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This year’s Graduate Student Workshop on Computing (GSWC) was a
tremendous success. With more than 125 attendees, the auditorium was
packed throughout the day, and the workshop can certain rival some
academic conferences. For the program, ten entries were selected as
full papers (out of a total of 22 submission). In addition, ten
posters were presented. The student work was impressive from every
lab in the department. Fang Yu won the Adobe Best Paper Award while
Jonathen Ventura won the Adobe Best Poster Award. Congratulations!

In addition to great work presented by our students, the workshop also
featured a number of distinguished guests from industry. The first
event was a rousing panel discussion between Arnab Bhattacharjee
(Director of Engineering for Yahoo! Search Technology), Thorsten von
Eicken (CTO and Founder of RightScale), and Simon Towers (Director of
Adobe’s Advanced Technology Labs). Later, Peter Norvig (Director of
Research at Google) presented his keynote on “Statistical Learning as
the Ultimate Agile Development Tool.” The last, and most certainly not
the least, talk was Barney Pell’s (Search Strategist and Evangelist,
Microsoft Live Search Powerset) keynote on “Semantics and the Future of
Search.”

To wrap up the day, everyone was invited to the annual Computer
Science BBQ. We were glad to see the industry participants all there
until the very end. At one point, we even had Peter Norvig and Barney
Pell in our annual water balloon contest. The BBQ was a great casual
event as students, faculty, and industry were actively interacting
with each other.