Research Talks — Fall 2026¶

The Department of Computer Science hosts two talk series. The CS/IT Research Seminar features faculty members and undergraduate researchers presenting work at the cutting edge of computer science and information technology research: a 40–45 minute talk followed by questions, Fridays 11:25 am – 12:25 pm in 243 King Hall. The CS/IT Distinguished Lecture Series brings researchers from other institutions to campus; their times and rooms vary. All CS and IT students, and other interested students and faculty, are invited to attend.

Subscribe to the CS events calendar Past semesters

Upcoming talks¶

Abstracts will be posted as they arrive.

Past talks this semester¶

"Regular" CS × Inclusive Design = Smarter Students and Greater Diversity¶

Margaret Burnett (Distinguished Lecture) · Fri, Oct 23

What if "regular" Computer Science (CS) faculty each taught elements of inclusive design in "regular" CS courses across an undergraduate curriculum? Would it affect the CS program's education climate and inclusiveness to diverse students? Would it improve retention? Would students learn less CS? Would they actually learn any inclusive design? This talk describes the outcomes of 613 students who experienced the course offerings of the 13 CS faculty who tried this approach. The results exceeded our wildest hopes! Among them were significant improvements in student retention, their grades, their ratings of their faculty, and their ratings of the education climate’s inclusiveness. Further, the students later acted on what they learned -- the software products they created were judged by inclusive design experts (who were blind to the before vs. after condition) to be more inclusive than the software products of the students who had come before. The talk also takes a peek at future directions. This talk is part of my "change the world for the better" agenda. Perhaps after this talk, some in the audience will want to join me in this effort.

About the speaker: Margaret Burnett is a Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University. She began her career in industry, where she was the first woman software developer ever hired at Procter & Gamble Ivorydale. A few degrees and start-ups later, she joined academia, with a research focus on people who are engaged in some form of software development. She was the principal architect of the Forms/3 and FAR visual programming languages, and co-founded the area of end-user software engineering, which aims to improve software for computer users that are not trained in programming. She leads the team that created GenderMag and SocioeconomicMag, two software inspection methods that uncover gender-inclusiveness and socioeconomic-inclusiveness issues in software from spreadsheets to programming environments. Burnett is an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, a member of the ACM SIGCHI Software Engineering Academy, and an award-winning mentor.

Code Your Own Paper Orb with Twoville¶

Chris Johnson · Fri, Oct 16

Members of a plugged-in society easily spend entire days in disembodied cognition, merely thinking about virtual artifacts. They forget how to draw and build. But brains and hands work better together. In this hands-on and brains-on workshop, Dr. Chris Johnson will guide participants in a papercraft activity using Twoville, a platform for designing physical objects with math, logic, and mouse manipulations. Twoville features a bidirectional editor, which means the design can be indirectly manipulated through code or directly manipulated through the canvas. Participants will code, cut, and assemble a three-dimensional paper orb sculpture to take home.

About the speaker: Dr. Chris Johnson is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at James Madison University. He joined JMU in 2020 after abandoning his Midwestern roots of Iowa and Wisconsin for a warmer place where he could bike everyday. His interests are in computer graphics and programming languages, which are exactly the courses he's teaching this semester. His favorite programming language hasn't been invented yet and never will be.

Active Bodies, Perceptive Machines: How Everyday Interactions Reveal Profound Questions in HCI¶

Paweł W. Woźniak (Distinguished Lecture) · Tue, Oct 6

In this talk, I will explore what fascinates me about the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), especially as technology becomes an increasingly integral part of our everyday lives. I will examine how we can deepen our understanding of technology to ensure it genuinely benefits its users. I will start by focusing on one of my preferred areas of interactive technology: those designed for physical activity. These technologies, while appearing straightforward, often raise profound questions about the future of our relationship with technology. This exploration leads to intriguing considerations—can technology become conscious? Could it one day ‘perceive’ our physical state or even empathize with us? However, these exciting possibilities come at a cost. What happens when technology crosses personal boundaries, becoming intrusive or unsettling? I suggest that a deeper understanding of how technology causes ambiguous feelings is key for the future of interaction design. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate that HCI is not only about designing devices and interfaces but also about understanding their broader impact on the human experience.

About the speaker: Paweł W. Woźniak, tekn. dr. is professor for human-computer interaction and head of research unit at TU Wien. Previously, he was associate professor at Interaction design, Chalmers University of Technology, assistant professor for Human-Centred Computing at Utrecht University and postdoctoral fellow at the Chair for Human-Computer Interaction and Socio-Cognitive Systems, University of Stuttgart. Paweł received his PhD degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Chalmers in 2016. Paweł’s key interests lie in the intersection of technologies, sport and wellbeing. His focus is on understanding the everyday experiences of physical activity to design better technologies that support wellbeing. To this end, he conducts studies in personal informatics, building an understanding of how uses gather, process and reflect upon data about their lives. Paweł loves to build stuff and he builds devices for sports particularly often. He also conducts research in multi-surface interactions, augmenting sensory perception and creepy experiences of interactive technologies. Paweł received numerous paper awards (CHI, DIS, MobileHCI, EICS) and assumed multiple roles of trust in the academic community (general chair of TEI’23, ISS’21, SIGCHI Poland Chair).

Metric Learning for Ancient Coin Identification¶

Nathan Sprague · Fri, Sep 25

Ancient coin identification is an instance-level recognition problem with a difficult data regime: large public collections provide many coin identities, but usually only one image per physical coin, while confirmed same-coin pairs from independent sources are scarce. Because such paired datasets are costly and likely to remain small, we ask how they can best be combined with abundant single-image public data. We test whether scarce paired data can be used effectively as an adaptation signal for tuning augmentations, which then provide synthetic repeated views of the public single-image identities used to train an embedding model. Our ArcFace-based pipeline tunes augmentation hyperparameters on repeated-image validation data and trains on public coin identities. For controlled evaluation, we introduce a curated dataset of 3,708 images covering 309 coin sides under varied lighting and reproduction conditions, including print--scan catalog-style artifacts. In this controlled setting, direct paired training achieves 98.01% Recall\@1, while augmentation-guided public-data training achieves 94.57% without using paired identities as supervised training classes. Ablations identify augmentation tuning and preservation of intermediate spatial features as the principal contributors to public-data performance.

What is Research Integrity?: Foundations for trustworthy science¶

Michael Kirkpatrick · Fri, Sep 18

Science only works for society if people can trust it. What happens to that trust if someone publishes a paper with fake data? What if journal editors automatically accept research if you pay them? What if peer reviewers just ask ChatGPT how to write the review? Systems built on trust have a lot of opportunities to be attacked, and the goal of research integrity is to protect the best parts of science from these threats.

Since 2017, Dr. Kirkpatrick has served in a variety of research integrity roles for ACM, the world’s largest professional society for computer science. This talk will give a broad overview of the landscape of research and publication misconduct, including (anonymized) exemplars of violations. It will also describe efforts to combat these problems and what we can all do to help out. Whether you’re a faculty member with years of research experience or an undergraduate hoping to get started—or even if you just like hearing about bad things people do—this talk is for you.

What is CS/IT research? (15 minutes) / Faculty Flash Talks (Roughly 2-3 minutes each)¶

Faculty flash talks · Fri, Sep 11

Join us for an overview of computer science and information technology research followed by 2 to 3-minute flash talks giving you an overview of ongoing research within the JMU Computer Science department. Whether you are looking to get into research or just interested in learning more, you are welcome!

Contact¶

The series is organized by John Bowers (bowersjc at jmu.edu). Interested in giving a talk, or in inviting a speaker? Get in touch.