Outstanding Recruitment Program 2011-2012

Address: Tehran, Iran.

The school of ECE hosts over 70 academic and 30 support and technical staff, all of which focus on providing excellent education and furthering cutting-edge research. The ECE work environment encourages creativity, teamwork, and dedication. The school of ECE at University of Tehran (UT) helps the students keep their connection to the technology as well as developing the required skills. Offering both undergraduate and graduate programs, the school is a highly admired engineering department in Iran.

The graduate programs are flexible enough to allow the students to create their own educational goals - with faculty approval, of course. On the other hand, the undergraduate students are welcome to the laboratories and research fields of the school, in addition to participating in the faculty educational curriculum. Being within the graduate students and cooperating in their researches make the undergraduate students ready for continuing and choosing the bests.

On average, the numbers of students who major in the field of Computer Engineering and Information Technology at the school of ECE at UT per year are:

Description of the chapter

ACM student chapter at University of Tehran began its activity on January 10, 2001 as the first ACM student chapter in Iran. The motivation of forming this chapter was to promote knowledge level of computer students in different areas of computer science. Cooperation with students who have creative ideas in different scientific programs, as well as encouraging them to pursue and improve their ideas were other goals of founding the chapter. Some of these cooperations are:

• Conducting short-time sessions for software and hardware, including introduction to technologies, methods and views
• Cooperation in organizing conferences and educational workshops, which leads to the improvement of social and managerial skills of students
• Forming and participating in groups for special purposes

This chapter is also known as the scientific chapter of the computer engineering department of University of Tehran.

ESSAY

We decided, at the beginning of our responsibility in the chapter, to share our executive and academic experiences, especially with freshmen and second-year students and assign them some roles in our activities.

Recruiting program for freshmen

In the opening ceremony held by the Faculty of Engineering for the freshmen, we collected their email addresses for later notifications and awarded them a badge with the logo of the ACM Student Chapter.

We then organized an artificial intelligence programming contest for them at the end of the Fall semester, during which they should, in groups of three or four as a team, select among different strategies in a two-player game and implement their strategy. Due to their lack of skill in programming, we assigned each team a final-year student to code their proposed algorithm. After the coding task, and before the contest started, they were exposed to a forty-minute talk in the department amphitheater which was an introduction to our chapter, followed by a number of clips from our previous activities. For more information about the event take a look at its webpage.

Event URL: http://acm.ut.ac.ir/page/aicontest/60

Besides, at the beginning of the spring semester, we held a number of programming contests, in the same way as ACM/ICPC. These contests were moderated by a team of second year students, who were themselves seeking to expand their programming and algorithm design techniques.

Recruiting program for other students

We have initiated the publication of the first quarterly magazine in the history of the chapter. It covers a vast variety of topics from fun and games to interviews and academic papers. The president of the magazine is the chapter chair and all the other affairs of the magazine are handled by a group of twenty students, most of which are sophomores and penultimate year students.

On the other hand, our weekly programming contests are conducted by another group of juniors and seniors. Their responsibilities include selecting the questions from past regional contests, setting up the server on the contest day, judging the contest in PC2 software (Programming Contest Control System) and updating each contestant rank in the overall rank list. Moreover, there are a number of graduate students, some of which are ex-members of our chapter, who are directing us on the way we have accelerated.

To conclude, there is now a group of over 80 students involved in different activities of our chapter, who certainly benefit from their teamwork experiences.