Outstanding Recruitment 2012-2013

Name: University of Tehran Student Chapter

Address: Tehran, Iran

The school of ECE hosts over 70 academic and 30 support and technical staff, all of which focus on providing excellent education and furthering cutting-edge research. The ECE work environment encourages creativity, teamwork, and dedication. The school of ECE at University of Tehran (UT) helps the students keep their connection to the technology as well as developing the required skills. Offering both undergraduate and graduate programs, the school is a highly admired engineering department in Iran.

The graduate programs are flexible enough to allow the students to create their own educational goals - with faculty approval, of course. On the other hand, the undergraduate students are welcome to the laboratories and research fields of the school, in addition to participating in the faculty educational curriculum. Being within the graduate students and cooperating in their researches make the undergraduate students ready for continuing and choosing the bests.

On average, the numbers of students who major in the field of Computer Engineering and Information Technology at the school of ECE at UT per year are:

 

Field of Major	Number of students
B.Sc. in Computer Engineering:	70
B.Sc. in Information Technology	30
M.Sc. in Software Engineering	15
M.Sc. in Hardware Engineering	20
M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence	15
M.Sc. in Information Technology	10
PH.D. in Software Engineering	6
PH.D. in Hardware Engineering	6
PH.D. in Artificial Intelligence	6

Description of the chapter 

 ACM student chapter at University of Tehran began its activity on January 10, 2001 as the first ACM student chapter in Iran. The motivation of forming this chapter was to promote knowledge level of computer students in different areas of computer science. Cooperation with students who have creative ideas in different scientific programs, as well as encouraging them to pursue and improve their ideas were other goals of founding the chapter. Some of these cooperations are:

• Conducting short-time sessions for software and hardware, including introduction to technologies, methods and views

• Cooperation in organizing conferences and educational workshops, which leads to the improvement of social and managerial skills of students

• Forming and participating in groups for special purposes

This chapter is also known as the scientific chapter of the computer engineering department of University of Tehran.

ESSAY

We decided, at the beginning of our responsibility in the chapter, to share our executive and academic experiences, especially with freshmen and second-year students and assign them some roles in our activities.

AI Contest for freshmen
In the opening ceremony held by the Faculty of Engineering for the freshmen, we collected their email addresses for later notifications and awarded them a badge with the logo of our ACM Student Chapter.
We then organized an artificial intelligence programming contest for them at the end of the Fall semester, during which they should, in groups of three or four as a team, select among different strategies in a two-player game and implement their strategy. Due to their lack of skill in programming, we assigned each team a final-year student to code their proposed algorithm. After the coding task, and before the contest started, they were exposed to a forty-minute talk in the department amphitheater which was an introduction to our chapter, followed by a number of clips from our previous activities. For more information about the event, please take a look at its webpage.
Event URL: http://acm.ut.ac.ir/page/aicontest/110

Joining freshmen to our student chapter
On the first day of the fall semester, the Faculty of Engineering at University of Tehran held an opening ceremony for the freshmen engineers. We asked ten senior and junior students (all with the same T-shirts) to introduce different aspects of our chapter activities. They talked about hardware and software opportunities and also  discussed our chapter activities. Moreover, they introduced F1 Journal (our quarterly magazine) and how the freshmen can contribute as its journalists. In the ceremony, our chapter had a booth in which we distributed leaflets for introducing ACM and the chapter, F1 journal, list of our university courses and our ACM chapter pixels. We made this meeting an opportunity for the newcomers by collecting their names and emails and added them to the chapter’s mailing list.
Event URL: http://acm.ut.ac.ir/page/social/125

Programming League for sophomore students
There are always junior and senior students participating in ACM/ICPC programming contests which have a high level of complexity. For this reason, ACM Student Chapter held a programming league which consisted of four programming contests (one contest per week), for sophomore students. In each contest, the winner received a silver medal and the second and third received a bronze medal. The overall winner of the league would be the one with most solved problems in least time. The awards for the top three winners were $75, $50 and $25, respectively. During the league, there was a stand that was displaying the result.
Event URL: http://acm.ut.ac.ir/page/contests/95
Results: http://acm.ut.ac.ir/page/contests/114

F1 Scientific Journal:
This is the second year of publication of F1 journal. It covers a vast variety of topics from fun and games to interviews and academic papers. The president of the magazine is the chapter chair and all the other affairs of the magazine are handled by a group of twenty students, most of which are sophomores and penultimate year students. In one session, all the students were invited to begin their collaboration in the journal.
URL: http://acm.ut.ac.ir/page/journal/

Cinema ACM - Augmented reality:
The objective of ACM cinema is to take the students out of their dull and repetitive daily routine and familiarize them with the new technology introduced to the world every day. In this program, 3 short videos were picked by ACM team members and they were put to vote in the faculty of electrical and computer engineering. We used our website to announce this voting. After counting the 65 income votes Marco Tempest's video about Augmented Reality was chosen as the most popular.
URL: http://acm.ut.ac.ir/page/cinema/74
URL: http://acm.ut.ac.ir/page/cinema/75