Congratulations to Siwakorn (Ping) and Zexuan for securing the 1st place in UIUC ICPC Spring Coding Contest!

Team ASEVeterans, formed by two current ASE members, Siwakorn (Ping) Srisakaokul and Zexuan Zhong, won the first place in the UIUC ICPC Spring Coding Contest held on April 7 by being the only team who solved all 13 ACM ICPC-level coding challenges. They were also the first to come up with correct solutions for 8 of the problems.

Siwakorn (Ping) is currently a third-year PhD student. He competed in ACM-ICPC World Finals 2016 by being in the first place at Chicago regional contest as part of the UIUC team. Zexuan is currently a first-year MS student. He also competed in ACM-ICPC and won Gold Medals at Changchun and Chicago regional contests.

Scoreboard at the end of the contest

Ping and Zexuan working together

Well done,  Siwakorn (Ping) and Zexuan!

Congratulations to Zexuan for his accepted papers at AAAI 2018 and NL4SE 2018

Zexuan Zhong, a first-year graduate student and Illinois ASEer, authored two accepted papers:

CoLink: An Unsupervised Framework for User Identity Linkage
Zexuan Zhong, Yong Cao, Zaiqing Nie, and Mu Guo.
Accepted at The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018)

Generating Regular Expressions from Natural Language Specifications: Are We There Yet?
Zexuan Zhong, Jiaqi Guo, Wei Yang, Tao Xie, Jian-Guang Lou, Ting Liu, and Dongmei Zhang.
Accepted at Workshop on NLP for Software Engineering (NL4SE 2018) co-located with AAAI 2018
(Co-authored with Wei Yang, another ASEer)

Zexuan interned at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) when he was an undergraduate student at Peking University. He worked with Dr. Yong Cao and Dr. Zaiqing Nie during his internship.

(Zexuan @ MSRA)

Congratulations to Zexuan!

Illinois ASE Undergraduate Researchers Analyzed Contestant Performance of a Code Hunt Contest

Over the 2017 summer, a group of Illinois ASE undergraduate students, Adrian Clark, Jonathan Wells, and Jalen Coleman-Lands advised by Professor Tao Xie, in collaboration with PhD student Angello Astorga and high school student Andrew Xie, analyzed the Code Hunt data set (released by Microsoft Research) from a coding contest. Their undergraduate research was 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 preceding students conducted analysis of the Code Hunt data set (players’ playing history) to focus on contestant performance 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 2017 Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada, October 2017

Adrian Clark, Jonathan Wells, Angello Astorga, Andrew Xie, Jalen Coleman-Lands, and Tao Xie. Preliminary Analysis of Contestant Performance for a Code Hunt Contest. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada, October 2017. [PDF]

Great job, Adrian, Jonathan, Angello, Andrew, and Jalen!! 

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

Jalen Coleman-Lands, Jonathan Wells, Adrian Clark, Tao Xie,  Angello Astorga (from lef to right)

Jonathan Wells co-presented the workshop paper at the the 8th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2017), Vancouver, Canada.

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.