Spring and Summer 2002

August 2002

Robofest outreached to New Hampshire: Ten teams, including a team from New Hampshire, participated in Summer Camp 2002 held on Saturday, August 17 in Science 321. The challenge was given on the day of competition in the morning after a brief workshop by Dr. Chung. There were two divisions in the contest: (1) RCX code, (2) Advanced Programming (NQC or Java). No adult help was allowed and the students must create code on site. The challenge was to pop three balloons in a maze made of white shelves. The winners were: RCX code champion: Duncan White and Mark Nogle from Warren, RCX code runner-up: Richard Holland and Joavon Seaton from Cerveny Middle School Detroit, and Advanced Programming Champion: Alex Rosner from Walled Lake Schools. During the award ceremony, the winner of each division presented the team's solution to the participants by showing and explaining the source code on a projection screen. Another unique feature of this camp was that the winner allowed the sorce code solution to be available to participants. For more details, please check out the official website with solutions, more than 100 photos, income/expenses report, team member list, etc. This site requires a password. If you want to visit the page, please send an email to chung@ltu.edu and explain to Dr. Chung the reason why you want to check the site out.

A Base 10 Computer for Instruction by Dr. Miller

 

July 2002

Tom George, MSCS student, presented a paper entitled "Applying Evolution Strategies to a University Timetabling System" at GECOO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference) 2002 held in New York, NY, July 9-13. For more details about his work, please check out Paper (PDF 284KB), Power Point, Final Project Report, and Conference Travel Report.

I just wanted to let you all know that this past Sunday, July 21, Aleta Mack and family welcomed into the world Anthony Carlton, weighing in at about 10 lbs. Tracy Kash, Office of the Dean

Robot camp for Girl Scouts of Metro Detroit: Ten girl scouts attended the class taught by Dr. Chung in July 8-19. For more info, please click here.

 

May 2002

Wei-Wen Chang (MSCS 2001) won first place in the 3D design optimization competition in WCCI (World Congress on Computational Intelligence) 2002 sponsored by IEEE Artificial Neural-Net, Fuzzy, and Evolutionary Computation Societies held in Honolulu, Hawaii. His advisor, Dr. Chung, attended the conference to explain the approach used to solve the problem and demonstrate the software. The problem is to find out a hidden 3D object in a black box and this problem can be viewed as a non-linear optimization (minimization) problem with 7,500 real-valued parameters. Honda research center in Germany created this real-world problem and the hidden shape found was a "duck". See the power point slides prepared by the organizer shown during the conference. The employed method to solve the challenging problem was to use multi-staged Evolution Strategies with 1/5 rule. As first prize award, he received $100 and a free registration ticket for the 2003 conference in Australia worth $500+, in front of more than 1,300 attendees during the award banquet. See this photo. This winning is very special, because Wei-Wen Chang continued his work usually during the weekends while he was working full-time at a company, even if he completed his master's degree in 2001. In Spring 2001, he was introduced to this problem when he took Dr. Chung's Advanced Topics in Intelligent Systems and he improved the system in Summer E 2001 as his capstone project. He did not lose his passion to improve the system to solve the 3D optimization problem after finishing his degree and entered a better solution to the competition in April 2002. He was given a special crystal pineapple trophy from Dr. Chung as well as the cash prize. Please see the photo of the winner.

33rd Annual Lawrence Technological University High School Mathematics Competition Results

Immersive Territories by Dr. Dong - The discovery of LTU with the use of virtual (CAVE) environments (Thu. May 2, T220): A presentation highlighting the discoveries and achievements of a collaborative effort between the Architecture Department and Computer Science Department in the study of virtual environments.


April 2002

Dr. Chung paid a special visit to Cerveny Middle School to celebrate their great achievement. See a photo album.

More than 500 people came to LTU to participate in and help with Robofest on April 27. It was shown on Channel 7 and 50 that day. Please ckeck out Robofest 2002 results and photo albums

Lan Jiang, a MCS graduate student representing LTU, got 3rd place on Mix Double in The 2002 National Collegiate Table Tennis Championships at Johns Hopkins University. Lan Jiang also got 5-8 place on Women's Singles. Another hooray! Details about this results, please click here.

some of cleanup crew


March 2002

MCM results

Hooray!  The MCM/ICM results are out, hot off the internet presses this afternoon!  Results for teams are below this note. Congratulations to everyone for a terrific job!  Out of 6 teams, there were 2 Meritorious, 2 Honorable Mentions, 2 Successful Participants. You can go to www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests and click on the appropriate contest and the results icon to view the complete results.  I have a printed copy.  Statistics will be posted in the Science building hall beside your photos. We are all proud of your good work. -- Ruth Favro

  • Honorable Mention, Advisor R. Favro, Problem B Airline Booking - Steve Holcomb, Shahid Nazrulla, and Mark Wagner
  • Meritorious, Advisor H. Whitston, Problem A Fountain - Brandy Shuler, Steve Apostaloski, and Bill Kolasa
  • Meritorious, Advisor S. Schneider,  Problem A Fountain - Nathan Loria, Dave Chamulak, and Jim Vecore
  • Successful Participant, Advisor V. Tobos, Problem A Fountain, Joey Katz, John Mysliwiec, and Chris Sabatowich
  • Successful Participant, Advisor R. Favro, Problem: Lizards - Hilary Olson, Tony Berard, and Aaron Mitchell
  • Honorable Mention, Advisor, H. Whitston, Problem: Lizards - Mark Heikkila, Mohamad Mazeh, and Ayad Yacoub

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, along with the Detroit Metropolitan High School Mathematics and Computer Club, will sponsor this year's Annual High School Mathematics Competition on Sunday, April 28, 2002, from 1:00 to 3:00 pm in room M217 of the Buell Building on the LTU campus. This year will mark the 33rd year for the competition. For more info, please check out here .

Robotics Events Reports

  1. The Robotics Lab participated in the CIS Vendor Fair on Sat. March 23 from 9:00am-2:00pm at the Northwest Activity Center in Detroit. We showed how to write programs for the Lego robots using our multimedia projector. Also, we demonstrated a RoboFest 2002 game, RoboRescuers. Many teachers were interested in RoboFest programs.  Student assistants Aleksandra and Andrey did a wonderful job again.
  2. RoboFest Infomational Meeting, RCX code programming workshop by Dr. Chung, was held here on Campus in S321. Around 40 students, teachers, and parents came on Sat. in the morning till noon. David Chamulak introduced another Lego programming language, RoboLab 2.0 to the attendees. Student assistants were Ching-Wei (Fredo) Chien, Chun-Min (Jimmy) Chang and David Chamulak. It was a quite a meaningful meeting, because a parent who is a marketing expert volunteered to be a public relations manager for the robofest teams. She will be helping teams to be publicized in local newspapers.
  3. Lego with Java classes by Dr. Chung were held during Spring Break on Friday 15, 4:30-7:30pm and Sat 16 9:00am-Noon in S321. It attracted many bright students because Java is replacing C++ to be used for AP computer science A and AB exams from 03-04 academic year. Student assistants were Ching-Wei (Fredo) Chien, Chun-Min (Jimmy) Chang and David Chamulak. It was recorded as perhaps the first Lego with Java class for Middle and Highschool students in the world.

Photos of the above events can be found at: http://ltu164.ltu.edu/mcsnews/02/robotClass3/

     Feb. 2002
    • 2-23: Photos from Dean's bruch demos
    • 2-21: Photos from Winterlude 2002 robot demos at Detroit Science Center
    • We have a new Dept. group photo! See below. Our old Dept. group photo taken in Fall 1999 can be found here.
    • RoboFest 2002 info meeting was held on Sat. Feb. 9. The number of Teachers, Parents, or Coaches attended (without counting students) was 36. According to a survey, the projected numbers of teams they will be sending are (1) Lego Competition: around 50 (2) Advanced Robot Competition: 3  (3) Lego Exhibition: 15 (4) Advanced Robot Exhibition: 3. RoboFest 2002 will be an international event, since a school in Windsor, Canada is coming. Student assistants: Aleksandra Myasnikova, Ching-Wei (Fredo) Chien, and David Chamulak did a wonderful job to prepare and cleanup the event.
    • After 14 1/2 years of service at LTU, Susan Penner, Administrative Assistant to the Dean of Arts and Sciences, will be leaving us. There was a farewell gathering for Susan on Feb. 6.
    • The 2002 Mathematical Contest in Modeling, an international competition, is taking place, Feb. 7 - 11 (Thurs. eve. - Mon. eve.).  The following  students are participating: Mohammed Nazrulla, Hilary Olson, Steven Holcomb, Anthony Berard, William Kolasa, Nathan Loria, Mark Wagner, David Chamulak, Stiven Apostoloski, James Vecore, Jon Kade, Mark Heikkila, Brandy Shuler, Aaron Mitchell, John Mysliwiec, Joey Katz, Ayad yacoub, and Mohamad Mazeh. Faculty Advisors are Ruth Favro, Howard Whitston, Scott Schneider, and Valentina Tobos.

    Jan. 2002

    • 1-18, OTMS (Online Tutoring Management System) was launched.
    • Hope College is hosting a Computer Science NSF REU summer undergraduate research program in the summer of 2002. We have support for at least five undergraduate researchers who are not Hope students. Please encourage your students to consider this opportunity to be involved with computer science research. Further information including application material is available on our webpage at http://www.cs.hope.edu/reu
    • MAA conference on May 10-11, 2002 - Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, MI For more info: favro@ltu.edu



     

    Math and Computer Science Department