ACM Computer Research Contest Honors Student Innovations

Nurcan Durak participated in the ACM SRC competition with the paper titled "Principal Contour Extraction and Contour Classification to Detect Coronal Loops from Solar Images." She completed her PhD. dissertation in August 2011 under the supervision of Dr. Olfa Nasraoui in Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Knowledge Discovery and Web Mining Lab. Her research was supported by a NASA and NSF funded project on Coronal Loop Mining since 2006. The project created a system that automatically retrieves solar images with coronal loops from the SOHO/EIT online image catalog. The project's scope falls within the research areas of data mining and machine learning, computer vision, and pattern recognition.

ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) honored the Grand Finals winners of its Student Research Competition (SRC) with awards and cash prizes for achievements in computing research.   The graduate and undergraduate winners competed against more than 50 participants in contests held at 13 ACM conferences. Their research covered a range of computing innovations that have applications for high-performance computer systems designs, image retrieval systems for astrophysicists, scalability for file system directories, improvements in massively-parallel graphics processors, biochips for clinical diagnostics and biochemical procedures, and assistive technologies for speech-impaired people.

ACM's Student Research Competition Program is sponsored by Microsoft Research to encourage students to pursue careers in computer science research, and to ensure the future of scientific discovery and innovation. The awards were presented June 4 at the ACM Awards Banquet in San Jose, CA. 

For more information and complete list of winners, visit http://src.acm.org/.