The UNM Branch of IEEE participated in the IEEEXtreme Programming competition, an
international, 24 hour coding competition. It was officially scheduled to start on October 14,
2017 at 0:00:00 UTC and end at 23:59:59 UTC the same day. During the 24 hours, teams of
three collaborated on a broad range of programming challenges. This year, over 3,000 teams
competed worldwide and contained a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students.

Three teams from UNM participated in the competition: DLC, Team3, and
MetalGearZappa. Team DLC had team mates Dante Orona Yang (Freshman, Electrical
Engineering), Charley Bickel (Freshman, Computer Science) and Lee Smith (Senior, Computer
Engineering). Team3 had Christian Page (Junior, Electrical Engineering), Alec Schuster (Junior,
Electrical Engineering), and Mark Perea (Freshman, Computer Science). MetalGearZappa had
team mates Francisco Viramontes (Senior, Computer Engineering), Isaac Torres (Senior,
Computer Engineering), and Christopher Zapotocky (ECE Graduate Student). The three teams
settled in rooms within the UNM ECE Building, monitored by proctors who fed the participants
and consulted guidelines for each challenge.

After 24 hours, though tired, the competitors and proctors considered it a learning
experience. “This competition was a great way to test student’s skills and expose them to
different programming problems that exist,” said Rebecca Kreitinger, the IEEE student branch
president and a proctor for the event. “Even though it was 24 hours of hard work, it was a great
time and was very rewarding for all of the participants.”
The UNM branch of IEEE intends to participate in the competition next year, for anyone
who would like to participate.

Here are some pictures of the UNM Student Branch members in action.

Left to Right: Dante Orona Yang, Charleyy Bickel, Lee Smith, Isaac Torres, Christopher Zapotocky, Christian Page, Francisco Viramontes, Mark Pera, and Alec Schuster

Back Row (left to right): Lee Smith, Charley Bickel, Dante Orona Yang, Francisco Viramontes, Isaac Torres, and Mark Pera. Front row (left to right): Christian Page, Alec Schuster

Left to Right: Charley Bickel, Lee Smith, Dante Orona Yang

Left – Isaac Torres. Back Right – Christopher Zapotocky. Front Right – Francisco Viramontes

Left to Right: Christian Page, Alex Schuster, Mark Perea

The IEEE Albuquerque Section would like to congratulate the UNM Student Branch of the IEEE for their participation at the IEEEXtreme Competition and hope to see them again at the next one.

Thank you,

Gilberto.

2017 Section Treasurer.

The Albuquerque Section of the IEEE meets on the last Tuesday of the month. The meeting is open to any Section member and it is free of charge for students. The meetings take place at Yanni’s on Central, at 11.30am, except for December, June, and July.

If you want to attend or have questions for the Section officers, please contact Gilberto (Treasurer) at g.zamora@ieee.org.

Here are the approved minutes for the September 2017 meeting.

Thank you,

Gilberto.

Here is some of the activities that the New Mexico Tech IEEE Student Branch had in October.

The NMT student branch has bi-weekly meetings with their members. Below you can see picture of their October 11th meeting that was attended by 22 members.

A couple members, Zach and Austin, attended the Fall Region 6 conference in Boise, ID. Here is their feedback:

“[The picture below] is from the R6 Fall Meeting in Boise, ID (Austin and I are in the middle of the group, he is to my left). There was a dinner on Friday night. Austin and I not only met many other IEEE members there, but we also got a personalized tour of Boise from Sean Collision, one of the local members attending the meeting! On Saturday, we participated in two Student Leadership training sessions. We took away much from this training, including the discovery of very useful IEEE mentoring and career tools we will use in future semesters. We also networked with other Student Branches. In between the training sessions, there was a very interesting VR Technical Talk given by Duane Mathes and at the end of the day they held a Cybersecurity Programming Challenge. Altogether it was incredibly beneficial to our Student Branch. We have shared the notes we took at the training with the UNM Student Branch, so both branches will benefit from the 2017 R6 Fall Meeting.”

The NMT Branch also organized a Machine Learning workshop in October. The picture below is a screenshot of the output of a project in which they trained a Machine Learning algorithm to classify low-pixel images with positive results.

The NMT Student Branch meets bi-weekly. If you have any questions, would like to join the branch, or would like to attend any of their meetings or events, please contact the branch’s president, Zach Harris, at nmt.ieee@gmail.com

Thanks,

Gilberto

2017 Albuquerque Section Treasurer.