SIGCSE inroads, June 2007
New Alliances and Continuing Excellence
Greetings!
This year has seen some revisions in operating procedures for UPE, along with new chapters, a new alliance, and another bumper crop of awards to deserving students. Probably the most exciting of our changes is the hope of bringing a regular presence to the SIGCSE winter meeting. When the ACM Computer Science Conference (CSC) ceased its annual operation a decade ago, it left the Intenational Computer Programming Contest (ICPC) and UPE National Meeting without a home. For many reasons, largely fiscal matters and UPE’s role in founding the ICPC, the National Meeting has followed the ICPC. Unfortunately, with SIGCSE and ICPC strong enough to stand on their own without the former “Computing Week” umbrella, these activities eventually diverged, leaving us with very little connection to SIGCSE aside from an occasional booth, and of course this column. Fortunately, we are planning to test the waters at SIGCSE 2008, which should bring us together with our most natural constituency, computer science educators. See you there!
A New Alliance
Upsilon Pi Epsilon has a new friend, the ACM Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W). We are proud to recognize the contributions of ACM-W by revising our procedure for scholarship applications. Whereas traditionally we have accepted up to two scholarship applications annually from UPE chapters (one for an undergraduate and one for a graduate student), we now will permit an additional application from schools that have an ACM-W chapter. (The applicant should be an ACM-W member!) If you haven’t heard of ACM-W or haven’t taken the initiative to start an ACM-W chapter, you may consider this as a strong word of encouragement. Look them up – they’re in the book!
Abacus Award
UPE’s most esteemed award pays tribute to the role of the abacus as a precursor to electronic computers – it’s the original laptop, after all. The Abacus Award was created for the purpose “of recognizing outstanding individuals who have provided extensive support and leadership for student-related activities in the computing sciences”. The recipient in 2006 was David Patterson, whose lifetime of contributions to education and the world of computing are so voluminous that no amount of tribute I can pay here could do him justice. How many of us have benefited from his textbooks, his stewardship as ACM President, or a RAID array, for instance? We are indeed proud to list his name as an Abacus awardee.
Student Awards:
I know I speak for the entire Executive Council when I say how uplifting it is to review our members’ scholarship applications and decide on awards. Be assured that the applications are read carefully and debated heavily. This year’s applicants have once again been inspirational.
Awards include UPE Scholarships, including the Dan Drew and Jim Nolen Scholarships, and UPE/ACM Student Chapter Scholarship Awards. Please join me in congratulating this year’s awardees (shown below):
UPE Dan Drew Scholarship ($1000)
Jonathan Hudson Clark (Texas Christian University, undergraduate student)
Jonathan is pursuing a B.S. in computer science with a Mathematics minor. He has been a research assistant in natural language processing and computer vision. He also has interned at Language Computer Corporation and participated in Google Summer of Code. He is vice-president of TCU’s chapter of UPE.
UPE Jim Nolen Scholarship ($1000)
Jonathan Franklin Gemmel (DePaul University, graduate student)
Jonathan is a Ph.D. student with research interests in grid computing, machine learning and bioinformatics. His background includes a BA in Classics and many years’ experience as a currency and derivatives trader. As vice-president and president of the large and active DePaul chapter, he has also organized quite a few research seminars.
Upsilon Pi Epsilon Scholarships ($1000 each)
Undergraduate
Bryan Nourse Culbertson (Lafayette College)
Renée De Voursney (University of Puget Sound)
Gabriel A. Golcher (Rose-Hulman Institute of Tech)
Floyd Charles Johnson II (St. Joseph’s College, NY)
Jason Neel (Slippery Rock University)
Xuan Thanh Quach (Brigham Young University – Hawaii)
Graduate
James W. Sander (University of North Florida)
Upsilon Pi Epsilon Scholarships ($500 each)
Undergraduate
Chase Montgomery Gray (University of South Carolina)
Bryan Daniel Price (Jacksonville State University)
Graduate
Naveen Kumar Santhapuri (University of South Carolina)
As always, these students distinguished themselves with a stirring array of activities. There was a noticeable trend towards more research among our undergraduates this year. Likewise, civic activities were in abundance: Renée raised funds for Katrina victims, and refurbished computers for donation to underprivileged children; Floyd has taught computer skills and set up a network for an Indian reservation. And while these students were outstanding academically as expected, I was still impressed to find two who are pursuing triple majors, with an additional minor or two to keep them occupied! The future plans of our awardees provide a nice glimpse of the future indeed, including bioinformatics, data mining, web services, multi-agent systems, and wireless mesh networks.
UPE/ACM Student Chapter Scholarship Awards
The UPE/ACM Student Chapter Scholarship Awards are offered annually “to raise the importance of academic achievement and professional commitment in our future computer professionals”. This year’s applicants were quite impressive, resulting in three finalists.
Finalists ($1000 each):
Sunny Huynh (Drexel University)
Joseph Talmage Patrick (North Carolina State University)
Elizabeth Samuel (Howard University)
All three of these students have been very active in their school’s chapters since their freshman years. Sunny has been vice-president and president twice each, during which the chapter has sponsored numerous lectures, LAN parties, student-faculty forums and debates on controversial computing topics. They were also a founder and sponsor of ACM SCENE (Student Chapter Event for the Northeast), attended by students and faculty from dozens of schools. He is majoring in Computer Science with minors in Mathematics, Software Engineering and Business Administration, and has co-oped at Siemens and Analytical Graphics, Inc.
Elizabeth is majoring in Systems and Computer Science, has been chapter secretary, and is serving her second term as president. She has also served as vice-president of the Howard UPE chapter and president of the Tau Beta Pi chapter. She has proven excellent at encouraging others to get involved in activities, be it the programming contest, tutoring, or attending graduate school. She has interned at Microsoft and Goldman Sachs and served as a laboratory assistant at Howard.
Joseph, better known to his classmates as Talmage, is a rising junior and president-elect who is double majoring in CS and Business. He has also served as chapter treasurer and has been an undergraduate teaching assistant. He has been a great contributor and organizer of chapter events and organized the CS department’s end-of-semester picnic, while maintaining his 4.0 GPA.
Other Awards:
Of course, UPE maintained its support of ICPC, with awards for each of the record 84 participating teams. With our two-tiered system that awards higher amounts to schools with a UPE chapter, the final tally was close to $35,000. The number rises again in 2007, with 88 teams competing.
In addition to these awards, UPE also supported three $500 IEEE-CS scholarships, and provided $1,200 in funding to the Consortium for Computer Science in Colleges (CCSC), which is distributed among its member regions.
IEEE-CS:
The 2005 UPE/CS Award for academic excellence consists of a $500 UPE/CS Scholarship, Certificate of Commendation, IEEE Computer Society one-year periodical subscription.
This award is offered to encourage academic excellence by IEEE Computer Society student members and to promote the development of our future professionals.
The winners were
Arun Kejariwal – University of California at Irvine 4.0 GPA
Moshen Shaaban – University of Louisiana at Lafayette. 3.97 GPA
Arun K. Pai – Queen’s University Belfast
All three recipients are PhD students. Arun K. is the graduate student representative on Graduate Council of Academic Senate and serves on its Coordinating Committee on Graduate Affairs and Academic Planning Council. He has been appointed as the graduate student representative of all the campuses of the University of California. He is Student Editor of IEEE Potentials, and is active in the IEEE Student Activities Committee. His research is in optimizing and parallelizing compilers.
Moshen interned at Intel. He spent two yrs advising undergraduate CS majors. His research is on low-power hardware and software designs for multimedia applications. He has organized a student paper contest for graduate students, was president of his IEEE CS student chapter, which won outstanding student chapter award, and has been a technical reviewer for many conferences.
Arun P.’s research is on System-On-a-Chip design, and the design and implementation of a high performance programmable image and video processor. His team won the Cruickshank & Co. All Ireland technology innovative enterprise award, finishing first among 400 entries.
You see? I told you these students were impressive. Hopefully you have found reading about their activities as encouraging as we did. I continue to have great confidence in the future.
Cheers,
… jp
