Fall 2016

In the same way that everything a small child does is special, so too are all issues of a publication as young as RUCS. This one, however, is even more so. Though based at the University of Toronto, RUCS – for the first time – has opened its doors to undergraduate students at Cornell University. As a result, we have broadened our scope and our community has expanded. From n-way matching, to face identification in movies, to energy efficient sensing algorithms and beyond, we hope you enjoy reading about the work conducted by these talented researchers as much as we did.

There are many without whom this issue would not have been possible. My thanks, first and foremost, are directed to Sam Toueg and Kawin Ethayarajh, for offering their invaluable guidance every step of the way. I am also indebted to Leanne Dawkins, Marina Haloulos, and Francois Pitt for their administrative and financial support and, in particular, their prompt replies to my many emails over the last several months.

I would like to thank Helen Kontozopoulos for all the time she devoted to this project and for her unwavering optimism; David Gries and Claire Cardie, for helping two great schools come together; Nima Yasrebi, for a fantastic tour; and Caitlin McDonough, for hosting RUCS a second time at Google Toronto. I am certain we’ll be back for a third.

Finally, a special thanks goes out to the team of RUCS staff I have had the pleasure of getting to know. Jaren, Chris, and Taamannae: the result of your hard work is remarkable. You have consistently delivered more than I asked without the slightest hesitation, and I am very grateful.

Julia Gilenko
Editor-in-Chief, RUCS

Papers

Wei Cui in Computer Networks : Wireless Adapters Transmission and Wireless Network Throughput Contention Exploration for U-CSMA Protocol Implementation Framework

Danniel Yang in Artificial Intelligence : Improved Heuristics for Solving the Pancake Problem

Olga (Ge Ya) Xu in Computer Vision : Face Identification in Movies

Dennis Windsor in Software Projects : Database Query-building Strategies as a Predictor of Student Success

Julia Watson in Natural Language Processing : Automatically constructing semantic maps: graphical representations for understanding cross-linguistic variation

Zihan Wang in Artificial Intelligence : Who’s who in rare disease research: predicting expertise from publication history

Yawen Wang, K. Shankari and Jonathan Fürst in Software Engineering : Software-Based Power Monitoring for Smartphones in the Wild

Tim Alberdingk Thijm in Natural Language Processing : Linked Parliamentary Data Text Classification Methods and Syntactic Parsing

Gary Song in Software Engineering : Representing Constraints and Complex Dynamics in Goal Models

Ammar Qadri in Theory of Computation : m-Consensus Objects Are Pretty Powerful

Jun Ouyang in Scientific Computing : Accurate and Efficient Numerical Methods for Pricing and Hedging American Put Options

Christopher Koehler in Software Projects : Development of Dynamic and Customizable Voice-to-Code Software

Amit Kadan in Software Engineering : Designing a Serious Game for an NP-hard Problem

En Hua Hu in Theory of Computation : A Logic for Temporal Preferences

Eric Bannatyne in Theory of Computation : Branching Program Complexity for the Height 4 Tree Evaluation Problem

Ian Berlot-Attwell in Artificial Intelligence : Integrating Machine Learning into a Contributional Implementation Framework

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