Computer Science in the Majors
Created by Developer Student Club at W&M
Fall 2020
The Developer Student Club at W&M wanted to focus on bringing computer science skills to other majors through a series of hands-on workshops. The descriptions of each workshop with relevant links follow below.
Workshop 1: Public Policy, International Relations, & Government
Date: November 24, 2020
Educator: Clare Heinbaugh
Have you ever wanted to learn about web scraping? At this workshop geared towards Public Policy, IR, and government majors, we will explain how to use Python tools to extract current keywords describing a news topic.
Here is the video recording from the workshop. You can follow along with the code in the lesson_1 folder.
Workshop 2: Computer Science in the Majors: Sociology, History, and Linguistics
Date: October 15, 2020
Educator: Emilio Luz-Ricca
Computer Science can help facilitate text analysis and make processes much quicker. Come to this workshop to learn basic programming techniques from natural language processing to boost your text analysis skills!
Here is the video recording from the workshop. You can follow along with the code in the lesson_2 folder.
Workshop 3: Physics
Date: November 5, 2020
Educators: Luke Mrini & Archana Radhakrishnan
At this workshop, you will learn how to use Mathematica to model and visualize physical systems. We will also learn to use the popular scientific typesetting system LaTeX to format and display our results.
Here is the video recording from the workshop. You can follow along with the code in the lesson_3 folder.
Spring 2021
Workshop 4: Data Visualization, GIS, and JavaScript
Date: February 25, 2021
Educator: Arya Ganesan
In this one hour workshop, we will be exploring basic web development. Using the JavaScript library Leaflet and calls to the “Where the ISS at?” API, we will produce an interactive map showing the real-time over-earth location of the International Space Station. By the end of this lesson, you will understand how to write basic code in JavaScript and HTML, and how API data can be used to produce a tidy geospatial visualization.
Click here to download the cheat sheet for the lesson!
You can follow along on JSFiddle with either the attendee version (not filled in) or the instructor copy (completely filled in).
Here is the video recording from the workshop.
Workshop 5: Machine Learning for Medical Applications
Date: March 18, 2021
Educator: Luke Mrini
Using neural networks and deep learning, medical research has begun to show how common processes within medicine can be automated and operationalized. Join us for a brief introduction to neural networks, with an emphasis on the many modular building blocks that make this learning method particularly powerful. Once we’ve covered the basics, we’ll use the python library Keras to build our own neural network. Then, we’ll train our network on breast cancer data, see how to make predictions on unseen data, and discuss practical considerations for building effective networks.
Click here to download the slides used in the lesson!
You can follow along on Kaggle with either the attendee version (not filled in) or the instructor copy (completely filled in).
Here is the video recording from the workshop.
Cypher VI Hackathon Workshop: Introduction to Natural Language Processing
Date: April 9, 2021
Educators: Emilio Luz-Ricca & Clare Heinbaugh
Natural language processing (NLP) is one of the most exciting areas of computer science, where tools are being developed using machine learning and statistics to make traditionally unapproachable data sources (text data) more accessible! In conjunction with modern web scraping techniques, NLP can be used to quickly parse and analyze the massive amount of text data online. Join Emilio and Clare from W&M’s Developer Student Club for an introductory tutorial to NLP in python with spaCy and TextBlob applied to data that we will scrape using the Beautiful Soup and Newspaper3k libraries. Prior experience with python is preferable, but by no means necessary!
Click here to download the slides used in the lesson!
You can follow along on Kaggle with either the attendee version (not filled in) or the instructor copy (completely filled in).
Here is the video recording from the workshop.
Workshop 6: Agent-Based Modeling with NetLogo
Date: April 22, 2021
Educators: Pinar Caglayan & Paul Scemama
Agent-based modeling (ABM) enables researchers to model complex systems of interacting parts using a simple, intuitive framework. ABMs have shown interesting results in a range of fields, from the biological sciences all the way to political science. In this short workshop, we will introduce the basics of ABMs and describe the key components to include in any ABM. Then, we will approach a model that simulates the growth of metastatic tumors using the popular ABM software package, NetLogo. Join us to learn about one of the most versatile (and fun) simulation-based modeling techniques!
We will show all code in this workshop in the desktop version of NetLogo. While you can use the online version if you want, downloading NetLogo will make the experience much more seamless!
Click here to download the slides used in the lesson!
You can follow along with either the attendee version (not filled in) or the instructor copy (completely filled in).
Here is the video recording from the workshop.
Workshop 7: Scientific Computing & Visualization
Date: May 6, 2021
Educator: Archana Radhakrishnan
In our final lesson of the year, we will look at the basics of particle discovery through a computational lens. Combining data visualization techniques with non-linear regression, we will see how large particle accelerators like the large hadron collider (LHC) detect new particles in practice. We will be giving a high-level primer on the physics principles at play before hopping into the coding portion of the lesson, so no physics background is needed!
Click here to download the slides used in the lesson!
You can follow along on Kaggle with either the attendee version (not filled in) or the instructor copy (completely filled in).
Here is the video recording from the workshop.