The details of the game will be released at the start of the competition that will give teams 8 hours to code an AI client (computer player) for the game. When coding commences, a double elimination style tournament (otherwise known as THE BRAWL) will be held that will pit the AI's against each other one on one to determine the winner of the competition. THE BRAWL will be held at 6pm on April 12th in Fisher 138 and will be shown on screen. Spectators are welcome to come and cheer for their favorite AI. For more information about bonzAI brawl or to register your team, visit http://wics.students.mtu.edu.

The students, Mikola Lysenko, Ryan Richards and Nicholas Smolinske, were narrowly edged out of first place by a team from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the last few minutes of a very exciting contest.

The team joins 92 other teams from around the world in the largest and most prestigious contest of its kind in the world. Worldwide over 7000 teams competed in various regionals, putting MTU's team in the top 1.3%, no small feat considering the competition came form schools the likes of MIT, Cal tech, and the University of Michigan.

Congratulations to Dr. Ching-Kuang Shene and Dr. Steven Seidel who have been promoted to the rank of Professor of Computer Science.

According to the NSF, the CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career- development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Dr. Wang's award is anticipated to provide funding for five years totaling $400,000.

Alicia's research interests are in parallel computing. She is working on a shared-memory parallel approximation algorithm for the maximum weight matching problem. Although several serial linear approximation algorithms have been developed, there is no comparable parallel algorithm. Her focus is on the shared-memory platform because message passing solutions are non-intuitive and therefore hard to implement. As part of her research assistantship responsibilities, she has done application development using Unified Parallel C (UPC) and atomic memory operations.

The alumni inducted are (from left to right with Dr. Linda Ott, Chair of Computer Science Department in the center) John Furton (B.S. '87), Vice President of Purchasing & Merchandising for Family Video and President of Family Online; Robert Rajewski (B.S. '81), Founder and President of Orion Systems, Inc.; Adil Shafi (B.S. '86, M.S. '93), Founder and President of Shafi Inc. and Steven Misenheimer (B.S. '81), Corporate Sales for Orion Systems, Inc.

Congratulations to Dr. Nilufer Onder and Dr. Charles Wallace who have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of Computer Science and to Dr. Robert Pastel who is now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science.

Janae Foss (C.S., PhD)
Graduate Student Council,
Exceptional Graduate Student Leader

Lior Shamir (CS&E, PhD)
Graduate Student Council,
Exceptional Graduate Scholar

Danielle VanDyke (C.S., BS)
Michigan Tech Fund,
Merit Award Distinguished Nominee

Nathan Paul (C.S., BS)
Department of Computer Science,
Department Scholar

Janae Foss (C.S., PhD)
Presidential Commission for Women,
Women of Promise

Janae Foss (C.S., PhD)
MTU Sigma Xi Student Research Colloquium,
Honorable Mention

Women in Computer Science
Women's History Month Bulletin Board Contest
First Place

The paper, "Improving Register Allocation for Subscripted Variables", was authored by David Callahan, Steve Carr, and Ken Kennedy and was published in 1990. The work was part of Dr. Carr's Ph.D. research.

The 50 papers will be published in a special issue of the ACM SIGPLAN Proceedings. (ACM SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages.) The compilation is to also include retrospectives from the authors discussing the history of the work, and how the paper influenced their own and other subsequent people's work.

The programming contest started in February when 512 students were invited to participate based on their ratings from previous TopCoder competitions. These 512 students represented 146 colleges and universities throughout the United States. A series of elimination rounds were held during February and March to determine the top 16 coders who competed in the Semi-Finals. Other schools represented by students in the Semi-Finals include: Cal Tech, Georgia Tech, Oberlin College, MIT, Purdue, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, University of Central Florida, University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, University of Minnesota, and Virginia Tech.

The programming contest started in February when 512 students were invited to participate based on their ratings from previous TopCoder competitions. These 512 students represented 146 colleges and universities throughout the United States. A series of elimination rounds were held during February and March to determine the top 16 coders who will compete in the Semi-Finals. The competition will conclude April 20 with a grand prize of $100,000. Other schools represented by students in the Semi-Finals include: Cal Tech, Georgia Tech, Oberlin College, MIT, Purdue, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, University of Central Florida, University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, University of Minnesota, and Virginia Tech.

To help with this continued growth, the Department has added an Instructor, John Duff, and a Lecturer, Dr. Robert Pastel. As some of you already know, Brian VanVoorst has resigned to return to his position as a Senior Research Scientist at Honeywell Technology Center.

I'm sure most students have noticed that we've also replaced some of the Suns with a lab full of new Sun Blades and that we've upgraded the operating system on the Suns to Solaris 2.8.

This marks the fourth time in 5 years that one of the three annual awards was granted to a computer science grad.

On the faculty front, Dr. Charles Wallace has joined the Department this fall as an assistant professor. Dr. Wallace received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999. This past year he was at the University of Delaware in a visiting faculty position. Dr. Phil Sweany is leaving the Department to join Texas Instruments in Dallas where he will continue his research in compiler optimization. We will definitely miss Phil's endless energy. The Department wishes Phil the best in his new adventures!

November 1, 1999 -- New Research Faculty

Dr. Phillip Merkey has joined the Department as a Research Assistant Professor. Dr. Merkey's position is funded through a $758,000 grant from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr. Merkey is widely known for his work on the development of "Beowulf" cluster computing platforms. A Beowulf cluster is a collection of PC's connected to each other by off-the-shelf networking equipment to form a parallel computer suitable for computationally intensive scientific and engineering problems. Later this year Dr. Merkey will bring a Beowulf cluster to MTU for use in this project and for the support of other research projects in Computer Science and the CS&E Ph.D. program. Dr. Merkey's work on this project will support the NASA Earth and Space Sciences program at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

August 30, 1999 -- New Students and Faculty

Although final enrollment figures aren't available yet, we are likely looking at our largest ever group of new students. A big welcome to all of our incoming first year, transfer and graduate students. We are adding three assistant professors and a lecturer to our Department this year. Dr. Nilufer Onder and Dr. Soner Onder are joining the Department this fall as new assistant professors. Both Dr. Onders recently completed their Ph.D.s at the University of Pittsburgh. A third new assistant professor will be joining the Department next term. Brian VanVoorst will be teaching for us as a Lecturer. Brian is coming from the Honeywell Technology Center where he is a Senior Research Scientist. Brian received his M.S. from our Department in 1993.