8 November 2012

International success for computing students

picture shows from left-to-right: Sebastian, Mark and Ha

A trio of computing students at the University of Dundee are celebrating success at a series of international and UK events.

PhD students Ha Trinh (from Vietnam), Mark Zarb (from Malta) and Sebastian Stein (from Germany) have picked up some of the top student prizes at conferences held in the USA and UK.

Ha won the Best Student Paper Award for research she presented at the ACM SIGACCESS conference in Colorado. The conference is one of the major international events for researchers working on computing and information technology to help people with disabilities. Ha is developing communication devices for people who cannot speak.

She is now going to work with Microsoft's Human-Computer Interaction group in Beijing on a four month internship.

Sebastian won the Best Student Paper award at the Digital Economy conference in Aberdeen, for his research towards a system which uses activity recognition to guiding people with cognitive impairments when they are preparing food.

Mark, meanwhile, won the runner-up medal for the Student Research Competition at the ACM SPLASH conference in Tucson, Arizona. He has analysed communications between expert pair programmers, which can then be used to inform novice pairs on better practices of communication. The ACM SPLASH conference is the premier conference at the intersection of programming languages, programming, and software engineering. Mark will now go on to present his research at the ACM SRC Grand Finals.

"These are all fantastic achievements by our students and highlight Dundee's considerable strengths as an international centre for research in assistive and healthcare technologies and agile computing," said Dr Janet Hughes, Dean of the School of Computing at Dundee.

The SIGACCESS and SPLASH conferences are both events organised by the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society.

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