People

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Professor Ellman has done research in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Problem Reformulation, Computer Aided Design and Automated Software Engineering. His research is currently focused on algebraic and co-algebraic methods of program construction. Tom teaches introductory and advanced Computer Science courses: CMPU-101 Problem-Solving and Abstraction; CMPU-378 Graphics; CMPU-379 Animation; CMPU-376 Computer Game Making. He also teaches in the Media Studies program: MEDS-250 Exploratory Media Practices. Tom is also a computational visual-artist. Tom's personal web site is Tom Ellman.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Professor Falcone's interests include Teleoperation, Human - Machine Interaction, Embodiment, Embodied Cognition, and Multimodality. She extensively published about the relation between the Sense of Embodiment (SoE) and Teleoperation in robotics and virtual/augmented/mixed reality. Particularly, during her PhD, she aimed to develop theoretical frameworks and methodologies that integrate multiple disciplines such as robotics, cognitive science, and neuroscience to improve the teleoperation experience by building a Sense of Embodiment (SoE) in humans. SoE refers to the process of developing a sense of ownership (feeling of self-attribution), a trustworthy sense of agency (feeling of control), and a sense of self-location (the perception of being located in a volume of space) over a remote avatar controlled through a teleoperation setup. She has a multidisciplinary background, and she strongly encourages interdisciplinary investigations and collaborations among departments.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Hannah Gommerstadt's research interests are at the intersection of programming languages and security, especially the use of language-based and logic-based methods to provide formal security guarantees. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. from Harvard University. Prior to entering graduate school, Anna worked as a software engineer at Microsoft. Anna teaches CMPU145: Foundations of Computer Science and CMPU331: Compilers.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Prairie Rose Goodwin is a usability expert who brings data science and quantitative analysis to questions formerly answered with qualitative data. She has published extensively on how to use the limits of human perception and cognition to make better tools and increase productivity in developer workflows. As a developer in industry, her work focused on transformative technologies like the rise of smartphones and the data everywhere framework that enabled IoT applications. She has owned her own business and worked in small start-ups all the way up to billion-dollar companies. Recently, she decided to switch her focus from building software for profit to training the next generation of developers by returning to academia. Technology continues to transform our world and how we interact with it, and Prairie Rose stresses that technology has to be designed around how people actually use technology rather than how we wished they would use it.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Professor Gordon received a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, focused on artificial intelligence. Before returning to Vassar, he worked at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) as a postdoctoral researcher. His research interests are broadly in natural language processing. Professor Gordon regularly teaches CMPU 101 Computer Science I, CMPU 240 Theory of Computation, and CMPU 366 Computational Linguistics.

Professor of Computer Science

Professor Hunsberger's research focus is on collaborative multi-agent systems. In particular, he is interested in endowing computer agents with intentions, as well as an ability to reason about temporal constraints, especially in group situations. Luke teaches CMPU-101 (Introduction to Computer Science), CMPU-145 (Foundations of Computer Science), CMPU-245 (Declarative Programming) and CMPU-365 (Artificial Intelligence). Luke's web site contains more information re: his research interests, publications and courses.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Prof. Lemieszewski received a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from NYU and an MS in computer Science from Marist College. For most of his professional career, he worked for IBM on the Transaction Processing Facility operating system. Anyone who ever used a credit card, took a commercial airline flight, or even submitted a tax return used this operating system. Besides an interest in operating systems, he is interested in opensource code projects like GNU's C library, glibc, the GNU Compiler Collection, gcc, and IBM's implementation of the java virtual machine, openj9. Before joining Vassar College, Peter was an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Marist College.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Rui Meireles holds Computer Science PhD degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Porto. His research interests lie in the general areas of networking and distributed systems. His research is applied and experimental in nature: designing protocols, creating prototypes and evaluating them in realistic environments. He has focused mainly in the area of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks. Vehicular networks wirelessly connect vehicles amongst themselves and with roadside infrastructure, with the goals of improving traffic safety and efficiency, as well as providing entertainment to passengers.

Associate Professor and Chair of Computer Science

Professor Smith earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida. He worked in industry for AT&T for fifteen years, during which time his Ph.D. studies were sponsored by AT&T's Doctoral Support Program. While at AT&T he worked in several different IT capacities, including applications and systems development and support, and IT infrastructure systems engineering. He was an Assistant Professor at Colby College from 2001-2006, before coming to Vassar. His research spans elements of theoretical and experimental computer science, in the areas of concurrency (models of parallel and distributed computation, programming languages, unifying theories of programming) and bioinformatics (phylogenetic inference and evolutionary robotics). At Vassar he has taught CMPU-101 (Problem-Solving and Abstraction), CMPU-102 (Data Structures and Algorithms), CMPU-203 (Software Design and Implementation), CMPU-235 (Programming Languages), CMPU-240 (Language Theory and Computation), CMPU-245 (Declarative Programming Models), CMPU-311 (Database Systems) as an Intensive, CMPU-353 (Bioinformatics), CMPU-375 (Networks), and CMPU-377 (Parallel Programming).

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Jason Waterman received his Ph.D in Computer Science at Harvard University in the area of Coordinated Resource Management in Sensor Networks. Before getting his Ph.D, he worked at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), working in the areas of Human Centered Computing and mobile systems for patient monitoring. He also earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University. His area of research is developing Mobile Health (mHealth) systems to improve the quality of healthcare using smartphones and wearable technologies. Jason teaches Computer Organization (CMPU-224), Operating Systems (CMPU-334), and Computer Architecture (CMPU-324).

Administrative Assistant

Professor Emerita of Computer Science

Professor Ide earned her B.A, B.S., M.A., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from The Pennsylvania State University, where she studied in several areas including neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science. Professor Ide is an active researcher in the field of computational linguistics, and has received several grants to support her research from the National Science Foundation, the European Commission, and others. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Resources and Evaluation and co-editor of a book series Text, Speech, and Language Technology for Springer Publishers.

Professor Emerita of Computer Science

Jenny Walter earned her PhD from Texas A&M University in 2000 in the area of distributed algorithms. Her research concentrates on the development and simulation of distributed algorithms. Her particular focus currently involves adapting existing distributed algorithms for use on wireless ad hoc networks and creating new motion planning algorithms for self-reconfigurable robotic systems. She retired after 20 years of teaching at Vassar.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Professor Jones earned his BS in Electrical Engineering at Cooper Union, MS in Computer Science at Marist College, and his doctorate in Computer Science at Pace University. He was an Industry Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for 18 years at the Polytechnic University Graduate Center, Westchester, NY. During that period he was also an Engineering and Computer Science Consultant to a number of organizations. He spent the following 3 years at The Sage College of Albany as an Associate Professor of Computer Science, with 2 years as department chair. His research is in computational music composition systems. His interests include digital hardware design and issues in multicore and distributed operating systems.

Louis Voerman, Visiting Associate Professor. Retired Spring 2009. We wish Lou all the best in his retirement after 26 years of wonderful service to Vassar and the Computer Science Department.

Adjunct Professor

With Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science, Alan has spent the past 20 years as a teacher and independent technology consultant. In addition to his academic pursuits, Alan has practical expertise in a wide variety of industries, with clients from Publishing (Scholastic, Simon & Schuster), Education (New York Institute of Finance, NYU), Risk Management (PriceWaterhouse Coopers, A&A), Showbiz (Dick Clark Corporate Productions, Ray Bloch Productions) and many others. In the public sector he's consulted for the New York State Office of Mental Health and the Westchester County Department of Child Welfare.

Alan continues to consult on large- and small-scale projects in the areas of Database Systems, Browser-based Applications, Mobile Solutions, and Software Development. Learn more about Alan at his web site.

Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Science

Professor Naumov has Diploma in Mathematics from Moscow State University and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, both with specialization in Logic. His present research is focused on logical systems for reasoning about multi-agent systems, information flow, formal epistemology, social networks, and game theory. Pavel coauthored over twenty peer-reviewed publications with undergraduate students. Previously, he has published papers on proof complexity, type theory, automated deduction, and modal logics. Pavel is teaching Computer Science I: Problem-Solving and Abstraction, Foundations of Computer Science, Language Theory and Computation, and Special Topics course on Foundations of Multiagent Systems.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Simon Ellis received his PhD in 2016 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, specialising in the application of cognitive computing to artificially intelligent agents for complex board, card and role-playing games. This remains the primary focus of his research, although he is also interested in “non-educational” computer games which permit learning as a 'side-effect' of playing the game: in particular, using such a game to help high school students to learn and understand basic computer science concepts without actively learning them. Some of his other interests include programming languages, software development, philosophy, and design, of A.I., and just about anything to do with games.

Visiting Assistant Professor

Dr.Vijayalakshmi Saravanan was a Postdoctoral Associate at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA and University of Waterloo, Canada under the prestigious “Schlumberger Faculty for the Future” Fellowship award (2015-2017). She completed her Ph.D. under the prestigious Erasmus Mundus EU-Govt Fellowship award at Malardalen University, Sweden as a research exchange student. Prior to this she was Assistant Professor of Practice at UTSA, USA. She has 10 years of teaching experience and has published many technical articles in scholarly international journals and conferences. She is serving as technical reviewer and program committee member for reputed conferences & journals such as GHC, SIGCSE and Springer. Her research interests include Power-Aware Processor Design, Big Data, IoT, Computer Architecture, Multi-Core Architecture, SW and HW Co-Design of Multi-Core, Power-Performance Analysis of Multi-Core Architecture. She is also a lead editor for Pattern Recognition Letters (2020), Interactive Multimedia Communication with 6G. Special Issue of Multimedia Tools and Applications (2020) and CRC Press Taylor and Francis, USA. She is a Senior Member of IEEE, ACM, ACM Distinguished speaker and CSI. She was the Chair of IEEE WIE Affinity Group at VIT University during 2009-2015. Also Chair of NPA (National Postdoctoral Association) Annual Meetings. She is a ACM Distinguished Speaker and a Board Member of N2WOMEN (Networking Networking Women). Dr. Saravanan teaches Computer Science I: Problem-Solving and Abstraction (CMPU 101) and Computer Science III: Software Design & Implementation (CMPU 203)

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Matthew Lambert received his BA in Mathematics and Computer Science at the College of Wooster before receiving his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Delaware. At Vassar, he has taught CMPU-145, CMPU-240, and CMPU-241. His research interests range from high-performance computing to computer algebra to a fledgling interest in the field of computational history.

Systems Administrator, 2022-2023

Administrative Assistant, 2021 - 2023

Systems Administrator, 2020-2022

Matt came to Vassar in January 2020 after a number of years in industry. In 2022 he moved over to the Vassar CIS Systems group.

Systems Administrator, 2015-2019

After enjoying an almost 25 year stint with IBM, Jerry sought a new challenge and became Computer Science's sysadmin in February, 2015. He earned his B.S. in Information Systems from Marist College. Jerry is now the Director of Information Security and Information Security Officer for Vassar College.

Administrative Assistant, 2017 - 2021

Jennie joined us initially during the middle of the spring 2017 semester, and she's been with us permanently since August 2017. We are delighted to welcome her to our department. She earned her B.S. degree in Broadcast Production and Management from SUNY New Paltz and is currently working toward a Master's Degree in Computer Science. She is interested in developing programs and assistive technologies to help people with learning disorders.

Administrative Assistant, 2010 - 2017

Linda originally started work for Vassar in 2006 for the department of Chinese & Japanese, and is now enjoying work with the CS faculty and students. She has spent the many years since graduating from Swarthmore College on a variety of adventures, some paid but many not. Highlights include providing pastoral care for people with terminal illnesses, for seriously ill patients at Westchester Medical Center as well as in local hospitals and nursing homes, and for search and rescue workers at Ground Zero on a weekly basis for 8 months following 9/11. As non-medical personnel she has suited up to enter an operating room, held tiny premature newborns, ridden with patients in the working area of ambulances, and appreciated high-speed driving skills from the back seat of a cruiser as a police officer rocketed through congested NYC traffic. At times Linda's adventures have had the makings of a fast-paced book, but thus far she has preferred to edit the work of others.

Systems Administrator, 2014 - 2015

Steve Beare obtained his B.S. in Computational Mathematics from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, Manchester, UK. He has been working with UNIX varieties since the late 1980s. Steve started as a pilot with the Royal Air Force, before an accident forced him to change directions. He began working with computers professionally in 1989 and has worked on High Performance Computing projects with companies such as Total Oil, IBM, and Siemens. He spends his free time flying, and rescuing retired racing greyhounds.

Systems Administrator, August 2011 - June 2013

Ben Stoutenburgh earned his B.S. in Computer Science from Marist College. He started his server administration career there as a freshman and moved up to full time work totaling eight years of experience. He has since worked briefly in the private sector and is now back to academia. He fuels his interests in linux and open source technologies by aiding in organizing meetings for the Mid Hudson Valley Linux and Open Source Users Group and the Hudson Valley Drupal Users Group. Ben's ramblings can be read on his blog at parazoid.net or follow him on twitter, @maristgeek. We wish Ben all the best in his new position at Acquia!

Systems Administrator and Lab Coordinator, March 1992 - July 2011.

Greg came to Vassar as a student in 1978 and began working in the Computer Science Department that Fall. He returned to the department in 1992 as a part-time Faculty Research Associate and became our full time sys. admin shortly thereafter. We wish Greg all the best in his new position at Google!

Administrative Assistant, 1980 - 2010

We wish Elle the best in her retirement as the departmental administrative assistant with thanks for 30 wonderful years!