Computer Science Student Research and Equipment

Student/Faculty Research

Our faculty are involved in diverse research areas within computer science. We offer many opportunities for computer science students to work directly with faculty on a number of research projects. Students gain valuable experience while collaborating with their professors throughout their Oberlin careers. Most frequently, these research projects take place during the summer as part of the Oberlin Summer Research Institute.

However, students have opportunities to continue investigations during the year and as a winter-term project. Oberlin students also participate in NSF-funded research projects at other institutions during the summer as part of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

OCCaM

The computer science department is involved in the Oberlin Center for Computation and Modeling (OCCaM) , an interdisciplinary research organization founded in 2005 and is devoted to promoting computation and modeling at Oberlin. OCCaM coordinates and organizes the various researchers on campus who use scientific techniques of model building and computer data analysis. The faculty span both the natural and social sciences. A 64-node Beowulf cluster is available for participant use.

Equipment

The computer science department maintains two teaching labs exclusively for the use of computer science students. Both labs are equipped with late model computers running Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. The department also operates its own Solaris server that functions as the department’s file, e-mail, and web server.

Students have a wide variety of software available for their use, and we are able to quickly update or implement student suggestions. We also employ student system administrator positions where students can work with our sysadmin to learn about and maintain these labs.

In addition to these computing labs, the department has been developing specialized systems for use in classes. For students taking Networking or Operating Systems courses, we have dedicated hardware on which they can run code directly. Work is also under way for developing a dedicated system for the Computer Security course.