Undergraduate
Awards to CCIS Undergraduates & Groups
• Andrea Grimes named by CRA as Top Female Undergraduate in 2005
Andrea Grimes of the College of Computer and Information Science has won the top award in the Computing Research Association 2005 Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition. The male award was won by a student from MIT. Runners-up included students from institutions such as Carnegie Mellon, Brown, Columbia, Berkeley, and Harvard. The award is a prestigious one, because the Association is the primary organization that focuses on computer science research, covering issues of policy, information, human resources, and community. Its members include the PhD-granting computer science departments in the US and Canada. Andrea's award included a $1,000 cash prize that was presented at a major national research conference.
The award is primarily based on Andrea's research. In Professor Futrelle's laboratory, she built a key system for research on computational linguistics applied to the Biology literature. She also worked with Professor Tarasewich on Human-Computer Interaction privacy issues for mobile devices. As an undergraduate, Andrea co-authored three published papers and had two additional papers submitted.
Andrea's qualifications go well beyond her stellar academic record and other prizes to include instructing in a community center, mentoring local high school students, and prominent involvement in various choirs at Northeastern.
In the Fall of 2005, Andrea entered graduate school at Georgia Tech in the program for Human Centered Computing.
• Additional CRA Awards
The College of Computer and Information Sciences has had other successes in the CRA competition:
- In 2002, Jennifer McDonald received honorable mention for her work on automata simulation.
- In 2007, Jason Ansel was a finalist for his work on distributed and parallel computing.
- In 2008, Tanya Cashorali received honorable mention for her work on computing and genetics.
• Undergraduate Research
In addition to the students who have won CRA awards, many students have conducted research with faculty and have published papers in computing conferences and journals.
• Awards to the CCIS ACM StudentChapter
The CCIS ACM student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery has five international awards in the past six years:
- 2007-2008: Outstanding Website
- 2006-2007: Outstanding Website
- 2005-2006: Outstanding School Service
- 2004-2005: Outstanding Activities
- 2002-2003: Outstanding Website
Over the same period, only one university worldwide has won as many as 2 awards (University of the Phillipines). Therefore, the achievement of the CCIS ACM student chapter in winning 4 awards is especially remarkable.
Below is a shapshot of members of the CCIS ACM student chapter taken after one of the talks sponsored by the chapter.
