Group BBQ Party for Greeting New Students and Farewell to Prof. Wo

Illinois ASEers had a fantastic BBQ party at Hessel Park on Saturday evening to welcome new graduate students, Joey, Liia, Wenyu, Yue and Zexuan, and say farewell to Prof. Wo, our visiting professor from Beihang University.

Preparing lots of foods for the party...

Special thanks to Mingming and Liia for their awesome cooking!

We had many attendees: Chiao, David (Wei), Joey (Jiayi), Jonathan, Liia, Mingming, Ping, Wenyu, Wing, Prof. Wo, Prof. Xie, Xueqing, Yue, Zexuan, Zhengkai, etc. Everybody enjoyed the food and the games!

Illinois ASE Group Farewell Party for the Group End-of-Year Celebration and Dengfeng Li's Graduation

Illinois ASE Group Farewell Party 2017 on April 28, 2017 for celebrating the group's achievements and Dengfeng Li's Graduation, with BBQ party at Prof. Tao's house!

Congratulations to Dengfeng Li (Davis) on the right of the picture below:

Illinois ASE Group Lunar New Year 2017 Gathering

Illinois ASE Group Lunar New Year 2017 Gathering on January 27, 2017 for celebrating Lunar New Year, with Chinese food, drink at Prof. Tao's house! (One ASEer, David, is absent due to other things.)

Congratulations to Wing for being named a State Farm Companies Foundation Doctoral Scholar

Wing Lam, a PhD student in our ASE Illinois group, has been named a State Farm Companies Foundation Doctoral Scholar. Scholars receive a $6,000 fellowship for use during academic year 2016-2017.  

Congratulations to Davis for being named a Siebel Scholar

Dengfeng "Davis" Li, an MS student in our ASE Illinois group, has been named a Siebel Scholar for the Class of 2017. He is one of five students in CS @ Illinois who received this award for 2017. In recognition of their outstanding academic record and leadership, the Siebel Scholars will receive $35,000 during their final year of study.

The student in the second to the right is Davis.

Read more here.

Illinois ASE Group Going away party for Pinjia and Tao / Welcome back party

The Illinois ASE Group gathered on Sept. 9th, 2016 for celebrating the departure of Pinjia, our group's visiting student this summer, and Tao, who is going to China for teaching CS101 in ZJU-UIUC institute. We also celebrated MingMing, our new visiting student for joining our group!

Group members had dinner at Destihl and then headed out for laser tag. Two intense games between group members made us all sweaty as much as the heavy rain outside that night did too. Davis and Ping acheived remarkably high scores in shooting everyone. :)

After the games, all of our group members grabbed some drinks, fruits and ice creams at Schnucks and went to Tao's house to play the board game "The Resistance" supplied by Wing. The game was contested with Zhengkai's and Tao's talkative strategies and Pinjia acting like a real "silent spy".

Attendees:
Chiao, Davis, Mingming, Ping, Pinjia, Tao (Only join the board game), Wing, Zhengkai

Below are our pictures taken at Destihl:

Illinois Undergraduate Researchers Analyzing Code Hunt Data Set Released by Microsoft Research

Over the 2016 summer, a group of Illinois ASE undergraduate students, Pierre McCauley, Brandon Nsiah-Ababio, Joshua Reed, and Faramola Isiaka, advised by Professor Tao Xie, have been analyzing the Code Hunt data set (released by Microsoft Research) from a coding contest. Their undergraduate research has been supported by the National Science Foundations.

Code Hunt from Microsoft Research is a web-based serious gaming platform being popularly used for various programming contests. Over the summer, the Illinois ASE undergraduate students conducted preliminary analysis of the Code Hunt data set (players’ playing history) released by Microsoft Research. This data set contains the programs written by students (only) worldwide during a contest over 48 hours. There are approximately 250 users, 24 puzzles and about 13,000 programs.

The initial results of the data analysis will be presented in the 2016 International Code Hunt Workshop on Educational Software Engineering (CHESE 2016), co-located with FSE 2016 in Seattle, Washington in November 2016:

Pierre McCauley, Brandon Nsiah-Ababio, Joshua Reed, Faramola Isiaka, and Tao Xie. Preliminary Analysis of Code Hunt Data Set from a Contest. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Code Hunt Workshop on Educational Software Engineering (CHESE 2016), Seattle, WA, November 2016. [PDF]

Great job, Pierre, Brandon, Joshua, and Faramola!! Look forward your further comprehensive study of the Code Hunt data set (with additional efforts from Jeremy Green) in the upcoming 2016 Fall semester!

Thank Microsoft Research for releasing the Code Hunt data set to engage the academic community to study such valuable educational data!