Computing Habitat Programming Competition Winners Split $5000 in Prizes

The 4th Computing Habitat Programming Competition yielded 6 winning projects and doled out $5000 in prizes. The annual contest sponsored by the department encourages students, faculty, and staff to develop software applications that enhance the Siebel Center's technology-rich environment and improve student life. This year's contest was sponsored by State Farm this year.

The CHPC projects this year ranged from touchscreen bulletin boards and VoIP functionality for information panels to social networking platforms designed for class project collaborations and building activity visualization tools.

The State Farm Grand Prize was awarded to Thadpong Pongthawornkamol and Long Vu for their project iLectures. iLectures enhances the finability of video recorded lectures and presentations in the Siebel Center. Their process uses OCR technology on the videos, as well as other metadata, to provide an index and web interface to conduct keyword searches to navigate CS multimedia files. The project also won the Best Improvement prize and split the Most Useful prize.

The team of Onur Pekcan and Abdullah Akce won the Best Computing Habitat prize for their ISiebel project, new content and services framework for the Siebel Center information panels. ISiebel adds VoIP support to the panels, and includes new content delivery like pizza delivery numbers, bus schedules, and newsgroup information. The project also split the Most Useful prize.

The IlliniGroup project turned a class project into a Computing Habitat entry and won Best Use of Data Analytics and Best Web Application, as well as a split of the Most Useful prize. The project is a social networking tool geared to provide efficient, optimal, and secure assignment of students to project groups. IlliniGroup's algorithms factor group membership constraints, instructor and individual preferences, and other characteristics to create strong groups. One CHPC judge described the project as "Facebook meets Match.com". The IlliniGroup team was comprised of students Hyun Duk Dim, Erick Dietrich, Derek Lawless, and Brian Romanowski.

Other CHPC winners included Vincent Fulton for his SimplyV project, a digital replacement for paper bulletin boards; and Alex Disney, Seth Cohen, and Kevin Barnes for their SiebelEKG project that interfaces with the Siebel building automation system and occupancy sensor data to provide a visualization of activity within the Siebel Center. The projects split the Judge's Prize. The SiebelEKG team also won for Best Presentation.