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News

Students strut computer stuff

NSM event will allow high schoolers to compete for UH scholarships, other prizes

by Sabrina Rodriguez
The Daily Cougar 

The College of Natural Science and Mathematics will host an open house event from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday to showcase computer research and recruit high school students to attend the University. 

The event will take place on the fifth floor of Phillip G. Hoffman Hall.

"We're interested in attracting Houston-area students from high schools and community colleges to enroll in our undergraduate program," Dexter Hill, associate director of computer science initiatives, said. "And this is an event to get them interested in what is happening at the University of Houston and specifically in the Department of Computer Science." 

Scholarships will also be awarded at the event. 

"We are having a programming contest for high school students," Hill said. "We have had 10 three-person teams register for the programming contest, which is our capacity so we're very pleased about that." 

The Department of Computer Science organized the contest for high school students interested in computer science, software and development. 

Teams of three high school students, who must be juniors or seniors in accredited programs, will have to create, demonstrate and develop a program to solve a problem that will be given at the start of the contest. 

The reward for first place is $2,400 and a $1,000 scholarship to each member of the winning team. Scholarships to the UH Department of Computer Science will also be awarded to each member of the second-place team. 

University students will compete in a research poster contest that will be judged by the public and faculty members. 

"We're excited about having a poster competition for our students, where they present a poster describing some of their research activity and we've (received) a dozen entries with 25 or 30 students involved and we are very pleased about that," Hill said. 

Demonstrations will include computational biomedicine techniques that look for early signs of cancer, smart robots, brain activity, blood flow, thermal facial imaging used by homeland security and characterizing Martian landscape. 

Twelve demonstrations will be showcased at the event and faculty and graduate students working on the demonstrations will be on hand to answer questions about their research.

Hardware and software prizes will be awarded to visitors who can answer questions about the demonstrations. 

The results of the programming contest will be announced at 2:30 p.m. The research poster contest winner will be announced later that afternoon and prizes will be given out to the public throughout the event. 

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