Undergraduate Capstone Project Award goes to “Picard”

The capstone project gives Computer Science and Computer Engineering students the opportunity to put their education into practice. Students, working in small teams, design and engineer innovative hardware and software systems using techniques from robotics, distributed systems, circuit design, networking, and real-time systems to tackle problems “donated” from local industry.

The prize this year for the “Computer Engineering Capstone Project Presentation Day Best Computer Science Project” award went to “Picard”. Team members Jonathan Kupferman, Jeff Silverman, John Morse, Frank Jones, and Jesse Wang took home the $500 award for their project at the June 5th event. By leveraging the power of new, large scale computing systems and programming technologies they attempted to tackle the Netflix Prize. They built a fully distributed data mining application using MapReduce, and running it on Amazon’s EC2 through RightScale’s server management environment, and they explored how these emerging technologies can be used in concert to solve challenging new data-intensive problems at scale. You can read more about this projects and the other amazing work at the Computer Science and Engineering Capstone page.