News

Yelena Mejova, a graduate of MSUM’s computer science department, will be doing a postdoc in Barcelona with the Yahoo! research lab in Barcelona as part of their web mining group. Mejova will graduate in May with a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Iowa. Her thesis was completed in the area of sentiment analysis, combining natural language processing, computational linguistics, and data mining.

Eleven students from the Computer Science and Information Systems Department attended the Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium. They are Charles Belanger, Shaochun Chen, Matthew Ehrichs, Dustin Ernst, Baron Hines, Michael Hurtig, Matthew Kava, William Linebaugh, Dalton Maddux, Steven Ruckdashel, and Samuel Sussman.

The symposium was held in Cedar Falls, Iowa at the University of Northern Iowa on April 13-14. The students attended technical presentations and participated in robotic and programming contests. The team of Ernst, Ruckdashel, and Sussman placed third out of 52 teams in the programming contest.

On March 26, Dr. Andrew Chen, Computer Science and Information Systems, presented his paper “Student-Voted Multiple-Round Elimination Team Projects” at the international symposium on Interdisciplinary Research, Education, and Communication (IDREC 2012), which was held in the context of The 3rd International Multi-Conference on Complexity, Informatics and Cybernetics (IMCIC 2012) in Orlando, Florida.

In his paper he describes the approach that he used in the Spring 2011 Game Development (GDEV) 190 class, which he anticipates using again in the Fall 2012 GDEV 190 class.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – A longtime Minnesota State University Moorhead professor has died in a hit-and-run crash here. Ben Lin, 72, was walking from his home to an exercise class Thursday morning when he was struck by an SUV while crossing the street, said Capt. David Verbruggee of the Sunnyvale Public Safety Department.

By: Amy Dalrymple, INFORUM

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – A longtime Minnesota State University Moorhead professor has died in a hit-and-run crash here. Read the rest of this entry →

The ACM North Central Collegiate Programming Contest was held Nov. 12, and an MSUM team placed in the top 12% of the contenders. Two hundred-twenty teams from universities in Michigan to North Dakota and Kansas to Manitoba competed at 16 sites across the region. They worked to solve 10 computer-programming problems over a five-hour period. The MSUM team of Sam Sussman, Andrew Dahl, and Dustin Ernst placed in the top 12% of the contenders. Our team of Kyle Borth, Dalton Maddux and Steven Ruckdashel also competed. The event was sponsored by IBM.

Two teams of students from the Computer Science and Information Systems Department competed in Digi-Key’s Collegiate Computing Competition Oct. 14 at Digi-Key in Thief River Falls. Twenty-one teams from 12 universities spanning Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin attended.

The MSUM team of Sam Sussman, Andrew Dahl, Matt Ehrichs, and Phillip McCorison finished in 2nd place, earning individual gift cards to Best Buy and $3,000 for the Computer Science and Information Systems Department. These funds will be used to support students in their future competitions. The second team from MSUM was comprised of Chris Szarkowski, Kyle Borth, Chris Heil and Kirby Price.

Twelve Computer Science and Information Systems students attended the annual Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium, April 8-9 in Duluth. Activities included a computer programming contest, where student teams competed against each other to solve seven interesting and challenging programming problems. Andrew Dahl, Sam Sussman and Aaron Taggart took second place over a field of 39 competing teams from universities throughout the Upper Midwest. MSUM students had four teams of three students participate in the contest.

Andrew Chen, an assistant professor in MSUM’s Computer Science and Information Systems Department, presents a Deans’ Lecture on “Looking at the Big Picture” at 3 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3 in the Center for Business.

In his talk, Chen explores notions of looking, notions of big picture, and explains what graph theory can be used to say about these notions of looking at these notions of the big picture. (Graph theory is a subfield of mathematics with a number of applications in computer science.)

It’s free and open to the public.