety of contexts.

At a practical level we rely heavily on open source software, such as Linux, Postgres, and FreeBSD for both teaching and research. Many of our students, faculty, and alums participate in open source software development projects. Eric Raymond, author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, spoke on campus about the open source movement on January 17, 1999.

News in the CS Department

2011-11-28 - LittleFe wins the 2012 UCES Award
The CCG went to Seattle for SC11 and returned home with an award and a check! Earlham's Cluster Computing Group attended the the annual SuperComputing conference, SC11, in Seattle recently. SC is one of the world's largest gathering of people...
2011-11-24 - Results from the Undergraduate Research Poster Conference
The Undergraduate Research Poster Conference this year was a big success! We had two groups from the Computer Science department make and present posters: the Cluster Computing Group and the Theory Group. ...
2011-11-23 - 2011 SuperComputing Conference
Earlham's Cluster Computing Group attended the the annual SuperComputing conference, SC11, in Seattle recently. SC is one of the world's largest gathering of people who work in high performance computing and computation and data enabled science and engineering. It is sometimes described as Burning Man for geeks...
2011-11-23 - Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference
Elena Sergienko, a sophomore majoring in Computer Science, recently attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. She had this to say about it: ...
2011-09-22 - Undergraduate Research Poster Conference Friday October 14th
Come to this year's URPC Friday the 14th of October in the Wellness Center from 4:00PM to 6:00 PM and see what research Earlham undergrads have done the past year in the fields of Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental...

Weather in the CS department!

Find out more: