Course scheduling is known to be among the hardest computer science problems to solve optimally. Many variations of the problem and approximations that work well on a particular instance of data have been demonstrated in the past, but this research project presented the first comparison of scheduling methods on a uniform problem formulation and on common sets of data. The students implemented several methods for course scheduling and also designed a model for generating random sets of data to do the empirical comparison.
The project originated at Xavier University during the 1999 - 2000 academic year with the support of a Collaborative Research Experience for Women grant from the Computing Research Association which funded Ms. Wanner. Ms. Walker and Mr. Ojha joined the project during the summer of 2000 when they participated in the Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates at Hope College, funded by the National Science Foundation and Hope College. Dr. Lewandowski served as an advisor in this program while on sabbatical from Xavier, through an NSF-sponsored Visiting Professor program at Hope.
The ACM International Student Research contest is sponsored by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the primary professional organization of computing professionals in the world. The contest takes place annually at the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Syposium. Students present their work in poster form, allowing for informal discussion with the contest judges. The judges are professional computer scientists attending the conference activities. Poster presentations are evaluated on the quality and significance of the work, and the quality and clarity of both the oral and visual presentation. The judge's evaluations determine the group of semifinalists who then present a formal conference presentation. The top three winners in each category are then determined by the judge's evaluation of the presentations.
An electronic copy of the conference presentation and poster will be published in the Computer Science Teaching Center, a digital library supported by the ACM Education Board, the NSF, and SIGCSE.