Department of Computer Science

Recent graduates working at Microsoft got together for a photo to share with the department. Pictured are Jordan Yates, Haythem Memmi, and Matt Morris. Haythem Memmi just started at Microsoft after graduating in December 2014. He is a Software Development Engineer working for the Dynamic Crawling Team at Bing. Matt Morris (May 2014) started at Microsoft six months ago and works as a Software Engineer for the Storage Management API team in the Operating Systems Group. Jordan Yates is also a Software Engineer in the Operating Systems Group and works on the Developer Ecosystem Platform team.

Over the summer and fall of 2014, at least nine Montana Tech computer science and software engineering students interned at a wide variey of companies, from Amazon and Cobalt in Seattle, to Echostar in Colorado and CISCO in Silicon Valley to several local companies in Butte. If a student enrolls in the Internship course, we asked them to share their internship experiences on the Computer Science Department website. Make sure to read the entire article and return for additional internships as students submit their reports.  Articles about Garrett Brown, Justin Emge, Scott Fleener, and Haythem Memmi are below. Not all students signup for internship credit, so there are many additional companies where our students are interning each summer.

Garrett Brown, a double major in Computer Science and Software Engineering entering his senior year, spent the summer and fall of 2014 with the National Center for Healthcare Informatics in Butte. His work was on designing and implementing a full profile mission scenario for an Air Force Special Forces training simulation. His role consisted of researching technologies that could be applied to adding realism to the scenario, such as force feedback, as well as creating content for the scenario. For most of the internships duration, Garrett worked with the help of a technical director and a former Air Force Para-rescue man. Throughout the internship, Garrett worked closely with representatives of the companies whose technologies were to be integrated into the simulation environment. The project uses existing technologies with Python and Lua scripts communicating between them. Using geographic information system (GIS) technologies and the MACE/VRSG simulation environment, he developed a realistic training scenario. Garrett learned of this internship through the faculty of Montana Tech, as it is a local organization.

A CBS Special Assignment reports on CodeMontana one year later. The report includes an interview with CS Department Head Jeff Braun and video coverage of Celia Schahczenski's Discrete Structures class and the Museum Building computer lab. The special feature mentions both the $4000 CodeMontana Scholarship and the CSCI 191 CodeMontana: Intro to CS course, which will be offered again next spring.

Six student computer programming teams from Montana Tech competed in the 2014  ACM Montana Programming Contest on September 19th on the campus of Montana State University in Bozeman. One of the Montana Tech teams placed first and another team received honorable mention. The competition saw 16 teams from Montana Tech and Montana State University. The team of Justin Emge, Adam Cass, and Ben Butcher placed 1st and the team of Hathem Memmi, Jake Jones, and Casey Flynn received honorable mention.

The contest challenges teams of three university students to use their programming skills and rely on their mental endurance to solve complex, real world problems under a grueling five-hour deadline. At the competition, the teams were given six problems to solve with a goal of solving as many problems as possible during the contest period. The solutions to the problems must be submitted as programs in one of the programming languages Java, C, or C++. Tech’s winning team solved all problems in under 3 hours.

Montana Tech’s top teams will next compete at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on Saturday, November 8 as part of the Rocky Mountain Regional competition of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.