ACM Computer Research Contest Honors Student Innovations

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The Association for Computing Machinery
Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession

Contact: Virginia Gold
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NEW YORK, June 7, 2011 -- At its awards ceremony, ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) honored the Grand Finals winners of its Student Research Competition (SRC) with awards and cash prizes for achievements in computing research.   The graduate and undergraduate winners competed against more than 50 participants in contests held at 13 ACM conferences. Their research covered a range of computing innovations that have applications for high-performance computer systems designs, image retrieval systems for astrophysicists, scalability for file system directories, improvements in massively-parallel graphics processors, biochips for clinical diagnostics and biochemical procedures, and assistive technologies for speech-impaired people.  

ACM's Student Research Competition Program is sponsored by Microsoft Research to encourage students to pursue careers in computer science research, and to ensure the future of scientific discovery and innovation. The awards were presented June 4 at the ACM Awards Banquet in San Jose, CA. 

SRC Grand Finals Results
In the graduate student category, Swapnil Patil of Carnegie Mellon University took first place for his development of a file system director service that scales to millions of files, presented at the SC10 Supercomputing Conference.  Second place went to Nurcan Durak of the University of Louisville for her work on the retrieval of images with coronal loops from solar image databases, presented at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference.  The third place winner was Xiangyu Dong of Pennsylvania State University for his research on non-volatile memories for future computer designs, presented at the 2010 Design Automation Conference.           

In the undergraduate category, Peter Calvert of the University of Cambridge won first place for his research on offloading Java to graphics processors, presented at the 2010 Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT) Conference.  Tsung-Wei Huang of the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, was awarded second place for his work on design and optimization for digital microfluidic biochips, presented at the 2010 Design Automation Conference.  The third place finisher was Timothy Walsh of the University of Delaware for his research on the design and development of electronic assistive interfaces for utterance-based systems, presented at the ASSETS 2010 Conference on Computers and Accessibility.  

The competitions, held at 13 major ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) conferences within the last year, featured research projects produced by an international array of computer science graduate and undergraduate students. By offering the experience of a real-world conference to prepare and present research to the community, these competitions give students an opportunity to demonstrate success in problem-solving projects with early practice and preparation of their research. 

Originally conducted as a single event at the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) conference, the SRCs now take place throughout the academic year.  Entries are judged on the quality and significance of the work, as well as the quality and clarity of the oral and visual presentations of results.  SRC winners from each of the SIG  conference competitions are then eligible to compete in the Grand Finals, where their research is evaluated over the world wide web by a panel of judges.  

The top three undergraduate and graduate winners at each SRC receive prizes of $500, $300, and $200, respectively (USD), as well as an award plaque and a two-year complimentary ACM membership with a subscription to ACM’s Digital Library.  The top three graduate and undergraduate Grand Finalists receive an additional $500, $300, and $200 respectively and Grand Finalist plaques, and are invited to ACM's annual Awards Banquet.

The ACM Special Interest Group conferences that sponsored SRC events during the recently completed contest include:

2010 CHI (Computer-Human Interaction)    

2010 ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering)   

2010 PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation)    

2010 DAC (Design Automation Conference)

2010 SIGGRAPH (Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques)

2010 SIGCOMM (Data Communications)    

2010 PACT (Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques)  

2010 Mobicom (Mobile Computing and Networking)  

2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing     

2010 SPLASH (formerly OOPSLA)    

2010 ASSETS (Computers and Accessibility)    

2010 SC (Supercomputing Conference)   

2011 SIGCSE (Computer Science Education)    

 

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.