TCNJ News
For Immediate Release
April 16, 2004
Students Receive Award at Annual Computer Science Symposium
Ewing, NJ…Two computer science students at The College
of New Jersey were honored with a third place award for their
research and presentation in the Student Research Competition
at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCSE Symposium
held in Norfolk, VA on March 3-7.
Each year, SIGCSE, or the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, honors students for their work which describes the results of recently completed or ongoing computer science research or development projects with substantial work performed primarily by students.
Jessie Burger and Aaron Archer Waterman, both senior computer science majors from Yardley, PA, submitted a long-term research project titled “Applying Support Vector Machines to Improving Web Search Results,” with assistance from Ursula Wolz, their faculty mentor and Associate Professor of Computer Science at TCNJ. For their project, they applied machine learning techniques, and in particular, Support Vector Machines, to the automatic discovery of context, and improvement and personalization of web search results.
To be considered for the honor, Burger and Waterman successfully completed a series of elimination rounds. First, they jointly submitted a research abstract and were among 15 teams or individuals chosen to participate in the competition. They then presented a poster of their work and were judged on presentation and an informal discussion by a panel of computer science educators. Finally the pair gave a formal presentation, and on March 5, Burger and Waterman received the third place honor at the conference banquet luncheon, where over 1000 people were in attendance.
Both Burger and Waterman plan on attending graduate school next year to further pursue careers in computer science. Also, Waterman is the son of Drs. Sally Archer and Alan Waterman, both professors of psychology at TCNJ from Yardley, PA.
Other finalists in this year’s Student Research Competition
included students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas;
Duquesne University; Columbus State University; and Georgetown
University. For more information on the Association for Computing
Machinery, please visit www.acm.org.
