About Us:
The College of Computer Science has just recently been renamed the College of Computer and Information Sciences (CCIS) as we have begun to expand our fields of study. Historically, the College has maintained a small college atmosphere in which students can feel comfortable with the classes, professors, advisors and fellow students. The CCIS student chapter of ACM has been there to provide that comfort level and to enable us to become a small community rather than a simple small College inside an enormous University. Northeastern University currently has 24,500 students enrolled with 14,000 being fulltime undergraduates. Approximately 650 of them are officially registered with the CCIS and 6-8 other degrees opt to register for classes in the CCIS rather than within their own. ACM has a diverse member range with currently a high focus of members being registered CCIS students. We also have membership from other colleges within the University such as Engineering and Computer Graphics. Our member list is growing rapidly semester-by-semester and we currently have approximately 50 students as paying ACM members of our student group. Of those members, we have found that as many as 10 of them have gone on to become members of the National ACM. With the efforts made in recent years, our student chapter of ACM has progressed to a level of professionalism that we feel will continue to uphold the values we have placed within our tiny community. With further support and efforts made on our part, as well as the National ACM, we hope to be able to continue to meet and exceed our goals.

In the past year, Northeastern University's ACM Student Chapter website has been rewritten from the ground up. Our local chapter has been planning to rewrite the web infrastructure for longer than most officers had been at Northeastern, but it was only this past Fall where we finally managed to get it done.

There were several areas that we wanted to improve upon with the new website, and fortunately, we were able to address all of them. The first was moving beyond our outdated table-driven layout to a design based entirely on CSS. In the process, a completely new design was created which prominently pictures our brand new Computer Science building that opened two years ago. Rounded corners adorn the various navigational areas, while the page still renders fine in text based browsers such as lynx.

Another concern was our calendaring system, which in the past was a messy combination of archaic m4 scripts. On our new website, the calendar is managed as part of a very comprehensive content management system called WebGUI, which we have installed and maintained on our own Linux server. The system is written with mod_perl and MySQL, which has allowed us to make certain changes to better suit our needs.

A new addition this year is our growing video archive, which is an effort to digitize our weekly speaker series and make it accessible to everyone from around the world. We currently have eight talks online, co-hosted at Google Video, available for both streaming and download: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=nuacm

Another addition is our ACM library, which is a collection of ~1000 technical books that we make available for our members to checkout. Managing a library of this size is not an easy task, and we opted for a technical solution to the problem. Initially some of our officers developed a complete library management system, from scratch, utilizing the Ruby on Rails web framework. This functioned for some time, however after evaluating several options, our officers decided on an open-source library package to replace the Rails application. Tellico was implemented this year and is currently running on our Linux webserver, alongside WebGUI, and is searchable by book title: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/jdlouhy/library/

Finally, we often require registration for some of our on-campus events, in order to get an expected head count. In the past, this was either done with pen and paper, or with hacked up CGI scripts on the College's web server. With our new website, we have installed a WebGUI plugin that allows us to easily create registration forms, with email notification, and the ability to export registration lists to spreadsheet tools for further processing. This has been very useful for things like our Student Faculty Dinners, Geek Week, and Student Workshop Series.

Overall, this was one the biggest and most technically challenging projects that our chapter has undertaken, and we're very pleased with the results. Our website can now be easily updated with a browser, by any officer, from any computer. Looking forward, we're hoping to involve more chapter members in making contributions to the website, both with content, and custom web applications. Through our Student Workshop Series, we are planning to walk through the process of creating a new website, starting from hardware selection, talking about user interface design, and ending up with a technical discussion on the merits of different web programming languages, including Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby.