CCIS Senior Named Finalist in CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards Program

CCIS senior Jason Ansel was named a finalist the Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Awards program. Each year, the CRA recognizes undergraduate students in North American universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. As a finalist, Jason placed in an elite group of the top fifteen students in this year's competition. Jason has co-authored two conference papers and one extended abstract with Professor Cooperman on transparent checkpointing: periodically saving to disk the state of a running program, so that one can restart from disk in the event of computer failure. It is transparent in that the operating system is not modified, and the programmer need not modify the application source code. Jason is currently working toward transparently checkpointing large distributed computations. While on coop at Reveal Imaging, Jason made innovative contributions in bringing to practice the algorithms for a novel method for CT scanning related to helical scanning (patent pending). There, he created an architecture for parallel and distributed computing, which is currently used by two companies, and he developed algorithms related to the reconstruction of multi-row CT data. Jason was vice-president of the CCIS honor society, Upsilon Pi Epsilon, and co-founder of RALPH, a forum for CCIS students to showcase their research.