CSU Computer Science undergraduate students Chris Campbell, Jason Lewallen, Mike Oba, Brandon Schaffer, and Austin Walkup are "Team Meh" and the champions of the 2013 International Collegiate Programming Championships. Windward Code Wars is a national programming contest hosted by Windward of Boulder, CO. Twenty-nine schools entered with over a hundred teams. Students had eight hours to write an artificial intelligent agent to solve an intriguing problem involving the simulated town of Windwardopolis with high-tech companies, CEOs, and a limousine service that the team had to control. "Team Meh" won with an extended version of the A* search algorithm that they learned about in the course "CS440: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence." Each member of the winning team receives an HP Laptop and a Microsoft Surface Tablet, as well as special software. The CSU team "Fractal Cabbages" with Adam Allevato, Parker Malenke, and Kyle Smith placed 5th in the competition.

Full rules, results, and contest information can be found on the contest page at:
http://www.windward.net/code_war.php

Read the article about it in Digital Journal here: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1039293

Read the article about it on Today @ Colorado State

Congratulations to Steve O'Hara for his Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV). The paper, co-authored with Dr. Bruce Draper, is titled, Are You Using the Right Approximate Nearest Neighbor Algorithm? The Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) is the anchor of the annual Winter Vision Meetings. WACV has a general scope with an emphasis on practical methods that support computer vision applications. This year, along with WACV, the Winter Vision Meetings consisted of the Workshop on Robotic Vision (WoRV), the Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance (PETS), and the Workshop on User Centered Computer Vision (UCCV). WACV 2013 had about 80 accepted papers presented over two days. Each day, attendees voted on the Best Paper and Best Student Paper of the day. This paper was voted the Best Student Paper for the first day of the workshop.

Dr. Sudeep Pasricha, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a courtesy joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science, is one of 40 scientists and engineers who will receive approximately $15 million in grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research through its Young Investigator Research Program (AFOSR-YIP). The grant was awarded for Prof. Pasrichas research proposal, Integrated Optoelectronic Networks for Application-Driven Multicore Computing. The research aims to determine the best modalities for integrating emerging photonics technology into multicore electronic chips that drive all major modern inventions including vehicles and airplanes, computers and phones, scientific and industrial infrastructure, as well as military systems. In doing so, the research will lay the groundwork for realizing electronic systems that perform at much greater levels of efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness than electronic systems today.