Hope College undergraduate computer science researchers received three awards at the recent Midwest Conference of the Consortium for Computing in Small Colleges.
The conference was held at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonaisse, Ill., on Friday-Saturday, Sept. 28-29.
The award for best student research presentation went to Josiah Dykstra, a Hope senior from Sioux City, Iowa. Dykstra's research was on an approach to software validation and verification using theorem proving and parallel processing. His work was done as a part of a summer internship with the National Security Agency.
Ngozi Victoria Uti, a senior at Northern Kentucky University, received the award for best student paper. Her work was conducted at Hope this past summer under the direction of Dr. Herb Dershem, professor of computer science at the college. Her project was the development of a system that automatically animates linked list operations in the Java programming languages. This tool is useful for instruction and for the analysis of programs that use these important data structures.
The team of Alexander Sherstov, a Hope junior from Karaganda, Kazakhstan and Steve Marlowe, a senior at the University of the South, won the award for the best research poster at the conference. Their work was performed this past summer under the direction of Dr. Mike Jipping, associate professor of computer science at Hope, as a part of Hope's summer research program. They studied the design and test of hardware circuits through the use of software simulation over a classroom network of computers.
The Midwest Conference is one of eight regional conferences sponsored by the Consortium for Computing in Small Colleges. This was the eighth annual Midwest Conference and was attended by computer science educators from Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Dershem was the conference chair of this year's conference and Jipping presented a tutorial on Handheld Computing in the Computer Science Curriculum. The student awards at the conference were provided by a grant from Upsilon Pi Epsilon, a computer science honorary organization.
In addition to the student award winners, six other student participants in the Hope College summer computer science research program presented their research at this conference. The Hope summer research program is sponsored in part by a grant from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program of the National Science Foundation.