ANOTHER FIRST PRIZE!...Ben Bostwick (MS student, ECE), Carl Evankovich (Sophomore, CS), and Rob Miller (PhD student, CS) have won First Prize in the Personal Productivity/Team Category of the the ACM Quest for Windows CE Contest. Their program, Slide Show Commander, allows a Windows CE hand-held computer to act as a remote control for a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Using this program, a speaker can change slides, view notes, and draw on the presented slide for annotation or emphasis. The team has noted their special thanks to faculty advisor, Brad Myers, for his advice and support. Details on Slide Show Commander can be found at www.cs.cmu.edu/~pebbles/ while particulars on the contest and other winners are at www.acm.org/windowsce/.

NEW DISTINCTIONS...Justin Boyan (now alum!) has received the Best Paper Award for his submission, "Least-Squares Temporal Difference Learning" from the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-99). The paper documented part of his thesis work (Thesis = Learning Evaluation Functions for Global Optimization/CMU CS-98-152), and is the second publication dealing with his thesis topic to receive top honors (AAAI98, Justin Boyan and Andrew Moore for their work on a new learning algorithm STAGE). For specifics, visit www-ai.ijs.si/SasoDzeroski/ICML99/main.html. Okay Justin!

PROPOSALS...
SUNDAR VEDULA offers a "Multi-View Spatial and Temporal Interpolation for Dynamic Event Visualization" at his robotics thesis proposal on Tuessday, June 15, 10:30 AM in Wean Hall 4615A. His committee includes: Takeo Kanade (Chair), Martial Hebert, Steven Seitz and Frank Crow (Interval Research Corporation) . For topical details: /www.cs.cmu.edu/~srv/proposal.pdf
JADE GOLDSTEIN presented "Automatic Text Summarization of Multiple Documents" at her LTI thesis proposal on June 3. Her committee included: Jaime Carbonell (Chair), Vibhu Mittal, Yiming Yang, and Jan Pedersen (Infoseek).

HE'S BACK...for an HCI Seminar! Steven Shafer, now with Microsoft Research, is coming back to share his perspectives on "Easyliving: An Architecture for Building Intelligent Environments" on Wednesday, June 16 at 3:30 pm in Wean 5409. For details on his schedule while in town, contact marian@cs.cmu.edu.

CALD HOST SUMMER SCHOOL...The Center for Automated Learning and Discovery is hosting the CALD Summer School for Professionals this week, June 14-18. The program focuses on new developments and initiatives in Data Mining and Machine Learning. Visit www.cs.cmu.edu/~cald/summerschool/index.html for particulars.

YAPC99 or YET ANOTHER PERL CONFERENCE...is coming up Thursday and Friday, June 24-25. This "grassroots" program, finding its origins in the "Perl Mongers" perl users groups, is "organized by and for perl users...as an inexpensive alternative" for devotees of perl. Kevin Lenzo is the force behind and organizer of this program. Visit www.cs.cmu.edu/~lenzo/yapc for more info.

6APT BEGINS JUNE 26...The first session of the annual Summer Institute for Computer Science Advanced Placement Teachers, will be held on campus June 26-July 2, to be followed by a second session July 24-30. The 6-day programs offer AP Computer Science teachers the opportunity "to learn two critical sets of skills: how to use and teach the C++ language, which will be introduced in the 1999 Computer Science Advanced Placement Exam; and how to establish and maintain gender equity in the classroom and computer lab, in order to attract and retain female students in computering courses". The 6APT faculty include: Allan Fisher, Jo Sanders, Jane Margolis, and Mark Stehlik. The program, sponsored by Carnegie Mellon, the National Science Foundation, and the Intel Foundation, with operational assistance from the College Board Advanced Placement Program, is detailed in /www.cs.cmu.edu/6apt/6apt.html

STEVENS AWARD LECTURE...Tom DeMarco, principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, was awarded The 1999 Stevens Award and will present "The Architecture/Design Paradox" at the the 1999 Stevens Lecture on Software Development Methods on August 31 at the joint plenary session of the Software Technology and Engineering practice (STEP99) Conference and the 1999 SEI Software Engineering Symposium in Pittsburgh. The Stevens Award and Lecture recognizes outstanding contributions to the literature or practice of methods for software development and was named in memory of Wayne Stevens, a highly-respected consultant, author, pioneer, and advocate of the practical application of software methods and tools. See /www.sei.cmu.edu/products/events/symp/ for more information on the conference and registration.

DATES FOR IMMIGRATION...Mark your calendars. The dates for this year's IC Courses are cast in stone. Newly admitted HCII, ETC, MSE and RI students will assemble August 16-20. CS Phd's will begin their immigration the first day of classes, August 23. Watch for schedules over the summer!

Return to: SCS-Today
SCS Alumni Homepage
School of Computer Science homepage

This page maintained by copetas@cs.cmu.edu.