CMU Students Cited by the CRA, NY Times

News

Well, I’m finally on my way home from Taipei. I’m on a layover right now in Osaka, Japan, awaiting the continuation of my flight back to the USA. While I’m here, I thought I would mention some of our undergrads who have made some waves recently.

The first is Jeff Grossman, a sophomore in our CS program. He was written up recently in the NY Times for the great success of his Flixster iPhone app. Besides the success of Flixster, it is nice to see our Project Olympus helping to make an impact like this.

The other students worth a mention are Jeremiah Blocki and Benjamin Maurer. They were cited as Honorable Mentions in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award.

As he did last year, Tom Horton (University of Virginia) has updated his list of universities and the number of CRA undergraduate winners each has had over the years. The top school on the list is the University of Washington, with 31 awardees. Next is Carnegie Mellon, with 31 30, followed closely by Virginia with 28. Rounding out the top ten are UBC, Berkeley, Brown, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, UT-Austin, and Columbia. I continue to be impressed with Harvey Mudd and Harvard, as their programs are quite small.

Now, I’ve heard arguments recently that the CRA ought to be giving out more undergraduate awards, and I have to agree. There are so many great students who get nominated. On the other hand, there is also probably a desire to have roughly equal numbers of male and female award winners. Thus, one suspects that not enough women are being nominated. A suggestion I’ve heard, which I think is a good one, is to require that coed programs nominate equal numbers of men and women. I think we should adopt that rule here at CMU, even if the CRA doesn’t impose it.

In fact, I am embarrassed to say that for last year, we did not nominate any women for the CRA award! When I found this out (which was too late to fix the situation) I was extremely upset. In a program like ours that prides itself on having lots of stellar women, I simply can’t fathom why the people running our program (and yes, I guess at least part of the buck stops with me) would fail to nominate two women along with two men. Totally, completely stupid on our part.

I vow to be directly involved (yes, micromanaging, if necessary) this year, to make sure this doesn’t happen again. In the mean time, I also hope that other departments, and maybe even the CRA, consider the equal-numbers rule in the future.

Peter Lee @ January 11, 2009