The Third Bit

Today Was a Good Day

Today, the students in my CSC491 project course gave their end-of-term demos. Each team had 10 minutes to present their work to a mixed audience of students, faculty, and visitors from industry.  It went very well—their talks were clear, their demos ran smoothly, and they handled questions well.  For the record, we heard from:

• Mike Conley and Geofrey Flores, who are rebuilding OLM on top of Ruby on Rails;
• Fan Dong, who benchmarked the usability of three scientific workflow packages (Taverna, LONI, and Kepler);
• Justin Foong, Vladimir Markin, and Teren Teh, who integrated Mozilla’s Ubiquity natural language interface into Thunderbird;
• AJ Guillon, who is building a mixed task- and data-parallel library for GPU programming;
• Lenny Han and Can Zhang, who extended the Eclipse feature diagram plugin to create a WYSIWYG graphical refactoring tool;
• Mohammad Jalali and Darren Jung, who extend the FlareFlow visual database query builder (and did some usability testing to see if their extensions actually made life easier);
• Eddie Kang and Ben Kim, who created two graph layout plugins for a bioinformatics tool called Navigator;
• Denis Pankratov and Jennifer Ruttan, who have been banging their heads against a wall of undocumented and/or flaky CDMA phone software;
• Miles Thibault, who put together a business plan for a screen writing site; and
• Kosta Zabashta, who built the mail and search components for our rewrite of DrProject on Django.

I’m really proud to have worked with them—they deserved all the applause they got.