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Increased Divisional Participation, 5 Awards at MAS 2008 Annual Meeting

The 72nd Annual Meeting of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences was held February 20 – 22, 2008 at the Whispering Woods Hotel and Conference Center in Olive Branch, Mississippi (just south of Memphis.) While the number of research presentations conference-wide was down 23% this year, participation in the Mathematics, Computer Science, and Statistics Division actually increased 16% over last year, and 40% over two years. The 21 research presentations (13 talks and 8 posters) marked the highest participation in the division since 21 divisional presentations were made in 1998, the earliest year for which abstract issues of the MAS Journal are still available from The MAS Web Site. Among the 13 divisions of MAS, our division was 7th in research participation this year; 1st was the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division with 23 posters and 25 oral presentations.

This year’s student participants competed for prizes in five categories; professional presentations were also given, but not eligible for prizes. Certificates were presented to all participants and $50 prizes were awarded on Friday for five presentations as follows:

Best Undergraduate Student Presentation (tie) – DeMarcus Thomas, MVSU: “Implementing E-mail Alerts to the GCC Temperature Monitoring Program”
Best Undergraduate Student Presentation (tie) – Benjamin Harvey, MVSU: “Research on Hybrid ARIMA and Support Vector Machine Model in Forecasting Environmental Sustainability”
Best Graduate Student Presentation – Xiaofei Nan, UM: “Implementation of Chinese Sliding Block Puzzle Using Balanced Binary Search Tree”
Best Poster Presentation – Henrique Momm, UM: “Assessment of a Non-Linear Optimization Algorithm for Imagery Classification”
Best High Performance Computing Award – Baoqiang Yan, UM: “Toward Automatic Parallelization of Spatial Computation for Computing Clusters”

MCSR has been an active supporter of MAS for a number of years. Since 2002, MCSR has been a conference exhibitor, and has held its annual Mississippi Supercomputer Users Advisory Group Meeting (MSUAG) in conjunction with the MAS Spring Meeting. This year’s MSUAG Meeting was held Friday morning February 22nd, and included representatives from Mississippi Valley State, Delta State, and the University of Mississippi, as well as from MCSR. All MCSR users and all MAS participants are invited to this open meeting each year, to learn about current MCSR initiatives and offer input into the future direction of MCSR.

This year, the division was co-chaired by Constance G. Bland, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics, Computer, and Information Sciences at MVSU. Jason Hale of MCSR was the other co-chair. A divisional business meeting was held on February 22, with approximately 10 members in attendance. Elgenaid Hamadain, Associate Professor, UM Med Center School for Health Related Professions, was elected Divisional Chair for the upcoming year. Paul Ruth, Assistant Professor, UM Department of Computer and Information Science, was elected vice-chair. In an effort to increase participation in our division next year, MCSR offered to sponsor a longitudinal programming or demonstration competition featuring Mathematica. If implementation is successful, finalists will be invited to present at the MAS 2009 Spring meeting.

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