University of Rochester is hosting a site for the 2010 North American Olympiad in Computational Linguistics (NACLO). NACLO is a competition for middle-school and high-school students which involves solving problems about language and computational linguistics. It consists of two rounds: the Open Round (February 4), open to all interested students, and the Invitational Round (March 10), for students who have advanced from the first round. The winners of the Invitational Competition will be invited to participate in the International Linguistics Olympiad.
Our undergraduate ACM programming team, including Dennis Huo, Ian Christopher and Xiaoqing (Sean) Tang, along with coach Daniel Stefankovic, was recently interviewed for the ABC affiliate 13WHAM TV. The team, which is headed to the World Finals in the ACM-ICPC Programming Competition in Harbin, China the first week of February, talks about the upcoming competition and their success at the regional finals in this report.
Explorations in Robotics is a Computer Science course designed for freshmen who may not have any programming experience but would like to have a more hands-on experience while learning some programming skills. Recently the class, with Adjunct Professor Hans Koomen (PhD '89), was featured in the Rochester Review Magazine.
Ashwin Lall (PhD '08) has accepted a tenure track position at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Denison is an independent, residential, liberal arts and sciences college founded in 1831 located in Central Ohio.
Lall will be in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and will join the department next fall to teach Computer Science courses. Currently, Ashwin is doing a Post-doctoral Fellowship at Georgia Tech University.
CASCON 2009 Technology Showcase has awarded the Canisius College/UR group with the Showcase Best Demo award at the plenary session of the conference. The demo, entitled "Want Not, Waste Not, Adaptive Memory Sharing in Multi-core Environment," is funded by an NSF collaborative grant between UR and Canisius College (led by Matthew Hertz). The group includes Tongxin Bai (URCS), Jonathan Bard, Stephen Kane, Elizabeth Keudel, Matthew Hertz, and Chen Ding (URCS).
President Joel Seligman met with the members of the URCS ACM Undergraduate Programming team to congratulate them for placing first in the ACM Regionals and qualifying to go to Harbin, China, in February 2010. Seligman asked the students about Saturday's event, their competition strategies, and how the team works together. He told them that URBee has been known to bring good luck and encouraged them to bring the mascots with them to China.
Nov. 1, 2009: URCS alumnus Maged Michael (Ph.D. 1997), a researcher at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, has received the company's prestigious "Research Accomplishment" award for his development of lock-free memory management techniques.
The undergraduate team of Ian Christopher '10, Dennis Huo '10, and Xiaoqing Tang '12 won the ACM-ICPC Regional programming competition at RIT on Saturday, October 31st. As a result, they will advance to the World Finals, to be held in Harbin, China, February 1-6, 2010. This will be UR's first appearance at the World Finals.
IEEE recently selected an ISCA '09 paper written by Engin Ipek with colleagues at Microsoft Research as "one of the 12 most significant computer architecture papers of 2009 based on novelty and long-term impact." Each year, the IEEE publishes its ``Micro's Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences'' as its January/February 2010 issue; the selection is made by a committee of senior architects.
The University of Rochester Yellowjackets ACM team placed first in the preliminary round of the ACM-Intercollegiate Computer Programming Competition, held this year at SUNY Fredonia on Saturday, October 17th. The team of Ian Christopher '10, Dennis Huo '10 and Xiaoqing (Sean) Tang '12 solved 6 questions with a time of 323. RIT's team #2 came in 2nd, solving 5 questions with a time of 1028, in a field of eleven teams.
Click here to see the complete standings.