VTURCS Undergraduate Research and Capstone Symposium

Publish Date: 04/30/2013

On Thusday, April 25, the Computer Science Department held its 11th VTURCS Spring Symposium. Virginia Tech Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (VTURCS) encourages Computer Science undergraduate students to become involved in research. This year's symposium featured 26 projects, including nine capstone projects from the CS 4284 Systems and Networking Capstone course. 

The organizers of VTURCS wish to thank all of the judges, including faculty Dr. Barbara Ryder, Dr. Denis Gracanin, and Professor Dwight Barnette, and industry representatives Jay Carver and and Ron Verbruggen (EMC), Christine Cantu (Fidelity), Dave Noller (IBM), Jacob Lloyd and Starr Green (Norfolk Southern), Chris Reidle (Cisco), Don Sanderson (Eastman), Greg Haught (Lockheed Martin), Marko Cruz (Accenture), and Erin Starnes (Qualcomm). 

All participants received a bag of CSRC items to take home.  The VTURCS organizers would like to thank Bloomberg, Cisco, DCS Corp, Deloitte, HyperGen, Intel, Qualcomm, and Vanguard for contributing items specifically for this event. 

Awards were presented in four categories (advisor in parenthesis):

Faculty Choice Awards:

  1. Carlo Del Mundo, "Toward a Performance-Portable FFT Library for Heterogenous Computing" (Dr. Wu Feng) $750 David Heilman Research Award
  2. Eeshan Shah, Ethan Holder, and Mohammed Davoodi, "CloudTwin" (Dr. Eli Tilevich) $500 David Heilman Research Award
  3. Adil Kadir, "Developing Android Game Applications that Promote Physical Activity in Adolescents" (Dr. Scott McCrickard) $250 David Heilman Research Award

Industry Choice Awards:

  1. Adil Kadir, "Developing Android Game Applications that Promote Physical Activity in Adolescents" (Dr. Scott McCrickard) $1500 Marston Award for Entrepreneurship
  2. Tam Ayers, CJ Gonzales, Zachary Lytle, James Miller, Stephen Turcol, and Matthew Wilt, "Team UI Design: Instant 3D Capture at a Fraction of the Cost" (Dr. Eli Tilevich) $1000 Marston Award for Entrepreneurship
  3. Divit Singh and Sanchit Chadha, "Collaborative Bus Tracker: Improving the Accuracy of Transporation Prediction Applications via Social Networking" (Dr. Eli Tilevich) $500 Marston Award for Entrepreneurship

People's Choice Awards:

  1. Sean Case, Christina Lidwin, Sara Mehfoud, Sean Rice, Avneet Singh, Glen Tona, and Roger Yamada "Website Redesign of Virginia Tech's Division of Undergraduate Education" (Dr. Daniel Wubah,  Dr. Cal Ribbens, and Ms. Alison Matthiessen) $500 CSRC Prize
  2. Eeshan Shah, Ethan Holder, and Mohammed Davoodi, "CloudTwin" (Dr. Eli Tilevich)  $250 CSRC Prize
  3. Adil Kadir, "Developing Android Game Applications that Promote Physical Activity in Adolescents" (Dr. Scott McCrickard) $100 CSRC Prize

Capstone Awards:

  1. Adam Binford and Joshua Martin, "The Completely Fair Scheduler in Pintos" (Dr. Godmar Back) $500 CSRC Prize
  2. Eeshan Shah, Karthik Kumar, Julian Adams, Tony Majestro, and Mark Nachazel, "OCR Extraordinaire" (Dr. Ali Butt) $250 CSRC Prize
  3. Alex Tran, Mohammed Davoodi, and Roger Yamada, "The Practicality of Lottery Scheduling" (Dr. Godmar Back) $100 CSRC Prize

Pictures from the VTURCS Symposium