We're Back at School
10/07/2009
Paul Smith and Devon Walker
During the Spring and Summer I 2009 semesters, Computer Science majors Paul Smith and Devon Walker completed a research project entitled "Bernstein Polynomials and Approximation." Their work was funded by the SUNY Alliance for Minority Participation and The National Science Foundation, and was supervised by Professor Lawrence Fialkow of the Department of Computer Science.
To carry out their project, in addition to studying the role of Bernstein polynomials in approximating continuous functions, Paul and Devon learned how to use the Mathematica software package, which does algebra with matrices and polynomials, and they learned how how to use the LATEX software package for preparing their project report, which will be posted on http://cs.newpaltz.edu/~fialkowl on October 15.
Major Plan Revision
The Department of Computer Science has undertaken a major overhaul of the courses in its major plan. Below is a schematic of the new major requirements.
Our new major plan will include two new courses in web technologies. The first course will deal with the backend aspects including databases and web page development scripting languages such as php and python. The second course will deal with what makes Web 2.0 different – writing code that executes on the browser itself. This includes JSP, JSON, AJAX including packages such as DoJo.
The second new sequence will be a sequence in device programming. The first course will use robots as the external device and the second will focus on mobile phone devices. Students will see the difference between devices that have no operating system and devices supported by an operating system.