The School of CS has an active industrial affiliates program (IAP). Some IAP activities are highlighted below.
Cisco Systems, Inc.
The 2013 Cisco Systems Scholarship for Underrepresented Undergraduate Students at UMass Amherst Computer Science was awarded to Rachel Gordon. The recipients of the 2013 Cisco Systems Awards for Outstanding Achievement as a Junior Undergraduate are Kyle Hughes, David Lowell, Brian Stapleton, Ryan Szeto, and Sofya Vorotnikova. This award, sponsored by Cisco, is given to the top junior year undergraduates in the School as determined by a faculty committee who took into account recommendations by faculty members, GPA, coursework, independent studies or honor projects, and course citations.
The Fourth Annual Programming Competition, held on April 11, 2013, was sponsored by Cisco. Participants from the five colleges competed to solve programming challenges. Khanh Nguyen, Anthony Moh, and Tung Pham won first through third place, respectively.
EMC2 Corporation
Along with supporting many undergraduate and graduate student events during the year, EMC2 Corporation also helped to fill the sparsely furnished USpace by providing many large beanbag chairs for students to be able to relax on while studying in the room.
UMass Amherst CS alumnae Julie Flannery and Jessica Schneider visited the School to speak to the CS Women's group about their careers as engineers at EMC. Dr. Narayanan ("KK") Krishnakumar, Vice President and Chief IT Architect at EMC, also gave a presentation to students and faculty on "Boldly Transforming IT Like Never Before."
Yahoo! Inc.
Assistant Professor Benjamin Marlin received a Yahoo! Faculty Research and Engagement Award for his work on "Identifying and Exploiting Temporal Patterns in Online Recommender Systems."
Along with sponsoring the School's outstanding undergraduate and graduate awards presented at the OAA 2013 (see article on OAA), Yahoo! also presented 2013 Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards to doctoral students David Belanger and Samuel Huston.
On May 2, 2013, the ACM Student Chapter hosted the school's 6th Annual CS Foosball Tournament sponsored by Yahoo!. Students, faculty, and staff participated in the event. CS undergrads Mohamed Elmoutaouakil and Said Mastawi won this year's tournament. Second place went to postdoc Mostafa Keikha and doctoral student Mostafa Dehghan Shirehpaz.
Yahoo! sponsored the technical talks held throughout the academic year as part of the Machine Learning & Friends Lunch Seminar Series and the Computational Social Sciences Initiative Lunch Series. They also sponsored CS Women and ACM chapter events including the popular ACM Jeopardy! Night, and the Fall Hackathon.