CS Newsletter 2025

Here is what happened with the Computer Science department!

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Table of Contents

Student Haptic Arcade Showcases Interactive Touch Based Projects Across Computer Science and Media Arts and Culture

Teddy Pozo


(Poster by Rayla Dominoe)

With the lights turned down low, a soundtrack of chill beats, and images advertising student games glowing from the projector screens on the walls, media classroom LIB 15 was transformed this Spring into a unique arcade. Presentations, poster sessions, and demos are an essential part of the Occidental Computer Science curriculum, and for Haptic Media (COMP/MAC 271, Professor Teddy Pozo), students tried to make this format as interactive and immersive as they could. The class studied the sense of touch from haptic technologies like vibrating video game controllers, ridefilms, and electric gaming vests, to the haptic aesthetics of video art, indie game design, and body genres like comedy and horror. For the Haptic Arcade, students had to combine some physical interaction or installation touching the user with the more ephemeral touch of texture, intersubjectivity, or other ways to touch the player's feelings and emotions.

Some installations, like the pillows and blankets of waking up (Mia Ellis) or the mushroom forest gaming PC of Mushie World (Jose Bustamante, Brian Cuellar, Rayla Dominoe, Marvin Romero, Malakai Strong) seemed more soft and welcoming, though the content of the game itself might contrast emotionally with the cozy environment.

The emotional rollercoaster of waking up rewarded players for reaching one of its three endings by giving them a corresponding handmade bracelet representing that outcome, handmade by creator Mia Ellis.


(Bracelets given for each ending of waking up)



(Creators Jose Bustamante [top center], Rayla Dominoe [bottom left] and Malakai Strong [bottom right] demo Mushie World to Lavender Perry [bottom center] and other attendees)

Some games could be played alone, though frequently audiences looked over the shoulders of players to see the work on display. Others like the screening room and large book of Re:Imagine were best experienced by a talkative group, transforming the self reflection and sometimes harsh judgment of the interactive movie into a combative and humorous interplay between audience and screen.


(Seolbin Hong screening Re:Imagine in the Critical Making Studio)

Zoo Horror (Renquan Zhao and Victor Zhu), isolated the player within an arcade machine made out of a torn cardboard box to add to the game's creepy, mysterious, and surreal atmosphere, conveyed on screen by multiple clashing styles of AI-generated art.


(Zoo Horror's mysterious rulebook)

The installation itself could be interactive as in Saving Dorado (Stephanie Cruz, Basho Fleming, Isa Ramos, Diego Santiago), a mystery visual novel, which included puzzles solved with tiles and boards outside the screen, its ticking countdown adding suspense to the puzzle mechanics.



(Top: Marvin Romero plays Saving Dorado. Bottom: letter tiles used to solve puzzles in the game)

Some students made custom control interfaces: Gods and Worship (Nico Cantrell, Stevie Cherryholmes) was an experimental demo simulating absolute power over a character's world, showing how a game could react to unintuitive inputs from a laptop, like the player covering a camera or inserting a USB port, to change day into night or Spring into Fall.


(Nico Cantrell showcases Gods and Worship)

Nvisible (Kasio Dalton, Hannah Glueck, and Lavender Perry) used its retro web design to transport the player into another era of webrings and friends sharing their personal lives through HTML and CSS. It also included paper photographs as a form of game control: the player could only get past certain parts of the game by tearing up the photographs on the table and dropping them in a box, reacting to the simple command "DESTROY."

Projects were sometimes more completed and sometimes in early stages, but all were playable and interactive, and the installation let students, professors, and their friends give valuable feedback to the works in progress. This in-person showcase comes after two previous Haptic Arcades at Occidental College, the virtual Haptic Arcade of 2021 held during quarantine in Gather Town, and the 2022 Haptic Arcade held in the President's Dining Room and Morrison Lounge.

If you're interested, why not check out what the students made? These projects from the 2024 Haptic Arcade are playable and documented online for easy access to anyone unable to attend the showcase. Some have been changed from the showcase version to be more playable outside that context.

Automation Cello Concerto

During the Summer 2021 Arts and Technology Institute, organized by Professor Teddy Pozo and funded by the Mellon Foundation, Music Professor Adam Schoenberg and Professor Kathryn Leonard teamed up on on cello concerto that Prof. Schoenberg was composing. The narrative of the concerto is a tense interaction between a human cellist and an AI entity, AGNES (Automated Generative Network for Excellent Songs) playing the halldorophone. The concerto opens with peaceful melodies of the humans living without technology. AGNES arrives, and is slowly taught through mimicry to play music. Eventually, AGNES' skill surpasses human skill, making for an epic showdown as AGNES and the human cellist compete for the orchestra's loyalty. Ultimately, orchestra loyalty returns to the human, AGNES is integrated, and the concerto concludes with a new form of peace that includes technology.

The west coast premiere of Automation took place in January 2024 with the San Jose Symphony (SJS). Profs. Schoenberg and Leonard were hosted by the symphony to provide context, philosophy, and background on the concerto. The concert was reported on in multiple venues, including the San Francisco Chronicle.

Alumni Interview: Anaiah Diop

I first met Anaiah Diop as a senior student in Haptic Media where she presented her game design 925, a demo for a surreal office horror game, inside a cubicle installation. Anaiah's senior comps project was equally creative: an interactive webcomic that used all the features of the digital medium to expand what comics could be. After graduation, Anaiah joined Spotify as an Associate Software Engineer, following a software engineering internship in the summer after her Junior and Senior years.

This Summer 2024, I caught up with Anaiah in her new role as Associate Software Engineer at the New York Times, where she is a member of the New Games team. Fans of NYT Games will recognize the new word search game Strands as a project she worked on in later stages. In a multi-skilled group, Anaiah has been creating prototypes based on designs from the team.

Outside work, Anaiah pursues creative passions like music, art, design, and photography. She plays bass and designs the posters and video backdrops for her band, Kid Voyager, and is always learning new skills.

This interview is abbreviated for length and clarity. If you want to talk to Anaiah, please reach out on LinkedIn or at anaiahdiop@gmail.com!

Anaiah Diop [AD]: I saw your faculty profile in the newsletter [from years ago]. Do you still feel like the students at Oxy are amazing, or engaging, from what you said there?

Teddy Pozo [TP]: Totally. I really love the Occidental students. The Computer Science students in particular are really passionate and I love how open minded everyone is, and creative.

Anaiah Diop [AD]: It's kind of funny. We just got interns [at the New York Times games] and we have some engineering interns, product interns, data, almost everyone has done a Computer Science major but was dabbling with art in some way. I feel like having more media and tech art classes would be something very cool for Oxy to explore and more niche.

Everyone at the New York Times has - me included - such different backgrounds and dabblings in other things. Everyone is very intelligent, but so diverse in that way. It's something very inspiring that I don't think every job is going to have. I feel like I'm tapping into a lot of different parts of myself.

The band's doing well. We just did a gay battle of the bands. We're recording right now. The media part of me has been getting into film and visualizers. I'm doing more design stuff that I've never done before. I do all the flyers; I silkscreen; I love doing collage. I designed a total collage of like a million pieces of astronauts and then I had a friend do some animation for it, so that astronauts were behind us for this battle of the bands. We're kind of like a sci-fi themed band.

I tap into that because I'm very intense about everything I do. If something's gonna get done it's got to be good. I've had people genuinely come up to me when I was selling merch and stuff, like "wow, you did that?" I thought it would be obvious that I made it or designed it, but I totally forgot you could get someone else to do it. Someone who is a designer, who makes logos was like, this is really good. Like "do you sell your art?" I was like "whoa whoa whoa. I am a software engineer. So the bass, band stuff is the side gig."

I've been getting more into film, because there's this nonprofit that makes it more accessible to make films. I feel like haptic visuality [from Haptic Media] is something that stuck with me a lot. And my New Wave Cinema class. I want to do a self portrait series.

I know I'm overloading you with all these things.

Teddy Pozo [TP]: No, this is great! What was your relationship to Computer Science, as a major, or the subject? How did you get into game design?

Anaiah Diop [AD]: I was a Computer Science major, I did a Studio Art minor, and I did a Media Arts and Culture minor, which I did in my last year. I declared Computer Science my Freshman Fall. I knew I liked it, and I wanted to do something lucrative. Computer Science is one of those things, like, everyone should have a little bit of it under their belt. It's very helpful just to understand how things get built.

I took a game design class at the end of my Sophomore year, which was more about how to make a game, game coding. And then COVID hit right at the end of it, and that kind of fizzled out. Everything changed my Senior year, studying media. All of the things I had to think about in Haptic Media, all of the things I had to think about with intentionality in my media classes, played a heavy role in what I do. Media and [computing] mixes together, and with New York Times even, I'm the engineer there, but it is such a collaborative space that everyone pitches in and gives feedback.

At the New York Times we have these design weeklies where we basically talk with the mission heads like the head of games. With games like Strands, which is a game I helped work on in the end, you're trying to solve specific problems. You're trying to go for a specific intention. How can we make this more obvious? How can we solve it? We want to think about and reflect on how we communicate the game mechanics, how certain game mechanics change how hard it is. Sitting and thinking about feelings.

Even though I'm the engineer, all of our meetings are collaborative and open, anyone can make a puzzle. I could make a Strands puzzle. We have Editorial, whose main job is to make content, but it's open for anyone. At Spotify and other jobs, we have design, but this one is so much more integral because it's an interactive space where we're trying to have users take a certain path.

I love engineering, but I'm exposed to so much in my role outside of engineering that is really refreshing. When it comes to the engineering side it's all about being quickly flexible. Because I'm prototyping. We're not thinking about maintenance, we're not even doing any testing actually. It really is just about letting this be easily tested by our stakeholders, by other people, testing this button right here. Being very iterative. Puzzle designers, UX, UI designers, have a whole lot of work to do and we're waiting. It's going to hit us because once they're done we have a whole brand new game. We work on multiple prototypes at a time, and there's only three engineers, which is more than they used to have. It's a lot of context switching. I love that this other part of my brain gets to be exercised so much because it's so collaborative.

Teddy Pozo [TP]: It sounds like you're negotiating what your role is as an engineer within this game design team. How many people are on your team?

Anaiah Diop [AD]: We have eight people and check these demographics. So out of eight people, six of us are women. Out of eight people, six are people of color. I'm pretty sure six are queer. There's three engineers. All the engineers are queer actually. What are the odds of having a makeup like this? I've done a lot of queer tech, out in tech mentorship, out in tech undergrad. I don't know if the people I see on the regular, if everyone is queer. I know everyone on the games mission who are queer because we have a Slack together and there are maybe 16 of us, so my team is pulling hard in the concentration of it.

So [on the team] there's a product manager, engineering manager, user experience, user interface designer, producer, puzzle designer, and three engineers.

When they hired me, they wanted someone with more of an art background. They've mentioned I was kind of the perfect fit. If they wanted someone who could just build, they would have got that, but they didn't want that. It's not like every other software engineering job, which I don't mind, but that's not what they want. Every prototype is extremely different, so we can't standardize a lot. We need to be very flexible to try new things constantly.

Teddy Pozo [TP]: So you're always learning new skills.

Anaiah Diop [AD]: Yes, every day. As an Associate Engineer, always, especially. There's so much to learn always.

I definitely want to say for the Oxy students, if you're ever doubting you know how to code, I feel that way all the time. Experience is essential. There's no way for you to know these things until you just do them. And I think the most important thing is to be able to pick something up and a willingness to throw yourself into something new.

I had a mentor. He's a Senior Engineer. He just started a new job and he's working with all new languages. There's no doubt coming from him that he will learn. He knows he has the skills to just adjust. That is pretty important for any software engineering role, but definitely for my job, New Games. Being ready to just pivot is important and just pick up a new approach and technology.

That's something that Oxy does teach, but I wasn't aware of. Sometimes I felt like I didn't "learn to code" at Oxy, but maybe what was more important is, as my senior engineer recently said, the ability to learn and critical thinking. You're not going to remember everything, so you need to be able to look up documentation, and just try something out.

Teddy Pozo [TP]: When I was teaching 131 with Prof. Justin Li, it was clear to me that his philosophy for the class was about teaching computational thinking and getting the students to believe that they could learn a different language at any time for whatever they need, which is why you're learning Python for the first half of the class, and then, oops! Now you all have to do Java, right now.

Anaiah Diop [AD]: I didn't have that but I wish I did, because that would definitely have helped, leaning into that feeling. It's a state of mind and thinking that allows you to tackle problems.

I just enjoy building. As a front-end engineer specifically, any change I make you can see on the screen. That feels very good and very tangible. You can get really stuck with that, like why is this not working? But it's kind of fun to just get something to work and start connecting things. I always wanted more classes that have building. Combining the liberal arts way of thinking with hands-on projects, small projects. That was always my biggest fear for so long, not getting the chance to feel like I could do something. My junior year, I overloaded myself with hackathons, mentorships, all this stuff. I was so afraid I didn't know how to get a job.

On a technical level, there's so many more people who know much more. I somehow managed to get a Spotify internship out of like 100,000 applicants and then the New York Times, so I think what people are looking for is those soft skills that are a strong suit at Oxy because you're going to have to work with design and product and other people who aren't tech. Having that way of thinking can already help shape how you build and interact.

Sometimes I feel like there's a "right way" I need to be coding, and that's not true. I think as long as you get it working, and then you get the job, you'll get the experience from others and they'll help you out. You'll learn to write better code. Trying to get your hands on as much as you can will be essential.

Teddy Pozo [TP]: A lot of students want to do comps projects that involve art, like your interactive comic, but the question is, what will be enough of a computational component to constitute a COMP senior project. How did you make that work in your Senior comps?

Anaiah Diop [AD]: It worked because it needed to. It had to be a Computer Science project most of all, so I couldn't spend time on the art or anything like that. That would have killed me, you know? I had to work with two other people and that was interesting to have to communicate with them in a way that makes sense. It was tough. They were also two very different kinds of people. One didn't do any drafting and only gave final sketches, but it would have been good to have placeholder art of some kind. I learned a lot about prototyping. It was pretty tough.

I basically had to put the tech part first, which is what the interactions were gonna be. It was kind of hard to figure that out before my story. The story can ideally at least give direction on the art. If there's an interaction that feels very compelling to you, that can be a jumping off point. One interaction I knew I liked before anything else was this feeling of panning around as something is happening with you. I tried to focus on what is this interaction and what is the feeling it brings? And then I think about this feeling that I'm able to bring, how can I make that into something narrative?

I know I'm naturally inclined towards things that make you feel unsettled. So I thought it would be cool, right after the character trips and falls, utilizing it being a website, utilizing JavaScript to take away control with certain buttons. I had that be the forefront. As long as you emphasize what the art is trying to accomplish, so that you have the technical part to do something with.

Games are underrated as storytelling devices. It's just another good way to have stories be told, but it's going to feel very different.

Teddy Pozo [TP]: Do you have any advice for Computer Science majors at Occidental who are worried about the future, getting a job?

Anaiah Diop [AD]: Getting an internship definitely would be nice. It's going to give you hands-on experience you wouldn't be able to learn anywhere else.

I think the second thing you can do that you don't need someone else for is to make projects. Find whatever it is that makes you passionate and excited, and get the ability to build. For me it was that tech art media game stuff. For someone else I went to Oxy with, he was an upperclassman, he would wake up every morning to surf. So his comps was an application that allowed him to track the waves.

I've asked advice from other engineers in my field, and working on side projects is what helps you get the skills to get the job. There's someone who's doing really cool VR stuff for the New York Times, and he just looked at the technologies they used and made projects on his own. He became qualified because he had a portfolio of hands-on examples. Finding whatever silly side project that you can, that will be the second thing.

I loved my time at Oxy, so if anyone wants to ask me about anything, I'm happy to be a resource for some advice. My superpower was asking for help and reaching out, and I realize a lot of people don't! The ones that do, really care.

Biography of Prof. Dong Phan-Yamada

Tuyetdong Phan-Yamada joined the Computer Science Department as a visiting professor in 2023, where she teaches Introductory Statistics. Her teaching history, however, begins in her native country of Vietnam, where in 1989 she completed her pedagogy program and began her career as a Physics and Math middle school teacher. She immigrated to the United States in 1994, where she again studied to be a teacher; graduating from the University of California, Irvine in 2002 with a B.S. in Mathematics, and in 2004 with her Single Subject Math Teaching Credential. Tuyetdong Phan-Yamada finished her M.S. degree in Mathematics in 2010 at CSU Los Angeles.

Mrs. Phan-Yamada has taught math courses at many levels. She has taught: Geometry, College Algebra, Trigonometry, Statistics, Math for Elementary Teachers, Math for Liberal Arts, Pre-Calculus, Calculus, Linear Algebra and Discrete Math at public high schools and colleges in the Los Angeles area from 2004 to present.

Mrs. Phan-Yamada enjoys building interactive graphical illustrations with GeoGebra, which she integrates into her lesson plans in Statistics, Trigonometry, and Calculus courses. She has presented much of this work in conferences and in journals. Her paper, Hypocycloids and Hypotrochoids was on the front page of MathAMATYC Educator Journal for September 2014. She extended her computational activities from the classroom to industry practice as a Summer'14 faculty research fellow at JPL, Pasadena. Tuyetdong is passionate about the subject of Mathematics and Statistics, best practices for teaching Mathematics to children and adults, and the use of Mathematics as a language for understanding the world and bringing people together.

Biography of Prof. Eugenio Grippo

Eugenio Grippo received his MS and PhD in EE (Electrical Engineering) from University of Southern California (USC), where he also conducted Postdoctoral studies in Computer Science (CS); he received his "Automation and Industrial Control Engineer" degree from Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (UNQUI, Buenos Aires, Argentina).

His research interest is in the area of modeling and control of the electric power grid using mathematical curvature theory. He also expanded his research area interest to ML (Machine Learning), DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and IoT (Internet of Things) while pursuing his postdoc at USC.

He worked in the ANRG (Autonomous Network Research Group) center at USC where he conducted research in machine learning, distributed computing, IoT and cybersecurity. After that, he worked in the ICAROS LAB (Interactive and Collaborative Autonomous Robotics Lab) at USC where he conducted research in robotics.

He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Occidental College, Los Angeles, USA; and an Adjunct Professor in Data Science at Pacific States University, Los Angeles, USA.

Contact Computer Science
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Phone: (323) 259-1370
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