180210-ACM-and-Computer-Science.txt

ACM and Computer Science
	by Wally Yang

Hi everyone, my name is Wally and I'm one of the leaders in OSU Chinese Hackers. I will do a brief of our club and events we will be involved. 

Before we go into our club, we have to go through some important things, like,
what is ACM? Anyone knows its full name?

(Association for Computing Machinery)

That is corret. / Not quite...

And its motto?

(Advancing Computing as a Science and Profession)

Awesome. / Exactly. / Pretty close. / ...

So, ACM is founded in 1947, right at the beginning of computer's history. And right now it's the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. Since it's a really huge organization, it's divided into local chapters, college and university chapters, and special interest groups. And of course, we are the official chapter at The Ohio State.

It's also a not-for-profit professional membership group.

Out of curiosity, anyone here is a subscribed member? Thanks.
It's a great place to look for computer science resourced, definitely go ahead and check that out if you're interested. 

ACM involves in many important events in computer science area, whether it's conference, journals, papers, and most importantly, anyone knows this?
Yeah! It's Turing Awards, like a Nobel Prize in computer science.

And for us, the most exciting events will be the ACM-ICPC, which is the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Basically, it's a programming competition, perhaps the largest competition among the universities around the world every year. And teams have to go through a qualifier test, for us is the North America Qualifier. Then a regional contest, the East Central North America, and finally the World Final.

During the contest, each team will have several hours to solve roughly ten problems using algorithms given the input and output. We can use C, C plus plus, Java, Python, and Kotlin. Each team will consists of one to three students. If anyone is interested, we will give you a chance to form teams. 

Actually, let's check out the results from last year.
(pull out 2017 World Final, 2017 Regional)

Well, as we can see, our opponents at our region mainly are Waterloo, CMU, and someone from the north. 

So come back to our topic, the reason we wanted to re-establish this old club from the history book, is to let more people know about ACM, ICPC, and things related. 

When we think of the Ohio State, we will say, yeah, football! But not everyone will say, yeah, great place for computer scientist or engineer. 

So four of us (HCYLZ raise hands) formed an underground group called OSU Chinese Hackers, yeah it sounds malicious, but it's not. During the ICPC last year, we formed three teams and we training together.Then we decided to expand ourselves, so we re-established this ACM Club. 

We want to have a place for students who interested in exploring computer science. That's why we want to make it a technical and professional club for us.

And in this club, we will talk about codes, and mostly about codes. Just like Linus Torvalds says, "Talk is cheap. Show me the code".

Before we move on, I would like to say a few things about Computer Science. 

First, Computer Science is not programming. While programmers using codes to solve problems, computer scientists study how to create new languages, systems, algorithms. In order to learn Computer Science well, we don't just need to learn some programming languages, but also data structures, algorithms, systems, and so forth. 

So, we decide our club activity will involve some workshops, discussions and perhaps semester-long team projects. 

Happy coding. :)