The Fun Before the Storm (of Finals)

Pizza, frisbee, bean bag toss,  day-glo football and even chess made for a fun afternoon to finish off the last day of classes and relax heading into finals on Friday afternoon, April 27th at the Quad Pavilion.   That's what Mathematics and Computer Science Department Picnic was about!

The event was sponsored by Aftermath and USF Computer Club (the Byte-ing Saints?)  our two student organizations, but the majority of the thanks goes to Dr. Angela Antonou for her fantastic work on getting everything together for a truly fun afternoon.



Awards were handed out (including a few gift cards) for students whose service to the department went above and beyond.  Tee-shirts for the USF Computer Club were the fashion must have.  Kudos on the design to Brett Pluth (Web Dev).  A number of humorous acknowledgements were made for students and teachers.

To top it off the weather cooperated and didn't turn to rain until after our picnic wound down. 

Don't miss our annual event at the end of each Spring semester.

It's a Skill... it's a Cloud...

  It's Senior Project

(L-R) Jim, Alejandra, Derek, Zach, Meera, Mike, & Ben

Congratulations to the our 5 students from the Computer Science and Information Technology majors for their work on  the 2018 Senior Project.   We had two teams this year.  They presented the results of their efforts on Thursday, April 26, 2018 in the President's Room

Our IT graduating senior, Ben Knight worked solo on building and configuring a server to house  virtual servers.   His client was USF's Mike Gende (CS 1987)  who was looking for a more cost effective solution for supporting a variety of classes. 

 Ben was able to cannibalize several servers and drives to create a server environment using 2 Dell PowerEdge servers with 32 GB of storage and a NAS server with 8 TB of storage.    A RAID 1 and a RAID 5 configuration were used for the NAS.   VM Ware was used for the bare metal operating systems.  A number of ISO images were created so that students would have a choice for configuration.  Documentation on creating virtual servers was provided.

 
Ben was able to test and tweak the environment by having the database administration class use the server for classroom projects and homework.






Our 4 CS students, Meera Chouhan, Derek Dailey, Alejandra Medina, and Zachary Watts worked as a team to build a new skill for the Amazon Alexa.  Their client was Jim Schuler (CS 2003) of Franciscan Ministries.   Jim was looking to use Alexa for their retirement communities.  The goal was to provide a  convenience to the residents while in the common areas of their community to find out menus and scheduled events.   These menus and events would be on Google calendars. 

While Alexa does have some calendar skills built in,  it was not able to look at the detail information or offer it in the manner that Franciscan Ministries was hoping for.   Since the change of use of Alexa from home to organization/business use is new, different tools for creating these skills were needed.  While there were options it required a great deal of trial and error before a skill that was comprised of PHP code, a JSON file, an export tool, and Storyline was found to be the answer.  And Alexa would begin by telling us:  Welcome to Franciscan Ministries.

  

Of course, documentation on how to update and modify the skill was provided as part of the turnover to Jim Schuler.    The new skill is being submitted to Amazon Alexa for certification and will be available publicly in June.  That means residents can use the skill from the convenience of the apartments or their family members can find out what's up on any given day.

Service is an important part of learning at USF.  In Senior Project we help non-profits with technology solutions that help them provide to others.  Students use their knowledge in various technical topics to contribute to society.  

A big thank you to USF CS alumni, Mike Gende and Jim Schuler, for providing our students with unique opportunities.  Congratulations to everyone on Senior Project.