Brett Cooley and Michael Wagner Selected for the 2012/13 Park Undergraduate Award
The Stephen K. Park Undergraduate Scholarship Award is presented annually at the Department of Computer Science Diploma Ceremony & Reception to at least one student earning a B.S. in Computer Science at William & Mary. Brett Cooley and Michael Wagner were this year's recipients.
The specific terms of the award are:
At least one award, of at least $1000, presented annually at the end of the spring semester to a graduating Computer Science undergraduate student who during his or her undergraduate career "Established a record of academic excellence and, equally important, demonstrated a continuing interest in computer science research and development, as judged by the joint faculty of the Computer Science department."
Brett graduated, cum laude, in May 2013 with majors in both Computer Science and Mathematics. Brett also graduated with Honors working under the direction of Professor Haining Wang on the Honors thesis Metis: Mocking Data for Usability & Privacy, in which he considered the problem of protecting the privacy of data both stored and generated from mobile devices. In addition, Brett was a member of Team Gold, one of only 110 teams invited from around the world to participate in the 2012 World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest in Warsaw, Poland — another significant investment of his time and energy, as the story Competitive programming team prepares for the World Finals makes clear. Brett is spending the summer of 2013 in Redwood City, California, working for the small tech startup Impermium. Brett returns to William & Mary in August 2013 as a master's student in the department's one-year M.S. degree program.
Michael graduated, summa cum laude, in December 2012 with a major in Computer Science. Starting in summer 2012, through the time of his graduation, Michael was a member of the SEMERU research team headed by Professor Denys Poshyvanyk. Michael's research focused on investigating the combined use of textual (i.e., natural language), structural, and historical information, automatically extracted from software artifacts, to support change impact analysis, the task of determining what parts of a codebase need to be changed in order to address a specific change request — an often time-consuming part of the software maintenance process. Michael extended FLATTT, an Eclipse plug-in developed by Trevor Savage (B.S., Computer Science, 2010), to implement an impact analysis technique developed by the SEMERU group. Michael was a Fall 2012 Phi Beta Kappa initiate and currently works at Business and Engineering Systems as a software engineer.
To learn more about Steve Park, a former faculty member and chair of the department whose bequest endowed this award, visit the commemoration on our Facebook page.
