Noticias de Colombia
Kiwi Students Victorious in International Computer Competitions
Monday, 24 August 2009
Two university students from New Zealand have made their mark on the international stage, taking top honours in high level computer science competitions.
Ronald Chan, who is studying Mechatronics at The University of Auckland’s Faculty of Engineering, won the Grand Prize in an online competition which challenged university students from around the world to solve a series of challenging mathematical problems using the Dyalog APL programming environment.
He is being flown to the United States in September to collect his $2000 prize in person at the Dyalog ’09 Conference in New Jersey. He will also give a presentation on how he solved the problems.
A Waikato Masters student in computer science and former web developer, Quan Sun, has just won first place in an international competition using the award-winning Weka datamining software developed at the University of Waikato.
Quan was placed first in the ‘hard’, graduate/post-doctoral section of the annual University of California San Diego Student Datamining Competition, which attracted more than 300 entries from top universities in North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia.
The competition was in four sections – with ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ options for both undergraduate and graduate/post-doc students. All competitors were set the task of predicting anomalies in some e-commerce transaction data.
Quan says figuring out the answer took him about a month, working on the data for two to four hours a day and brainstorming ideas with his wife, who’s a PhD student in engineering at Waikato.
“I couldn’t have done it without Weka,” he says. “Weka is like the Microsoft Word of datamining, and at least half of the competitors used it in their entries.”
In 2005, Weka software won the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Service Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). The open-source software has been downloaded by more than one and a half million users worldwide.
Quan's MSc supervisor, Associate Professor Eibe Frank, says the win provides yet more evidence that the University of Waikato's Computer Science Department is a good destination for students. "Quan's success demonstrates the benefits of studying at a department that produces internationally competitive open-source software such as Weka. Here at Waikato we not only write widely-used software; we also teach our students to become expert practitioners."
Quan, who also did his first degree at Waikato, says his previous work as a web developer has given him good attention to detail, which is essential for datamining. He’s planning to continue on to doctoral study when he completes his Masters degree later this year.
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