« 20 October 2002 - 4:27 pm | Main | 22 October 2002 - 4:51 pm »

I've recently returned from the wilds of northern Illinois, where I attended a student-run conference put on by the ACM chapter of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This the third year that WashU's ACM chapter drove up for the conference, and this year we tricked 10 people into going up to hear people like Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris, and "Rasterman," the designer of the Enlightenment windows manager, speak. We also ate lots of (not so good) free food and got to play Quake in true virtual reality in UIUC's CAVE. All things considered, it was a pretty good trip.

But, as in years past, after spending some time in a CS department that is easily ten times larger than WashU's, and has an ACM chapter that puts ours to shame, I found myself wondering if I would have been better served at a larger university. In the end, I decided that I probably wouldn't be, but they really do have an impressive facility there.

What follows are a few random ideas I had after seeing the CS facilities at UIUC.

• Scattered throughout the DCL are display boxes filled with old photos and hardware from earlier eras of computing. There must be at least twenty of these display cases, all over the place. Seeing all these display cases has inspired me to do something similar here at WashU, albeit on a smaller scale. ACM has an empty display case that we aren't using for anything at the moment. I wonder if there is a collection of old ACM photographs that I can use for this? Or something else that would be cool to put on display? I'll have to look into this a bit more.
  
• ACM needs a project for its members to work on. If we pick the right project, and do a bit of initial work, this will hopefully be something that other people want to work on, thus bringing more people into ACM. The project I've been pushing for the past few days is an interactive display for the CS dept. Most of the time it would show nifty computer graphics related to work people are doing in the department, but it could also serve to direct people to professors offices or give information about the department when a user requests it (probably through a touchscreen). I think this could be a pretty cool little application, and everyone I spoke to about it seemed to think so as well, so perhaps I'll try to get something organized.
  
• Since we're on the topic of ACM, I think it would be very cool if ACM put together a questionnaire that asked seniors to give their impressions of all the CS classes that they've taken and of the entire sequence of classes as a whole. ACM could distribute the questionnaires, compile the results and share them with the department. I'd be interested in seeing what departing seniors had to think of the courses they've taken, and I would think that the department would like to get feedback like this.
  
• The consensus opinion seems to be that ACM needs a TV or projector and game system for the lounge.
  
• Somewhat related to the second bullet above, but a fishtank VR system that uses a camera to track the user's head location would be a very cool project to work on.

I'll have more to say about the conference later, but this seems like enough for now. If any of you have ideas or input on anything I've mentioned, email me or leave a comment.

Posted by on 20 October 2002 at 5:44 PM