Sunday, March 4, 2012

Winning!

 Who knew before last week that a small liberal arts focused college computer science project stood a chance against bigger universities (like Virginia Tech, Duke, Carnegie Mellon)? As the title implies, despite going to SIGCSE with little expectation other than to have fun at the poster session I had better odds than  imagined!

Firstly some action shots from the poster session:
Me with the project poster.

Two of the judges for the competition hearing my elevator pitch.
After the poster session wrapped up, semi-finalists were posted. Naturally as the title implied I didn't just pack up and go home, I made it to the semi-finals! This required a mad dash of prep work under Dr. Rivoire's supervision to organize a talk that could make or break going on to being a finalist.

Each of the 5 semi finalists had to give a talk and be ready for a Q&A session afterwards.

Giving a talk - less scary once I got started.
The judges must have seen something in the talk because I came home with this lovely third place medal and a chance to go on to the Grand Finale!


Based on the SIGCSE results, Dr. Rivoire and I are currently looking to enter this project in the CSU Student Research Competition at CSU Long Beach and continue onward in the ACM Student Research Grand Final.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

And the nominees are....

After a nerve wracking wait, we are pleased to announce that this research has been accepted into the SIGCSE Student Research Competition!! The peer review induced wait between submitting an abstract and hearing back to see if the research had been accepted meant many a night refreshing email with baited breath and fingers crossed. There was much rejoicing when that email that begin Congratulations arrived in my inbox.


I'll be presenting a poster on this very research later this year in March, fighting with the other undergraduates to outshine and throw down for the glory & prizes.