Tag Archives: 2012

SCE Fall Picnic Enjoyed by Students, Faculty and Staff

SCE students took a break on Thursday, September 27, enjoying fantastic fall weather at the SCE fall picnic hosted by the SCE Student Council. The annual picnic is an SCE tradition and is well attended by SCE students, faculty and staff. SCE Student Council officers plan and coordinate the picnic each year. Thank you Carson, Grant, Cody, Arturo, and Matt!

2012-2013 　Student Council Officers From Left to Right
Carson Buchanan – Administrative VP, Grant Meyer – President, Cody Kaspzyk – Comptroller, Arturo Pino Quintana – Executive VP, Matt Moore – SGA Representative

SCE Welcomes Our New Students

SCE student organization leaders, faculty and staff welcomed our new students this Sunday, August 19. New SCE undergraduates and transfer students were provided with recommendations for creating a vibrant campus experience for themselves and encouraged to be active, rather than passive, learners, and given suggestions for a successful transition to UMKC. They obtained information about our many SCE student organizations and scoped out Flarsheim Hall via activities which led students to SCE laboratories, departmental offices, computer labs, the student lounge and other locations. Whitney Molloy, Director of SCE Student Affairs, coordinates this annual SCE event which follows Convocation. At the conclusion of Convocation, students walk to their respective academic homes to learn more about their School’s student organization and the importance of connecting with faculty and being involved within their discipline and School. Our Best Wishes for a Great Academic Year to all our new SCE undergraduate students.

    

Xinjie Guan & Xili Wan Awarded GENI Summer Camp Scholarships

Xinjie Guan and Xili Wan are two of ten students in the nation to win the first annual GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) summer camp scholarships. Ms. Guan, a third year telecommunications and networking Ph.D. student at UMKC SCE, and Mr. Wan, a fourth year telecommunications and networking Ph.D. student at UMKC SCE, spent May 29, 2012 – June 2, 2012 at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York learning how to use the GENI resources/tools such as ProtoGENI, Flack, Instools, and OpenFlow. They gained hands-on lab experience with those resources and developed a team-based project that established certain network topology and investigated the impact of new flow attack to OpenFlow switch.

Attending the GENI summer camp greatly improved Ms. Guan’s and Ms. Wan’s skill in using GENI resources/tools. Furthermore, they obtained many significant suggestions from GENI experts on how to design and begin their next research projects. GENI infrastructure is becoming a mature virtual lab for networking related researches and compared to traditional simulation, GENI resources and tools provide more convincible results as they support experimentation on real nodes throughout the network. Xinjie Guan’s faculty advisor is Professor Baek-Young Choi and Xili Wan’s faculty advisor is Professor Xiaojun Shen. SCE heartily congrats Ms. Guan and Mr. Wan on their awards and knows the experience they have gained will benefit them greatly. For more detail about the camp download the file – GENI.

Sarah Withee’s team wins Best Mobile App at Hack the Midwest Contest

Hack the Midwest, an event designed to bring developers and designers together to create a working website or mobile app in 24 hours, brought together over 100 developers and 28 different apps. SCE’s own Sarah Withee, along with friends Abbey Trotta (a UMKC computer science alumni), Sarah Peters, and Kevin Donnelly developed an iPhone game called Number Scram. They won the Best Mobile App award, and received a Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch for the prize!

“Number Scram is a game where the goal is to score as many points as possible in 60 seconds. Points are scored by reaching a target number using a combination of digits and math operators. Users can earn multipliers to their score for each problem by using digits with an apple (2x) or gold star (3x) next to them. The app also keeps track of user stats including number of games played, highest score, average score and most math operators used in a single game.” Be sure to look for Number Scram in the Apple App Store in a few weeks. Screen shots of the app they developed can be found here.

Congratulations to Sarah and her teammates! Pictured from left to right: Kevin Donnelly, CS graduate from University of Missouri-Columbia; Sarah Peters, MSA CS graduate from Northwest Missouri State University; Abbey Trotta, CS graduate from UMKC and Sarah Withee, CS student at UMKC.

IEEE Robotics Team Competes in Tulsa, OK

Fourteen student members and three advisors from the UMKC IEEE Robotics Team travelled to Tulsa, Oklahoma on April 19th for the annual Region 5 IEEE Robotics Competition. Two robots were entered the competition from UMKC’s School of Computing and Engineering, but only one robot was checked-in to compete because of a motor malfunction. Due to a miscommunication, the second robot was placed by a judge instead of a team member (as has been the rule for the past seven years) on the track in a different location than anticipated causing the robot to miss the first targeted energy source. Clement Lumanyika and Andrew Gatrost entered the Circuit Design Competition and came in fourth place. Two Robot Team alumni came to the competition to show their support and various others were watching on UTube. Unfortunately team members Mell Carter and Blake Huntington were not able to attend the competition.

Congratulations to the UMKC IEEE Robotics Team members Scot Banes, Andrew Blackton, Mell Carter, Lisa Chen, Oliver Craig, Tim Gitau, Blake Huntington, Aaron Hurst, Clement Lumanyika, Matt Mohler, Ariel Muthyala, Eddie Pogosov, Victor Skulavik, Jordie Smith, Sarah Withee, Vicky Wu and the IEEE Robotics Team advisors Eddie Burris, Reza Derakhshani and Debby Dilks.

UMKC SIFE Team is TOP TEAM at Regional Competitions in Chicago

UMKC Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) Team, an interdisciplinary team with students from several UMKC School’s including the School of Computing and Engineering (SCE), achieved a level of success at the Chicago Regional Competitions never before experienced. For the first time, ever UMKC received the 2012 All Star Team Award. It was presented to UMKC SIFE advisor Cary Clark, by esteemed faculty at the Sam Walton Fellow Luncheon. Only one team from each of the eleven Regional Competitions across the country received this award. To sum it up, this means that the UMKC SIFE team was recognized as the Top Team at this Regional Competition. Cary Clark was almost speechless as the envelope was opened and the announcement was made, just like the Oscars. The team received a standing ovation from the faculty members of over 70 teams in attendance. UMKC SIFE was named the tournament’s best team, over well-known schools like Notre Dame, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Loyola Chicago, and the University of Illinois-Champagne Urbana. SIFE student team members attended a separate luncheon at which they ate and conversed with executives representing several U.S. top 500 companies. This gave them a rare opportunity to get career advice directly from executives at companies where they someday might like to work and have a career.

The UMKC SIFE Team, by earning Regional Champion of their league (League 7), will now go on to the National Competitions in Kansas City on May 22, 23 & 24. In addition to winning their league and the Top Team at the Regional Competition award, the team received the Club 44 Award for the second consecutive year. The award recognizes that UMKC SIFE is one of the largest teams in the U.S. The team also received the 4.0 Club Award. This award is a result of an intensive evaluation on numerous topics such as team accomplishment, the number of successful projects completed, impact in the community, the recognition received from the community, and the support that the team receives from its faculty and administration. In the past UMKC SIFE has received scores averaging 3.5, which is excellent. However a 4.0 is much more prestigious and coincidentally placed us in the top 4% of teams in the U.S.

Please join SCE in congratulating this exceptional group of students, especially our SCE team participants Kingsley Kantanka, Innocent Nsoh-Awasom and Ravi Patel. They have brought national attention to UMKC and they have demonstrated that UMKC creates academic excellence. For more information on SIFE, please contact Cary Clark at clarkcary@umkc.edu.

Trifecta at SGA Award Banquet – SCE congratulates Reza Derakhshani, Whitney Molloy & Tim Williams

SCE proudly congratulates Whitney Molloy, Director of SCE Student Affairs, and Reza Derakhshani, Associate Professor of Computer Science Electrical Engineering, for being honored with Apple Polisher Awards at the April 12, 2012 banquet sponsored by UMKC’s Student Government Association (SGA)! SCE also proudly congratulates SCE Student Council President Tim Williams. Tim received the SGA’s 2012 Most Outstanding School Council Leader Award for his leadership and his work within the SGA.

Apple Polisher Awards honor UMKC outstanding faculty and staff who have had a made a significant impact on students’ lives, professionally, academically and/or personally. Nominations for the Apple Polisher awards are made by student leaders. Whitney Molloy was nominated for the award by SCE 2012 Student Council President, Tim Williams, and Dr. Reza Derakhshani was nominated by Sashi Kanth Saripalle, his Ph.D. student.