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Twelve of Hamilton’s outstanding female science students are the first recipients of the Clare Boothe Luce Undergraduate Research Award. The new annual award will fund up to 12 female scientists each summer over the course of three years as Clare Boothe Luce Scholars in the fields of computer science, physics and chemistry. The $144,600 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation will be matched with funds from Hamilton.

George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel 1984 famously featured cameras capable of discerning a person’s state of mind – their contentedness, truthfulness or trustfulness – simply by looking at their face. The year 1984 came and went without such a technology emerging, but as demonstrated by Diane Paverman ’13 and Eric Murray’s ’13 summer research on the functional near-infrared spectrometer (fNIRS), scientists are getting closer to achieving Orwellian-like surveillance capabilities.

Imagine being able to select any written document on a computer and automatically know where the writer struggled, which sections the writer breezed through, and if the writer had plagiarized – all without reading a single word of the document itself. The idea seems simple enough to conceive with the use of text extracting programs and subsequent algorithms, but, surprisingly, no software maker has produced such a product.

Hamilton faculty Wei-Jen Chang (biology), Natalia Connolly (physics), and Alistair Campbell (computer science) have just been awarded a Multi-Investigator Cottrell College Science Award by the Research Corporation.  This award, in the amount of $100,000, is for developing novel computational techniques for investigating gene interaction networks in fish parasite called Ichthyophthirius multifiliis (Ich).

Research Associate Leanne Hirshfield ’02 was named 2011 Young Technologist of the Year by the Mohawk Valley Engineers’ Executive Council (MVEEC). According to the MVEEC, the award acknowledges the winner’s work and “contributions to our area’s knowledge base and to the next generation of technologists.”

Spencer Gulbronson, a candidate for May graduation from Hamilton, has been awarded a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for 2012-13. Her project, titled “The Universal Language: Exploring Creative Approaches to Math Education,” was among 40 national winners of the Fellowships.

The total number of students on Hamilton’s campus may be smaller than an entire graduating class at big research universities, but that doesn’t mean Hamilton’s research opportunities are any more limited. In fact, as Matthew T. Farrington ’12, Diane Paverman ’13, Spencer Gulbronson ’12, Peter Lauro ’12 and alumnus Sam Hinks ’11 are discovering, research at Hamilton is just as engaging as it can be at large universities. The students are working with Professor of Computer Science Stuart Hirshfield to determine if computers can recognize the unique “signature” of a user’s brain.

Research Associate Leanne Hirshfield ’02 presented a talk titled “This is Your Brain on Computers: Using Non-invasive Cognitive and Physiological Sensors to Enhance Human-Computer Interactions” on Dec. 7 at Syracuse University.  

Hamilton students and faculty are working with the U.S. Air Force this summer on a project that measures the neurological responses to fear, frustration and suspicion of humans as they interact with computers.

Many computer users are unaware of the varied and serious threats that their computers are exposed to. To help raise awareness of computer security, Leah Wolf ’14 is working this summer with Associate Professor of Computer Science Mark Bailey on curricular work for the introductory class Secrets, Lies and Digital Threats. She is preparing all the materials for this course to be available online for other educators.