Congratulations to Alexander Vinh Nguyen for his extremely professional object-oriented solution to this quarter's Pattern Matching contest problem. There were many correct solutions this quarter, and in the end it came down to the solution with the fastest runtime!

Thanks to everyone for participating in the UCLA ACM Quarterly Programming Contest during the 2008-2009 academic year. Look forward to more exciting contests next year!

What: Cisco Research Tech Talk
Where: ENGR IV: 54-134
When: Thursday, April 23, 6:00pm - 7:00pm

Dr. Steven Fraser, Director
Cisco Research Center
Software "Best" Practices, Agile Deconstructed

"Best" really depends on context ‐ and this introduction to software "best" practices will focus on the evaluation and integration of the practices that constitute many of today's "Agile" methods. One of the interesting observations made by members of the software community is that "what is old ‐ is new again" when it comes to Agile. Another observation is that "best" is not universally applicable and boundary conditions do apply ‐ due to variations in customers, competition, context, culture, tools, scale and scope ‐ of the systems developed. This talk ‐ intended for researchers, practitioners, managers and educators ‐ does not require any specific programming knowledge and has evolved over the past ten years based on experience gleamed at several multinational organizations developing large software systems.

Please see the attached pdf for additional information regarding the speaker.

Advanced Bionics, LLC is offering a four hour discussion on May 1st, 2009 covering the technical difficulties facing software engineers.

Advanced Bionics, LLC makes cochlear implants, and is headquartered in Valencia, CA, but our software department is located in Sylmar, CA. For more information about who we are and what we do, please visit www.bionicear.com.

The day will be spent discussing the architecture and infrastructure of AB’s fitting software, SoundWave. SoundWave is a C# WinForms application developed over the past five years used to adjust stimulation settings for one or more cochlear implants on a patient. SoundWave has a multilayer Service Oriented Programming (SOP) architecture that uses our own implementation of an Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) infrastructure to handle everything from thread marshalling to enforcement of our state machine rules. Multiple static threads are used to keep SoundWave responsive.

What: Advanced discussion of technology challenges
When: 1pm to 4pm May 1st, 2009
Where: Encino, CA (RSVP for specifics)
Presenter: Phillip S. Givens, Principal Software Engineer, Advanced Bionics, LLC.

Target Audience: Junior and above Computer Science students.

If you are looking for an internship or entry level position, feel free to bring your resume and be prepared to talk to me about projects that you are proud of. As we need at least five participants for this presentation to go forward, please email Mr. Phillip Givens at Phillip.givens [at] advancedbionics [dot] com to RSVP.

Please see the attached flyer for additional details.

Join ACM for the Microsoft Programming Competition:
What: Microsoft Programming Competition
When: Monday 4/20/2009, at 6:15pm for ~3 Hours
Where: Boelter 4760

There will be 3 persons from Microsoft attending, and great prizes to be won.

Programming Competition
3 Coding Problems to be written in any language of your choosing. You must submit the output and the code.

The output will be marked against the test cases, and the top contestants will receive excellent prizes.

Open to graduate and undergraduate students!.

FYI: Undergraduate problems should be very doable with knowledge from CS 31/32.

When: April 15, 2009. 6:00p - 8:00p
Where: BH 4760
What: MySQL Speakers Tour

Sun Microsystems has graciously offered to make UCLA a stop on the MySQL Speakers Tour in mid April. Join us for a presentation by a distinct group of speakers from MySQL (please see bio's below).

Of course, as with any of our events, food and drinks will be provided!

Please read further for speaker bios.

The Spring 2009 UCLA ACM Quarterly Programming Contest is now live!

This quarter we have an interesting problem dealing with pattern matching!
The first place winner will receive a $50 Best Buy gift card.
There will also be bonus prizes for anyone who submits a correct solution :)

Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2009.

LOCKHEED MARTIN
TECHNOLOGY EXHIBIT DAY

THURSDAY, APRIL 2ND
RICE ROOM, BOELTER HALL
(6th floor; 6764)
STOP BY ANYTIME: 10:30 AM – 3:30 PM

WHY ATTEND…
• Chat & Learn From Engineers & Scientists About Their Field of Work
• See Cool Demos Depicting Exciting Products and Technology
• Tabletop wind tunnel, product models, videos, radiation detector, materials used on projects and other computer graphics and animation
• Raffle every hour: You might win a Zune or GPS
• Free Food & Giveaways
• We are hiring!

Make sure to stop by –

Tired of working on your projects? Join ACM for two 10th week study break events this Wednesday and Thursday.

Take a break from your projects to grab some food and have a little fun. These events are sponsored by Microsoft (bring your resumes).

What: ACM Study Break Event 1
When: March 11, 2009 from 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Where: Boelter 4760

What: ACM Study Break Event 2
When: March 12, 2009 from 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Where: Boelter 4760

UCLA ACM would like to congratulate Grace Park, who will receive a $50.00 Best Buy gift card for her efficient solution to the problem.
We received many correct solutions using brute force methods, but few were able to complete all the test cases within a minute. Grace went above and beyond to speed up her performance by using an intelligent mixture of combinatorics and prime factorization.
Well done, Grace! And thanks to everyone who participated!

Get ready for the Spring 2009 Quarterly Programming Contest!

Early registration is officially open for Google's largest developer event of the year, Google I/O, being held on May 27 and 28, 2009 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Space is limited so reserve your spot now as Google I/O attracts about 3,000 developers with two days full of in-depth breakout sessions on the latest technologies. New additions to the conference include learning about 3rd party technologies, as well as informal office hours with product managers and engineers and informative tech talks on areas of interest to developers, both of which are Google traditions. This year, sessions will span a range of topics including Android, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit, and Google App Engine. See the latest session list.

The academic registration fee is $50, which applies to students, professors, faculty, and staff. Early registrants will receive a Google Chrome Comic Book. Registration to Google I/O includes: Two full days of sessions, product demos, breakfast, lunch, snacks, admission to Wednesday night's After Hours reception, as well as discounted room rates at several nearby hotels. To register, click here. For more information, check out the Google I/O website.