Computer Scientist foolishly submits photography to art jury for campus building (no film anytime soon)

From the 2010 Welcome Center Open House
2010 Welcome Center Open House (not by me)

The University of Minnesota, Morris, recently open its new Welcome Center, a major renovation of what had become a sad little building into a shining, spiffy new space. Among other things, it’s a real tribute to the campus’s commitment to sustainability:

When certified, the Welcome Center will be the first LEED Platinum building in the University of Minnesota system; the first LEED Platinum building on the National Register of Historic Places; and one of only thirteen higher education LEED Platinum certified buildings in the world. The Welcome Center is also the first building in Minnesota to use energy efficient chilled beam technology.

They’ve put out a call for art for the building, with a particular interest in work from alumni and others connected to the campus. In a foolish moment, I’ve submitted 20 photos. Now we wait and see if they want to purchase any of them!

Turbine and abandoned cars (retinex)
Turbine and abandoned cars (retinex)

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I’m published in CACM! (But not in the way one might have thought)

CACM page spread featuring UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison at MICS
CACM page spread featuring UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison at MICS

The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.

The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.

As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".

Happy, happy, happy.

But I’m easily amused :-).

In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.

Weird.

But cool.

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