Computer Science Department Wins Gold at Regional Competition

Author: Meghan Keenan

Last weekend marked the eighth annual Consortium for Computer Sciences in Colleges (CCSCNE) Northeast Region at Rhode Island College in Providence, RI. The goal of the CCSCNE is to "bring together faculty, staff and students from academic institutions from around the Northeast for the exchange of ideas and information concerning undergraduate computer education." The two-day event centered on various activities designed to discuss helpful teaching techniques, as well as to give students hands-on experience and provide them with the opportunity to present their work. The various events included a programming competition, poster presentations and talks by prominent leaders in the field.
Middlebury College was represented in both the programming competition and poster presentations. Team Captain Maksims Ovsjanikovs '05 of Latvia, Yunpeng Li '05 of China and Dimitar Koparov '03 of Bulgaria participated as one of 31 three-person teams in the competition. Assistant Professor of Mathematics Frank Swenton advised the team.
Competing against schools such as Colby College, Connecticut College, Providence College and Wellesley College, the competition presented five programming problems and allowed three hours for teams to complete them. The method used to solve each problem was not taken into consideration - only the solution created was e-mailed to judges in an adjoining room for verification. The team to correctly solve the most number of problems in the shortest amount of time was deemed the winner. In a close victory over Connecticut College, in which Koparov observed the team did not perform "to the best of their abilities," Middlebury narrowly won the competition, taking home the first prize of $300.
Middlebury has competed in a number of computer programming competitions such as this one in past years and has shown that it possesses a strong program that can contend with the best other colleges have to offer. For example, the College has competed many times in the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) International Collegiate Programming Competition, which attracts many of the most widely known and respected colleges from around the world. Competing on the regional level against teams such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, Middlebury has even outscored the MIT team in the past. Programming team member Ovsjanikovs competed in the ACM competition last year as a one-man team and still managed to place sixth among many other extremely accomplished three-man teams. Koparov believes this year's programming team showed much potential and hopes the tradition will continue every year.
Jiaxin Fu '03 represented Middlebury College in the poster presentations with his poster entitled "Polygon Placement Algorithms for Convex Polygon and Simple Polygons." Advised by Associate Professor of Computer Science Matt Dickerson, Fu joined in the presentation of nearly 50 posters covering topics in all areas in both math and computer science.
The competition also featured internationally recognized guest speaker John H. Conway, the John von Neumann Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Conway is well known for his many publications aimed at research and amateur mathematicians and his development of the Game of Life theory. His presentation at the conference, entitled "How to Beat Children at Their Own Games," offered a comprehensible, yet in no way trivialized, view of the mathematics involved in children's games. For many attending the conference, this presentation capped off as the most notable event of the weekend.
Linda Stern, professor of computer science at the University of Melbourne, Australia, served as the other guest speaker with her presentation on "Multimedia in the Classroom: Visualizing, Animating and Conceptualizing." This talk emphasized the benefits and challenges arising from the use of multimedia animations in augmenting student's education of programs and algorithms.
Overall, the weekend was a great success and offered proof that Middlebury students can hold their own in the computer science and mathematics areas. The participants look forward to future competitions and encourage others to join the team as a way to explore their talents under pressure.