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February 2017
| VOICES Bi-Monthly Magazine of the University of Technology, Jamaica
STUDENT VOICES
“UTech, Jamaica to Me”
“I am not sure what I think about him, I have to see what he is doing first.
I have to see what kind of changes he can bring to this institution and
how he can support us financially in terms of school fee. I just want to
see the first step he makes and the changes. I like the environment and
the students here. They just make it comfortable and it allows me to build
rapport with other students.”
Dominic Groves, Year 1
School of Building and Land Management,
Faculty of The Built Environment
“I didn’t know that we had a new President so that is news to me. Being
a student at UTech, Jamaica, normally I wasn’t friendly. I came here and
met a few friends and got new experiences. So probably the experiences
and learning new stuff are what I like about being here.”
Davian Fairweather, Year 1
Caribbean School of Nursing,
College of Health Sciences
UTech, Ja. Students Dominate Caribbean Ranking at 4th
International 24-Hour IEEE Xtreme Programming Competition
University of Technology, Jamaica students from the School of Computing
and Information Technology (SCIT), Faculty of Engineering and Computing
emerged as the leading regional institution following their participation in the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE) 4
th
international IEEE
Xtreme 24-Hour Programming Competition held recently on October 22,
2016. UTech, Jamaica is currently ranked at 390 out of 2000 Universities
in the world standing for 2016, moving up 900 places from its previous
ranking in 2015. The global software development challenge which is
conducted entirely online attracts some of the brightest student minds in
computing and engineering worldwide. Programming challenges.
Computing solutions to real world problems
IEEEXtreme 24-Hour Programming Competition is a global challenge in
which teams of IEEE Student members—advised and proctored by an IEEE
member, and often supported by an IEEE Student Branch—compete in a 24-
hour time span against each other to solve a set of real world programming
problems. These span for example, programming used in data mining
for tasks ranging from classifying diverse chemical compounds, to text
processing and searching in large databases. Programming problems can
only be answered in any of the supported languages (C, C++, C#, Java,
Python, Ruby, Perl, and PHP).
Dr. Sean Thorpe
, Head, SCIT, explains that the students use and design
a set of well suited algorithms to formulate the solutions to assigned
problems. Students use a combination of different computer programming
languages as a part of these mentioned solutions. The criterion for winning
the competition is dependent on the quality of the computer programme
output generated by the software solution. This quality of programme
output is measured by: (i) run time execution of the programme output
and (ii) desired functionality of the programme output. Students from the
winning IEEE student branches worldwide get international ‘bragging rights’
and scholarships to attend highly reputable International IEEE conferences.
Registration for the IEEE Xtreme competition opens in August each year.
University IEEE Student Branches register student members in collegiate
teams of three to participate in the global challenge. Students and mentors
work assiduously from the registration period until the competition day. Last
year UTech, Jamaica fielded four teams consisting of three students each
which is in keeping with the IEEE competition rules.
Dr. Thorpe noted that “the UTech, Ja./FENC IEEE Computer Society Student
Branch is doing an extremely good job, through opportunities such as the
IEEE Xtreme software competition challenge, to provide the students with
an international platform to become world class software practitioners.” He
expressed pride that, “the University’s participation over the last three years
and at the 4th staging of the competition has significantly improved in the
world ranking and has now far outstripped our other local and regional
University competitors in the software challenge.”
STUDENT EXCELLENCE
School of Computing and Information Technology (SCIT) students and mentors who
participated in the 4th International 24-Hour Extreme Programming Competition.
From left (standing) Michael Asphall, Jermaine Coates, Mardon Bailey, Lomar
Lilly, Luke Chen Shui, Duran Thomas, Brandon Chung, Travis Allen and (seated
from left) Raffique Muir,Christopher Udeagha (Chair IEEE Jamaica Section and
Academic Proctor) and Agyei Masters.
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