Undergraduate Byron Wallace presents at FIE 2005

Computer Science undergraduate Byron C. Wallace presented the paper “Using Multimedia to Support Research, Education and Outreach in an NSF Engineering Research Center” at the Frontiers in Education (FIE) 2005 Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana this fall. Currently in his senior year as a Computer Science major, Wallace was the lead author on the paper. “Presenting a scholarly paper in front of a room full of people you don’t know is a great experience,” said Wallace. “It also gave me the chance to see what other research groups are doing in this area.”

While it is the exception for undergraduates to write, let alone present papers at academic conferences, years of hard work as a student employee of the RIPPLES (Research in Presentation Production for Learning Electronically) lab led him to that point, said RIPPLES director Rick Adrion. Wallace started with the RIPPLES lab following his sophomore year in high school when he was introduced to the group by his father, Gary Wallace, a longtime technical staff person in Computer Science who now works for the Astronomy Department.

The younger Wallace started with the lab encoding multimedia content. While still in high school he took computer programming courses at Greenfield Community College. He believes these courses gave him a leg up when faced with the notorious freshman course CMPSCI 121. He feels that the introductory GCC courses along with being able to bounce questions off RIPPLES’ senior software engineer, Ken Watts, as well as his father, Gary, was extremely valuable and helped him succeed.

Over the years Wallace worked on a number of projects including multimedia encoding, graphics creation, flash animation, programming customized multimedia authoring tools, an application for web-based collaboration and a java based version of the lab’s MANIC courseware. His current project is a Web-based archive using jMANIC of CMPSCI 496a, an independent study in wireless networks. Wallace participates in the class as a student, but he also operates a video camera to capture class presentations and projects. He uses the lab’s authoring tools to post the classes on the Web. His work can be viewed at manic.cs.umass.edu/jMANIC/fall05/cs491/jMANIC.jnlp.

“Working in a lab has given me first-hand experience with software development as well as an academic research environment which you just can’t get from classes,” said Wallace. “Understanding what the research environment is like has spurred me to want to attend grad school. I think solely taking classes could be wearing.” Wallace plans to attend graduate school in fall 2006 to explore bioinformatics research.