Grad students, advisor win computer science competition

PULLMAN – Two Washington State University graduate students and their faculty advisor were presented with the Best Paper Award at the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-centric Computing held Sept. 5-7, in Brighton, United Kingdom.

WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate students Sean Farley and Jon Brown, together with their faculty advisor Christopher Hundhausen, submitted their paper entitled, “Can Direct Manipulation Lower the Barriers to Programming and Promote Positive Transfer to Textual Programming? – An Experimental Study.” The paper won the distinction after peer review by an international program committee, which reviewed a total sixty-five submissions to the symposium.

“In my view, this is quite an honor”, said Hundhausen who attended the symposium representing the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, “and it reflects quite positively on the quality of research being conducted in the Visualization and End User programming Lab (VEUPL) in particular, and in EECS in general.”

Sean Farley, Renton, graduated summer 2006 with a master’s degree in computer science and Jon Brown, Wenatchee, is currently working on a
doctorate in computer science. Chris Hundhausen is director and founder of VEUPL, which designs, evaluates, and studies the use of computer-based visualization and simulation environments that empower people to construct and discuss visual representations of scientific phenomena.

The IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) is the premier international conference on visual and multimedia computer-mediated communication. Based on the idea that visual representations can greatly benefit the task of computer programming, the conference has become the premier international forum on VL research.

The mission of the symposium is to support the design, formalization, implementation, and evaluation of computing languages that are easier to learn, easier to use, and easier to understand by a broader group of people.

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