UMass ACM

Lunch with Steve Willis:
The Road From LISP and Ethernet’s Promiscuous Mode to the NYSE

Steve Willis will give an informal talk and discuss his career in startups and technology over lunch. This will be an exciting perspective on life in the real world after UMass CS! Plus, it would never hurt to know a friendly venture capitalist (haha, only serious).

Loose Goose sandwiches, sushi, and drinks will be provided for lunch!

Currently a consultant to financial, management, and technical startups, Steve Willis completed a BS in Computer Science & BDIC (Bachelor’s Degree of Individual Concentration) at UMass Amherst. He has patents on various computer networking technologies, and has led many industry projects in developing leading edge internet and ATM technologies. He also recently co-authored a short paper on cryptographic finance: Cryptographic Rule-Based Trading.

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Yahoo! CS Foosball Tournament

What better way to end the semester than the 5th annual Yahoo! all-department foosball tournament? Sign up with a partner or pair up at the tournament. It's open to everyone in UMass CS: undergrads, grads, post-docs, staff, and faculty! Pizza and prizes are generously provided by Yahoo!

Sign up to compete!

UMass ACM Five College Programming Competition

The 3^rd annual UMass ACM Five College Programming Competition is an ACM ICPC style programming competition open to all five college undergrads. Come compete for fun and profit with prizes offered by Cisco. Free food and soda are also generously provided by Cisco. Competition is between individuals–not teams. It’s a great time every year and a fun chance to take on some programming puzzles.

Date: April 11, 2012 (Wednesday)
Time: 6:00-9:00 PM
Location: CS 150/151

Google-CS Jeopardy!

POSTPONED! See new date & time below or on calendar.

Come compete in CS Jeopardy on teams with other CS majors and minors! Try to answer questions crafted by Google engineers and show your knowledge about CS, our department, and digital culture. Free pizza, soda, and t-shirts will be generously provided by Google. Sign up today and form teams on the day-of. Spectators are welcome too. Google is giving out prizes to the members of the winning team!

Date: March 7, 2012 (Thursday)
Time: 5:30-6:30 PM
Location: CS 150

Campus Career Blast & Company Visits

This is your chance to meet plenty of companies interested in UMass CS students and learn about all the internships and career options waiting for you! Check the calendar for details on dates, times, and locations.

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so we can make sure there's enough free burritos & pizza for everyone. Signup.

• Career Blast

  The campus career blast on Feb. 8 in the campus center hosts more than 70 companies–many UMass CS students have found jobs and internships at this event in the past.

• TripAdvisor

  TripAdvisor is a UMass CS industrial affiliate coming to UMass CS to give a lunch tech talk for our students. One of our ACM officers had a great internship with them, so you should check out their talk, find out what opportunities are available, and enjoy the lunch!

  Stephen Bourdeau, of the TripAdvisor Mobile Team, will give a talk on making sites into mobile apps.

• Microsoft Career Lunch

  Come talk to Microsoft about open career and internship opportunities over free pizza! Microsoft is coming straight to UMass CS to share info about the company and meet interested majors.

  UMass CS has alumni with awesome jobs in all different divisions of Microsoft, so it’s worth stopping by!

• LinkedIn Info Session

  LinkedIn is visiting UMass Amherst for the first time to share career and internship opportunities with CS & engineering students! Come find out what's available, enjoy some free food (Bueno y Sano burritos), grab a t-shirt, and enter their raffle.

  Three engineers, including Mario Rodriguez and Adil Aijaz, will be present to talk about current work at LinkedIn, where a lot of attention is given to information-retrieval, massive infrastructure, and large-scale mobile & web apps. LinkedIn will be hiring for summer intern and full-time positions in Software Engineering, Data Analytics, and Technical Operations.

Windward Code Wars

UMass CS team “Skyward Nord” placed 2^nd in the international finals! Congratulations to CJ Carey & Jonny Leahy.

Students from a number of the top CS programs in North America will compete head-to-head to program game-playing AI agents. This isn’t the usual format for a programming competition, and the competing agents will be fun to code and watch.

All UMass Amherst students undergraduate and graduate can compete, so rally a team or go solo for great justice! Other universities have over 100 students signed up, so there’ll be plenty of action. There’ll be free food & drink to fuel the fighting too.

Date: January 28, 2012 (first Saturday after classes start)
Time: the UMass Amherst local competition is 10 AM–6 PM, and then the top two teams from every school will compete in the finals will compete at 6:30 PM
Location: CS 150/151

In the news: Digital Journal and Huffington Post .

2012

Apocalypse or not, it’s a new year so it’s time for new ideas and new projects. The deadline might even be good motivation.

This spring UMass ACM will host plenty of events and activities for trying out new skills, making new projects, and keeping in touch with other CS majors. Here’s a preview (more information will be posted as each of these events comes over the horizon):

• The 1^st Windward Code Wars: game-playing AI programming competition among a lot of the top CS departments in the country. UMass Amherst is competing! See the above announcement for more details.
• The 3^rd annual UMass-Cisco Programming Competition: Compete to solve programming challenges in the language of your choice for fun and profit (not to mention fame and prizes). Five college students are also invited. Previous years have been a great time, and it’s good practice if you are interested in the official ACM international collegiate programming contest.
• Processing.org Projects: make digital art, music, and games with this Java dialect that’s friendly to newcomers and capable enough for the advanced. Processing.org works on Linux, OS X, and Windows. It’s a fun way to learn or practice java and impress your friends instead of being stuck with boring text-based programs.
• Hardware Hacking: since we’re CS and not EE, most of us don’t have too many chances to hit the hardware. This is still only potential, but UMass ACM wants to do an arduino night with starter kits and fun projects.
• Portfolio or it Didn’t Happen: we’ll go over tricks and tools to publish your projects and show off what you can do, and explain how this is one of the biggest favors you can do yourself if you want to succeed in basically anything.
• A secret project that’ll make other departments jealous

In other news, UMass ACM is developing a new site to be a better hub for CS majors. We want to make it easier for everyone to join in, collaborate on projects, and show off their work. As CS students, we can generally produce a lot more with our time since we aren’t limited by material and it’s time to start sharing what we do–public work is one of the best ways to make connections and prepare a portfolio.

Shoot us a message if you have any suggestions or other comments.

UMass Programming Team

Two of our UMass teams placed 1st and 3rd at the ACM ICPC local competition, and our 1st place team went on to place 4th at the ACM ICPC regionals! We plan to hold programming team practices all year starting next year, so keep an eye out for the announcement.

Learn more about the ACM ICPC.