One of the presentation was named among the top three student presentations at the conference. In addition, a three member Hope team placed third in a programming competition held during the event.
The students attending were junior Carrie Halvorsen of Traverse City, senior Marty Kane of Champaign, IL, junior Chad Kettner of Grand Rapids, junior Mike Kopchick of Grand Rapids, and senior Alex Sherstov of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Ben Occhipinti and Josh Rowe from Grand Valley State University, also presented their summer work, conducted as a part of the Hope program, at the conference.
Sherstov presented his paper, "Visualization of Distributed Algorithms using DisViz," which was selected one of the top three student works at the conference. Halvorsen and Kane presented a poster on their work on electronic textbooks, while Kettner and Kopchick presented a poster that described research in improving the ability of search engines to respond appropriately to ambiguous search requests.
Sherstov did his work under the direction of Dr. Herb Dershem. The other four students all worked under Dr. Ryan McFall.
In addition to making their presentations, the students participated in a programming contest held during the conference. The team of Halvorsen, Kane, and Sherstov solved three out of the eight problems for a third-place finish, while the team of Kettner, Kopchick, and Occhipinti correctly solved one problem.