 Drake University students Skyler Nesheim (left) and Luong “Louis” Hoang won an award for best undergraduate paper at the 40th annual Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium. |
CONTACT: Lisa Lacher, 515-271-3119, lisa.lacher@drake.edu
Drake University students Skyler Nesheim of Altoona and Luong “Louis” Hoang won an award for best undergraduate paper at the 40th annual Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium, hosted by the University of North Dakota.
Their paper, “Creating an Object-Oriented Network Simulator,” was honored for its innovation in creating a new software program to facilitate testing of ad hoc wireless network protocols.
“Our basic goal was to design and implement a wireless network simulator that would be easy to maintain and extend,” said Nesheim, who recently completed his senior year at Drake and is a graduate of Southeast Polk High School. “We wanted to make it easy for student researchers to create and test their own wireless network routing protocols.”
Nesheim and Hoang, a junior, collaborated together as research assistants for Associate Professor of Computer Science Michael Rieck. The project won the Maytag Innovation award last year and is funded through a grant from the Maytag Corporation. Nesheim and Hoang developed the project by examining studies and dissertations from graduate students and gave a 30-minute presentation on their paper at the symposium.
“The research we did to accomplish this project and the paper involved a serious study of object-oriented programming practices and design as well as an in-depth study of the routing protocols,” said Nesheim, who majored in computer science.
“The Symposium conference was a big event,” said Hoang, an international student from Hanoi, Vietnam, who’s majoring in quantitative economics, mathematics and computer science. “It attracts many talented and professional persons in the field and it created a remarkable learning experience for sharing knowledge as well as the environment to network with top leaders in the industry and other peers. Winning the best paper award marked our success for the efforts we’ve put in and of course motivated us to maintain and improve our project in the future.”
The symposium, which was held April 20-21, included a panel discussion from program directors, engineers and programmers from Microsoft Corp. and IBM, centering on the theme “Our Midwest Computing Heritage.” The regional conference was established in 1967 to promote creative thinking about computer-related issues in institutions of higher education.