Computer Science Team Shows Again They Are Among the Best

A team of UALR computer science students placed seventh out of 20 schools participating worldwide in the 2007 National Institute of Standards and Technology’s TREC competition. “This is the second successful competition for faculty and research students from UALR’s computer science department this year,” said Dr. Coskun Bayrak, professor of computer science. He was part of another UALR team that also included Hemant Joshi, Chuanlei Zhang, and Srini Ramaswamy. That research team won first place in the bug prediction competition in May 2007 at the International Conference on Software Engineering. They submitted the best approach for predicting software bugs in large-scale software development projects. In the latest NIST competition, UALR’s team developed methods to direct computers to perform information-seeking tasks, mining information from any information-bearing units, including news articles, scientific abstracts, web bases, blog posts, email messages, recordings of speech, and video clips, and more. UALR’s team ranked third in detecting opinioned documents and 10th in detecting topic relevance.