Program

Facilities

The Computer Science Program has moved into its new home in the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. The Center houses the Biology and Computer Science and Programs. The main floor of the new Center has three large, self-contained "smart" classrooms, an auditorium, capable of seating 80, and labs lining the entire western side of the building, framed by glass walls that overlook woods leading down a slope to Annandale Road. Faculty offices are found on the second floor.

The Center greatly expands laboratory and teaching space, including:

A new computer teaching laboratory (the "Doughnut Room") enables integrated hands-on computing within the context of classroom instruction. The teaching lab includes reconfigurable tables for group projects, 21 Macintosh computers at the perimeter, a printer, and projection to the main screen for all computers in the lab.

A Hardware Teaching Lab for instruction in computer hardware and robotics. This room contains 20 PCs that dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Lab tables support work on electronic and mechanical systems. An attached room houses Lego Mindstorms, IPRE, and Pioneer robots as well as electronics equipment.

RKC 110 houses the Laboratory for Algebraic and Symbolic Computation and the Distributed Robotics (DRAB) lab.

A Cognitive Systems Lab devoted to cognitive modeling, machine learning and human-computer interaction.

Ad-hoc study space with whiteboards, wireless networking, and network jacks.

Proximity to computer science faculty and the systems administrator on the second floor.

A dedicated computer server room.

24-hour access via a card-reader security system.

Computing

Our systems are served by a Dell Poweredge 1550 running Linux and 2 Xserve G5s with Dual 2.3 GHz processors and 4.5 GB RAM. The Program also maintains a number of PCs that run Red Hat Linux. A gigabit fiber-optic backbone network and 100Mb switched Ethernet link the College's various facilities and provide students and faculty with unlimited access to the Internet, e-mail, and the World Wide Web. Wireless networking zones (WiFi "hotspots") are located in the Bertelsmann Campus Center and Stevenson Library.

Bard has site licenses for a number of software packages of particular use for computer science and mathematics students, including Mathematica (a very powerful tool for solving a broad range of mathematical problems), SPSS (for statistics), and PCTeX (a friendly implementation of TeX (for typesetting papers).