Computer science Ph.D. students are finalists in international programming contest

Contacts:

Rhonda Zurn, College of Science and Engineering, rzurn@umn.edu, (612) 626-7959

Preston Smith, University News Services, smith@umn.edu, (612) 625-0552

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/08/2011) — Three University of Minnesota computer science and engineering Ph.D. students in the College of Science and Engineering are part of a team that is among only five international student teams selected as finalists for a computer programming contest sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Microsoft.

The students received a $4,000 award to attend the 2011 Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data (ACM SIGMOD) Conference in Athens, Greece, June 12-16, where the winning team will be announced.

The University of Minnesota team is led by a first-year Ph.D student Ahmed Eldawy with Emery Mizero and Mohamed Khalefa as members. Assistant Professor Mohamed Mokbel is the group’s advisor.

The task for this contest is to implement a high-throughput main-memory index that uses flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) for durability. The winning team will be awarded a prize of $5,000. This is the third year of the student programming contest. The winner in 2009 was École Polytechnique in France, and the winner in 2010 was Stanford University.

The other four finalists this year are teams from the University of Cypress, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Stony Brook University, and KAIST (formerly Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology).

Details about the Third Annual SIGMOD Programming Contest are available on the contest website.