Students and industry professionals network at C-MAPP event

The Computing-Mines Affiliates Partnership Program (C-MAPP) held its third annual Awards Event on Thursday, January 19, 2017. The event brings together Mines computer science students and industry professionals. Twenty-four students presented their posters in 30-second elevator pitches to industry judges, and 32 students were awarded scholarships thanks to the fifteen C-MAPP Partner companies. The theme of the night was “what I wish I knew.” After a brief company bio, each of the fifteen industry representatives gave a piece of advice on what they wish they knew when they were in college before presenting a $1,000 scholarship to select students.

Kerry Neilson, a representative from Lockheed Martin, spoke about the positive effect that events like C-MAPP have on students. “How successful you will be in industry depends on your ability to communicate and to summarize,” said Neilson. Tyler Rust, a Fast Enterprises representative, expressed that, “Anything we can do to be involved at Mines—keep that constant presence with the students and learn about their projects—is a priority for us.”

“My advice to you is stretch your comfort zone,” said Metcalf representative Nathan Boyles. “Scare yourself because that is when you start expanding your horizon, you start coming up with new ideas and you start meeting new people [who] are going to give you their hand and hold you forward.”

After the scholarship presentations, “Best Poster” and “Best Oral Presentation” winners and runners-up were announced.

Jesse Demott won Best Undergraduate Poster. His project focused on bringing like-minded computer science students together via CONNECT, a constantly evolving web application that caters to computer science students.

“Computer science is such a wide field, there’s so many different things you can learn and so many different niches,” explained Demott. “Students can feel like they’re isolated.”  The main goal of CONNECT is to allow computer science students to connect with their peers and discuss what they are passionate about.

Jennifer Ryan won Best Graduate Poster for “Selection of Offloading Algorithms in High Congested SDNs”. Blair Watkinson’s  “Self-Organizing Autonomous Robotic System Using Constrained K-means Clustering” was the runner-up.

The winner of Best Undergraduate Oral Presentation was Brandon Her for “Mapping Routes of Science”. Fei Han won Best Graduate Oral Presentation for “SRAL: Shared Representative Appearance Learning for Long-Term Visual Place Recognition” and William Kelly’s “A Comparison Between Mobile OS Security Systems” was the graduate runner-up.

"Our C-MAPP event was bigger and better than ever before. We had approximately 220 attendees. The students who presented posters did an amazing job. We were pleased by the number of current students and industry representatives that attended to network," said Tracy Camp, Professor and Division Director for the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Colorado School of Mines.

Contact:
Leah Pinkus, Communications Assistant, Colorado School of Mines | lpinkus@mines.edu
Agata Bogucka, Communications Manager, College of Earth Resource Sciences & Engineering | 303-384-2657 | abogucka@mines.edu