Google Code Jam 2014 Registration is open and the qualification round starts on Friday, April 11, 2014. Google Code Jam is an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google. The competition began in 2003 as a means to identify top engineering talent for potential employment at Google.

The competition consists of a set of algorithmic problems which must be solved in a fixed amount of time. Competitors may use any programming language and development environment to obtain their solutions. More than 45,000 coders registered to compete last year and the winner, Ivan Miatselski won the $15,000 grand prize.

If you are interested in finding out more, see the Google Code Jam quick start guide and try some of the practice problems from past competitions. The first qualification round starts on April 11 and the finals will take place in Los Angeles on August 15.

Google Code Jam 2014 Registration is open and the qualification round starts on Friday, April 11, 2014. Google Code Jam is an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google. The competition began in 2003 as a means to identify top engineering talent for potential employment at Google.

The competition consists of a set of algorithmic problems which must be solved in a fixed amount of time. Competitors may use any programming language and development environment to obtain their solutions. More than 45,000 coders registered to compete last year and the winner, Ivan Miatselski won the $15,000 grand prize.

If you are interested in finding out more, see the Google Code Jam quick start guide and try some of the practice problems from past competitions. The first qualification round starts on April 11 and the finals will take place in Los Angeles on August 15.

The UMBC Council of Computing Majors will hold its first hands-on Raspberry Pi workshop from 2:00-4:00 this Friday, March 7, in ITE240.

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 credit-card-sized, single-board computer that runs a version of Unix. Originally developed for teaching computer programming to children, it is now being used in many useful and exciting applications, from near-space weather balloons to baby monitors to media servers. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

The initial workshop will cover the Raspberry Pi, its Raspbian Unix OS, and how to program it using Python for real-world applications. There will be 20 Pi computers for participants to use. The workshop is designed so freshman and non-computer science majors can attend and participate. If you know anyone who would be interested in attending, please send them the link and information!

Space is limited, so sign up to reserve a seat.  Intermediate and advanced workshops will follow later in the semester. See the Pi FAQ for general information on the Pi and Raspbian for information on its operating system.

For more information, contact CCM president Austin Murdock (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

The UMBC Council of Computing Majors will hold its first hands-on Raspberry Pi workshop from 2:00-4:00 this Friday, March 7, in ITE240.

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 credit-card-sized, single-board computer that runs a version of Unix. Originally developed for teaching computer programming to children, it is now being used in many useful and exciting applications, from near-space weather balloons to baby monitors to media servers. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

The initial workshop will cover the Raspberry Pi, its Raspbian Unix OS, and how to program it using Python for real-world applications. There will be 20 Pi computers for participants to use. The workshop is designed so freshman and non-computer science majors can attend and participate. If you know anyone who would be interested in attending, please send them the link and information!

Space is limited, so sign up to reserve a seat.  Intermediate and advanced workshops will follow later in the semester. See the Pi FAQ for general information on the Pi and Raspbian for information on its operating system.

For more information, contact CCM president Austin Murdock (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

Grant English, VP Engineering, Advertising Technologies at AOL Networks (aka Advertising.com) in Baltimore will visit and give a talk from Noon to 1:00pm on Monday, 24 February 2014 in Lecture Hall 7 (ITE104) at UMBC. In his talk, he will describe AOL’s Adtech advertisement serving platform, its underlying system architecture, and what his development team does.

He will also dive deep into how new online and mobile technologies makes money, focusing it to computer science and engineering students. There will be a free lunch.

Please RSVP for the event here.

Grant English, VP Engineering, Advertising Technologies at AOL Networks (aka Advertising.com) in Baltimore will visit and give a talk from Noon to 1:00pm on Monday, 24 February 2014 in Lecture Hall 7 (ITE104) at UMBC. In his talk, he will describe AOL’s Adtech advertisement serving platform, its underlying system architecture, and what his development team does.

He will also dive deep into how new online and mobile technologies makes money, focusing it to computer science and engineering students. There will be a free lunch.

Please RSVP for the event here.

Grant English, VP Engineering, Advertising Technologies at AOL Networks (aka Advertising.com) in Baltimore will visit and give a talk from Noon to 1:00pm on Monday, 24 February 2014 in Lecture Hall 7 (ITE104) at UMBC. In his talk, he will describe AOL’s Adtech advertisement serving platform, its underlying system architecture, and what his development team does.

He will also dive deep into how new online and mobile technologies makes money, focusing it to computer science and engineering students. There will be a free lunch.

Please RSVP for the event here.

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git’s features (learning ease, tiny footprint and fast performance, services like GitHub) have caused many to choose it over older alternatives like Subversion and CVS. If you want to find out how you can use Git, come the LUG Git tutorial this Wednesday.

The UMBC Linux Users Group will sponsor a lecture and workshop on Git led by Alexander Bauer from Noon to 1:00pm on Wednesday, February 26 in the ITE 240 computer laboratory at UMBC. “Git” is a term that has become familiar to a great many of us in the technical world, whether as users or as developers. With the rise of such services as GitHub and BitBucket, and an increasing number of open source projects being hosted as Git repositories, yet many people are still unfamiliar with its use and potential use cases. During the workshop you can use your own laptop or a lab computer.

The UMBC ACM Student Chapter will kick off the Spring Hi-Tea series this week at 3:00pm on Friday, February 20. Hi Tea is a student-run social event held (nearly) every Friday from 3:00 to 3:30 in the third floor hallway of the ITE building outside the CSEE Department suite (325 ITE). All students, staff, faculty and friends of the CSEE Department are welcome to attend. Each week, a group of students will plan and assemble simple refreshments for the event. See our photo sets for pictures of past Hi-Tea events.

This week the event host is the IEEE Student Branch and next week it will be the Ebiquity Research Group.

This time we are changing the competition model to bring in more participants and give away more prizes. We are also modifying the judging process to bring in more votes from the faculty, staff and students who are attending the event. We will continue to have faculty and/or staff judges at the same time, that would help us find a right balance for the judging process. Although the competition rules remain the same, we are now going to have four winners and instead of a knockout tournament format we will have points based ranking format. Here are the rules:

• Form groups of one to three members. Teams do not have to have all members from the same lab. So feel free to form a group with any of your friends from the CSEE Department.
• Create a name for your team or use your lab’s name.
• The winning team will be chosen from a weighted combination of points given by judges and attendees.
• Each week one or more teams may participate. All of them would get points on the judging criteria from the judges and attendees.
• Points obtained through the semester would be ranked and the top four team would receive the prizes.
• Each team should limit their presentation to $25. Each team MUST save their receipts to obtain their reimbursement. We will inform you how to get the reimbursement.
• Teams will be judged on creativity, presentation, and budget planning. It is preferred that you list how you managed your expenses for the judges to verify limit-to-$25 rule.
• The Hi-Tea competition will proceed through the semester and at the end of the semester the winners would be announced.

For questions, comments, and registration, send email to one of the Hi-Tea committee members: Genaro Hernandez Jr. (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ), Primal Pappachan (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) or Sunil Gandhi (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

The Baltimore Code Craftsmanship meetup group will hold its monthly meeting at 7:00pm on Thursday, February 20 in room 107 of the Sondheim Building on the UMBC Campus. The meetup is for students, faculty and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

This is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and automated unit testing environment. If you don’t have a laptop, come anyway, we will need only one laptop for every two people. Be prepared to pair up, learn, share and have fun!

Join the meetup and register to attend at the meetup event page.