Computer Science Students Present Research in DC, Meet with two Congressmen

Two comp-sci students met with U.S. Representatives Rush Holt and John Adler to make the case for continued funding for undergraduate research opportunities.

Words by TCNJ's editorial staff

Autumn Breese ’10 and Ruth Dannenfelser ’10 took part in a “Posters on the Hill” event in Washington, DC, this past May. The two-day event, sponsored by the Council on Undergraduate Research, provided a venue for undergraduates engaged in student-faculty collaborative research to exhibit their work and make the case to policymakers for continued funding for research opportunities. While in DC, Breese and Dannenfelser had the opportunity to meet privately with U.S. Representatives Rush Holt and John Adler.

Breese and Dannenfelser presented their work on Comment Mentor (COMTOR), a Web-based tool developed at TCNJ that provides analysis and feedback on Java source-code commenting. Comments are non-executable annotations in a program’s source code that explain what each component of the program does.

Peter DePasquale, assistant professor of computer science and the COMTOR project adviser, explained that the person who writes a program very often is not the same person who maintains or uses it. “Comments…help the next person clarify what was going on in your head when you were writing the code,” DePasquale said. There are no standards for writing comments though, and the emphasis placed on teaching student programmers to accurately document their code varies from instructor to instructor and institution to institution.

“We’re…building a system where an instructor has an infrastructure that asks the students to submit their code, which gives the students feedback to improve upon what they’re doing, and also sets up some sort of grading schema…[that] automates some of the grading process for the professor,” DePasquale explained.

The idea for COMTOR was conceived several years ago by Michael Locasto ’02, then a graduate student at Columbia University. He shared the idea with DePasquale, who had a former student, Joe Brigandi ’07, write “the first cut” of the program. In the years since, Steven Sigwart ’10, Breese, and Dannenfelser have revised and expanded COMTOR’s functionality.

“The students working on [COMTOR] recently have taken it to a point where I’m ready to invite other schools to use it,” DePasquale said.

Dannenfelser’s work dealt with improving the user interface based on data she collected through a usability study. She also “worked on enhancing the analytical part of the system by developing a new module that evaluated the quality of a specific type of comment,” she said. Breese spent the past year researching and implementing Natural Language Processing (NLP) into COMTOR. “NLP is a new field,” Breese explained, and its inclusion allows for a more in-depth analysis of a programmer’s comments.

Both Breese and Dannenfelser received a Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates Grant this past academic year to fund their work. The grant “aims to increase the number of minorities and women that go on to graduate programs in computer science and engineering-related disciplines,” Dannenfelser explained.

“It’s an historic problem that we go through in the field,” DePasquale said in reference to the grant. “Typically it’s mostly white males in this program.”

Dannenfelser, who plans to pursue a PhD in bioinformatics, said the opportunity to work on COMTOR “not only strengthened my interest in pursuing graduate school, but will be a major asset as I apply for graduate programs.”

Breese, who also plans to get her PhD in computer science, said her work with COMTOR helped her secure a spot in the National Science Foundation’s competitive Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. Her REU took place this past summer, and allowed Breese to work at Texas A&M with a networking and security professor.

“I was admitted to the REU program because of my experience with COMTOR,” Breese said. “Having had the opportunity to do research as an undergraduate at TCNJ gave me the edge…over other applicants to the program.”