Announcements & Recognition

This past weekend at the University of Pennsylvania more than 1,000 programmers came together for PennApps, “the biggest university hackathon in the world.” The field was narrowed down to twenty teams by Sunday with Swap taking the grand prize. According to the article, Swap is “a platform where developers can make changes to their mobile apps in real time without having to send a new version through Apple’s time-consuming, download-dependent App Store.”

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Phys.org is reporting that the National Science Foundation has awarded a grant to a University of Texas at Arlington engineer “to develop a mathematical method of ensuring for consistency in various manufacturing processes that produce complex data.” Interim chair of the IMSE department and a professor at UT Arlington, Victoria Chen, Ph.D. (MD A ’88), said, “Dr. Zeng’s work will allow manufactures to trouble-shoot their processes and help them increase quality and efficiencies.” Click here to read the article

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The 2013 winners of the Lasker Awards were announced this week. The award recognizes achievements in medical research and public health. Read the press release for details about the winners, which included a pair of neurotransmitter researchers, a team that developed the modern cochlear implant, and Bill and Melinda Gates.

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