Students who write theses spend an entire academic year working on an in-depth study with the help and direction of a faculty member. In addition to writing a thesis, each student gives a seminar late in spring semester. The thesis seminar weeks are busy and exciting times around the department.

Copies of student theses are located in the Computer Science office in the Science Center.  If you are a current student and would like a copy of a thesis, please email your request to  Leena Valge (lvvalge@amherst.edu) and let her know which one you would like. 

2022

  • Luke Duranović worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on "Page Protection as a Viable Memory Tracing and Management Technique for a Single Process"
  • Quincy Hughes worked with Prof. Will Rosenbaum on "Super-Stable Matchings and K-Range Preferences
  • Alexander Lee worked with Prof. Matteo Riondato on "Diffusr: Distortion-Free Swap-Randomization for Statistically-Testing Data Mining Results"
  • William Turchetta worked with Prof. Kristen Gardner on "Understanding Slowdown in Large Scale Heterogeneous Systems"
  • Yajie Wan worked with Prof. Lee Spector on "Upstream Reciprocity in a Decentralized Social Network"
  • Chloe Wohlgemuth worked with Prof. Scott Alfeld on "Kernelized K-Planes Clustering"

2021

  • Nicholas Joseph Carolan worked with Prof. Lee Spector on "Saliency-Conditioned Image Generation Through Image-to-Image Translation"
  • Isaac William Caruso worked with Prof. Matteo Riondato on "Bayesian Inference with Stan for Hybrid Species Distribution Modeling"
  • Benjamin Lewis Fleischmann worked with Prof. Lee Spector on "Generating Polyphonic Music with a Recurrent Generative Adversarial Network"
  • Maria-Cristiana Girjau worked with Prof. Lee Spector on "An Analysis of Generation Gaps in Genetic Programming"
  • Samantha Rydzewski worked with Prof. Alfeld on "An Empirical Investigation of a Naive Attacker"
  • Lesley J. Zheng worked with Prof. Gardner on "Cost of Choices: Investigating the Cost of Polling under JSQ-D Dispatching Policy"

2020

  • Kathleen Therese Isenegger worked with Prof. Matteo Riondato on "Approximate Mining of High Utility Itemsets through Sampling"
  • William Jang worked with Prof. Scott Alfeld on "Reconstructing Aspects of Training Sets of Sequential Learners"
  • Christopher J Rabasa worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on "Reference Trace Collection for Virtual Memory Policy Evaluation"
  • Shukry Emilio Zablah Gavarrete worked with Prof. Matteo Riondato on "A Parallel Algorithm for Balanced Sampling"

2019

  • Alexander Roland Einarsson worked with Prof. Kristen Gardner on "Partial Priority Queueing A Method for Alleviating the Starvation Problem"
  • Lucas Newman-Johnson worked with Prof. Scott Alfeld on "Manipulating Learners:  Constrained Training Time Attacks Against Data Processing Pipelines"
  • Mackenzie Stein worked with Prof. Scott Alfeld on "Training Autoregressive Forecasters to be Robust Against Test Time Attacks"
  • Cole R. Stephens worked with Prof. Kristen Gardner on "Accomplishment Sampling: A Novel Approach for Dispatching to Heterogeneous Server Farms"
  • Jamie Tucker-Foltz worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Sparse Graph Minor Embedding"

2018

  • Jeffrey J. Ewing worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on "Redesigning Compressed Caching for Modern Systems"

2017

  • Matthew C. Macoy worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on "A Look into the Future of Compressed Caching in Virtual Memory"

2016

  • Michael Borkowski worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Algorithms for Public Transit Routing"

2015

  • Mark Idleman worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on “Shortest Path Search in Road Networks via Pruned Highway Labeling”
  • Allen Li worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on “Examination of the behavior of compressed caching and the optimal use thereof”
  • Michael Millian worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on “Reliability and Capabilities of Brower-Based Botnets for Distributed Computing”

2014

  • Gregory Cohan worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on “Incorporating Twitter Data into Machine Learning Models for Predicting Crime”
  • Michael Curry worked with Prof. Cathy McGeoch on “Heuristic optimization of grid minors”
  • Allison Koo worked with Prof. Cathy McGeoch on “A dynamic model for prior-free auction mechanism design”
  • Mike Podgorski worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on “Road Trip Planning”
  • Colin White worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on “Lower Bounds on the Runtime of Routing Algorithms for Graphs of Low Highway Dimension”

2013

  • Benjamin Pullman worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on "Detection of Unintentionally Obfuscated JavaScript"
  • Mark Santolucito worked with Prof. Scott Kaplan on "A Reevaluation and New Application for Compressed Caching"

2012

  • Kristen Gardner worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Shortest Path Search in Dynamic Road Networks"
  • Wenying Hu worked with Prof. Cathy McGeoch on "Mechanism Design for Optimal Auctions"

2011

  • Elisabeth Baseman worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Computing with Quantum Physics"
  • Benjamin Mears worked with Prof. Rager on "Incremental Support Vector machines with Applications to Concept Drift"
  • Benjamin (Gavin) Zalinger worked with Prof. Rager on "Scaling TD Learning to Complex Game Domains"

2010

  • Nicholaus Mollel worked with Prof. Kaplan on "Neural Networks and Page replacement"
  • Yijing Tan worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "The Foundations of the FM-Index:  Achieving Simultaneous Compression and Indexing"

2008

  • Kevin J. Nattinger worked with Prof. Kaplan on "Evolving a Better Page Replacement Algorithm"

2006

  • Owen S. Hofmann worked with Prof. Kaplan on "Reference Trace Reduction via Recency Distribution Sampling"
  • Thomas B. Jablin worked with Prof. Kaplan on "How Memory Allocators Interact with Prefetching and Clustering"

2005

  • Brian J. Lyons worked with Prof. Rager on "Predicting Chaotic Time Series Using Genetic Programming"
  • Lisa M. Wallmark worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "New Approaches to Dynamic Transitive Closure of Directed Graphs"

2004

  • Crystal L. Kahn worked with Prof. Catherine McGeoch on "Distributed Tabu Search for the Graph Coloring Problem"
  • Deborah S. Katz worked with Prof. Kaplan on "An Evaluation of the SEGQ Replacement Policy with Adaptive Variations for Running Time Reduction"
  • Isuru Seneviratne worked with Prof. Kaplan and with Prof. Emery Berger (UMass) on "Evaluating the Page-Level Locality Characteristics of Memory Allocators"
  • Miroslav J. Skovajsa worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Experimental Evaluation of Dynamic Graph Connectivity Algorithms"
  • Christopher M. Vigorito worked with Prof. Catherine McGeoch and Prof. Andrew Barto (UMass) on "Extinction Resistant Temporal-Difference Learning: A Meta-Learning Approach"

2003

  • Amy C. Adams worked with Prof. Rager on "Creating An Intelligent Opponent: Artificial Intelligence and Video Games"
  • Megan F. Cole worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "The Effects of Disk Behavior on a Dynamic Prepaging Algorithm"
  • Andrew B. Goldberg worked with Prof. Catherine McGeoch on "Highly Constrained Sports Scheduling With Genetic Algorithms"
  • Jonathan M. Kaldor worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Cutting-plane Algorithms Applied to Traveling Salesman and Graph Coloring Problems"
  • Daniel A. Murillo worked with Prof. Catherine McGeoch on "An Approximation Algorithm for the Fault Tolerant Facility Location Problem"

2002

  • Tom Briggs worked with Prof. Rager on "Automated Musical Transcription Using Hidden Markov Models"
  • Stephen B. Thomas worked with Prof. Kaplan on "The Auction Policy for Variable Space Allocation"

2001

  • Luis Manuel Hernandez worked with Prof. Rager on "Exploiting the Similarities in Agent-Based Artificial Life Implementations"
  • M. Chase Smith worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Dynamic Graph Algorithms for Connectivity and Maintaining a Minimum Spanning Forest"

2000

  • Daniel I. Dickman worked with Prof. Cathy McGeoch on "Evaluating Targeted Crawling"
  • Aaron M. Grunewald worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "A Comparative Analysis of the Run Time Performances of C++ and Java"
  • Grigori V. Kapoustin worked with Prof. Rager on "Recursive Object Definition for Interactive 3D Graphics"

1999

  • Jonathan T. Agnew worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Error Recovery in LR Parsers"

1998

  • Jill Cirasella worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "An Introduction to Quantum Computing"
  • Beth Linker worked with Prof. Rager on "A Concept-Based Search Agent for Web Sites"

1997

  • Seth Mirick worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Shape from Shading Algorithms and Light-Angle Estimation"
  • Brian Tjaden worked with Prof. Lyle McGeoch on "Local Optimizations for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem"
Tags:  computer science