Archives—May 2018

Two CS Instructors Receive Exceptional Scores

Keith Vertanen and Bo Chen have been identified as two of only 89 instructors who received an exceptional “Average of 7 dimensions” student evaluation score during Spring 2018. Their scores (Keith: 4.62 with an enrollment of 98; Bo: 4.79 with an enrollment of 9) are in the top 10% of similarly sized sections across all courses/sections on campus. These excellent student evaluations reflect the tremendous efforts that Keith and Bo have put on their teaching.
Congratulations Keith and Bo. Please keep up the good work!

Alex Larkin, CS undergrad, achieves a national NCL ranking

FB_IMG_1525454724440Alex Larkin. Computer Science undergrad. Outstanding achievement.

Alex placed 36th out of 3,350 students/players in the 2018 National Cyber League (NCL) cyber competition!  CS Assistant Professor, Bo Chen, is the faculty coach.

The NCL was founded in May 2011 to provide an ongoing virtual training ground for collegiate students to develop, practice, and validate their cybersecurity skills. It is a defensive and offensive puzzle-based, capture-the-flag style cybersecurity competition. Its virtual training ground helps high school and college students prepare and test themselves against cybersecurity challenges that they will likely face in the workforce. All participants play the games simultaneously during Preseason, Regular Season and Postseason.

Way to go Alex!

 

Undergraduate Programming Competition Win

18th Annual NMU Invitational Programming Contest Logo with 95 Students, 6 Schools, 34 TeamsComputer science undergraduate students received top honors at the 19th Annual Northern Michigan University Invitational Programming Contest held March 24, 2018. Tony Duda, Justin Evankovich, and Nicholas Muggio took first place; Michael Lay, Parker Russcher, and Marcus Stojcevich took second. Michigan Tech earned the highest program count and No. 1 ranking.

Congratulations!

“We are proud of our students for representing Husky values of possibility and tenacity.” —Min Song, Chair, Computer Science

Zhenlin Wang receives an REU supplement to his NSF award

Zhenlin Wang received an REU supplement of $15,876 to his his NSF award titled 28“CSR:Small: Effective Sampling-Based Miss Ratio Curves: Theory and Practice”. The supplement will support two undergraduate students for one year, offering research experiences in cache modeling for modern multi-core processors and data center key-value stores.

Congratulations Zhenlin!

 

Research Excellence Fund (REF) Award Announced

Keith VirtanenThe Vice President for Research Office announced the 2018 Research Excellence Fund (REF) awards and thanked the volunteer review committees, as well as the deans and department chairs, for their time spent on this important internal research award process.

Keith has received a Research Excellence Fund (REF) seed grant from Michigan Tech for his project entitled “Automatic Speech Recognition using Deep Neural Networks”. This one-year project has a budget of $45,421. This project will create a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine based on deep neural networks. The recognizer will be used to investigate speech-based interactive systems for instrumented physical environments (e.g. cars) and person-centric devices (e.g. augmented reality smartglasses). The recognizer will also be used to investigate the input of Java source code by voice.

Congratulations Keith!