ACM Events & Website

October 7, 2010
Jason Ernst
1 Comment

Categories: Computer Science, Education, Featured, Miscellaneous, News

Tags: ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, Dan Ashlock, Programming Contest, Speaker Series, University of Guelph, Website

Recently the ACM Student Group at the University of Guelph (which I am currently chair of) has been busy with some of our first events. The first was a programming contest modeled after the ACM-ICPC. The event was briefly featured in the fall issue of XRDS (crossroads magazine) (look for the article “ACM Chapter News: From Ontario to Hyderabad”). The purpose of the event was to gain enough interest within the department to field a couple of teams for the annual competition. Our school has not had a team for many years. Overall the event was a success. We managed to attract two sponsors: Freshbooks and the School of Computer Science at the University of Guelph who provided us with great prizes and t-shirts and refreshments for the participants. We now have many students interested in the programming contest teams. Below are some of the pictures from the event.

On top of the programming event, we have begun a speaker series at the University of Guelph. The goal here is to get enough people coming out so that we can eventually host an ACM distinguished speaker. Our first speaker was Dr. Dan Ashlock from the department of Mathematics at the University of Guelph. His talk was on video game content creation and was quite interesting. The slides for the talk are available on the ACM guelph website. The turnout was very good for the first talk and we hope it continues in the future. (for anyone interested in attending we also provide snacks!) There are more talks scheduled for throughout the semester from professors, students and industry speakers.

Lastly, we have launched a first version of our website: http://guelph.acm.org. The main purpose of this page is to display upcoming and past events. In the future we also intend on having a vote available for the distinguished speaker we are inviting to Guelph as well as the ability to vote on dates for upcoming events so that we can get the highest attendance possible.