Computer Science

Welcome!

Tutoring Spring 2023

The Department of Computer Science is offering group tutoring both in person and digitally this semester. When tutoring is held, the tutor will be in Roddy 140, helping students on a first-come, first-serve basis.  They will also be available through Zoom, Meeting ID: 959-6169-3862.

Zoom Tutoring

By Course:

By Day:

Introducing the CS Department Discord Community!

The Department of Computer Science has a Discord Community which all students enrolled in Computer Science or Information Technology courses are encouraged to join. Discord is a social platform where people can collaborate and socialize together in text and/or voice channels.

We have premade channels for all courses, social activities, troubleshooting, and more. You can download Discord to your computer, phone, and/or tablet through your device's respective App Store or from https://www.discord.com

To join the Computer Science Department Discord Server, click this button:

JOIN THE DISCORD

Setting Up Development Environments

Trying to get your computer set up for your Computer Science class? We have guides to help you! 

Setting Up Development Environments

MU@PACISE 2023

Eight MUCS students and three faculty traveled to East Stroudsburg University to participate in the PACISE conference this year. Justin Stevens, Samantha Noggle, and Briar Sauble all presented talks on their honors theses. They did a fantastic job, and Justin's paper won the Best Paper a

ward (for best Faculty Paper, but that's another story...)

We also had two teams compete in the programming contest. The team of Marshall Feng, Samantha Noggle, and Trevor Bender won the competition, solving all ten of the problems in the shortest amount of time, with five "fastest solves", and with 40% of the allotted time remaini

ng! The team of Evan Magill, Ryan Ganzke, and John Hershey came in 4th, solving eight of the problems with two "fastest solves". Congratulations to everyone!

Millersville Computer Science Goes to CPOSC

 

The 13th Annual Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference (CPOSC) was held on Saturday, April 1st, 2023 at the Ware Center in downtown Lancaster. Millersville University was well-represented with over 15 students and faculty in attendance, along with many, many alumni. Samantha Noggle and Dr. Stephanie Schwartz gave a presentation called "Machine Learning Techniques to Improve Users' Listening Experiences".

CPOSC is organized by many local technology enthusiasts. This year two MUCS alumni, Elyse Ewing (2009) and Emma Montgomery (2018) were two primary coordinators, along with many other alumni who were involved in this great event. We look forward to next year!

John Hynes Completes Department Honors Thesis Defense

During the last year through online instruction, an MU CS senior, John Hynes, was concurrently working on his Departmental Honors Thesis: "A GPU-Accelerated Ray Tracing Engine in Modern C++". John built off of Peter Shirley's Ray Tracing in One Weekend and re-engineered the code to enable GPU parallelism with CUDA.

The ray tracing engine supports different types of objects such as spheres, planes, and triangles; different types of materials such as Lambertian, metal, emissive, and diaelectric; and a custom scene file format. The engine can run on NVIDIA GPUs through CUDA or on multi-core processors.

The code created throughout this thesis is Open Source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/JohnHynes/Thesis

Thesis Abstract: 

Cyber Defense Organization Qualifies for Regionals

 

The MUCS Cyber Defense Organization competed in the qualifying rounds of the CCDC (National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition) in March 2018 and placed 6th out of 25 teams. This qualified the team to compete in Regionals where they placed 4th out of 8 teams.  This is an outstanding achievement among very stiff competition.

The CCDC asks "student teams to assume administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network – typically a small company with 50+ users, 7 to 10 servers, and common Internet services such as a web server, mail server, and e-commerce site.  Each team begins the competition with an identical set of hardware and software and is scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats, maintain availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services, and balance security needs against business needs.  Throughout the competition an automated scoring engine is used to verify the functionality and availability of each team’s services on a periodic basis and traffic generators continuously feed simulated user traffic into the competition network.  A volunteer red team provides the 'external threat' all Internet-based services face and allows the teams to match their defensive skills against live opponents." [CCDC Mission]