Reflections Projections

Reflections | Projections

The logo of Reflections | Projections 2016
Status Active
Genre Technology, computing
Venue Siebel Center for Computer Science, Digital Computer Laboratory
Location(s) Urbana, Illinois
Country United States
Inaugurated 1995
Attendance 2000+ (2016)
Organized by Association for Computing Machinery, UIUC student chapter
Filing status Non-profit
Website
http://acm.uiuc.edu/rp

Reflections Projections (stylized as Reflections | Projections and sometimes shortened to R | P) is an annual technology-related conference hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. The conference has been held in October or November each year since 1995 and features two job fairs, numerous guest speakers from various fields in computing, technology and occasionally webcomics, as well as an AI programming competition, MechMania. The conference is noted for being free for general attendees and being run entirely by student volunteers.

History

reflections|projections began as the 1995 Midwestern ACM Chapter Conference. The conference was originally held in the Digital Computer Laboratory but has since moved most of its operations to the Siebel Center for Computer Science. A job fair was incorporated into the conference in 1996. Other events that have been part of the conference have included movie showings, barbecues, as well as an evening social. Early instances of the conference included registration fees for general attendance, though the conference is now free.

Conference highlights

1995

The first conference featured Steve Wozniak as its keynote speaker. It was sponsored by Andersen Consulting, Citrix Systems, Enterprise Integration Technology, O'Reilly & Associates, Silicon Graphics and Symantec. "Reflections, Projections" was the theme for the conference and would later become the title for the conference as a whole.[1]

1996

The second conference also used the "reflections, projections" theme. It included keynote speeches by representatives from Spyglass, Inc. and Be Inc. as well as general talks by local UIUC presenters. Sponsors for the 1996 conference included AMD, Boeing, Citrix Systems, Cray Research, Intel, Northrop Grumman, Symantec and others.

1997

The 1997 conference was sponsored by Abbott Laboratories, Andersen Consulting, Silicon Graphics, Boeing, John Deere, Green Hills Software, HP, InstallShield, Intel, Microsoft, the NSA, State Farm, Symantec, and Tellabs. The conference included talks on OpenGL, web commerce, and the Y2K bug.

1998

The 1998 conference was the first to bear the name "Reflections | Projections". Corporate sponsors included Wolfram Research, Crowe Chizek, Abbott Laboratories, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as Microsoft, HP, Allstate, Lockheed Martin and TRW.

1999

Topics for the 1999 conference included OpenBSD, artificial intelligence and open-source software with talks by Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum and others.

2001

The 2001 conference included a keynote talk by Fred Brooks, as well as general talks by John Draper, and Alexy Pajitnov. This conference also included workshops on Windows and Perl.

2002

The 2002 conference included a PGP key signing party, talks by Michael Hart, Ian Murdock, Marcus Brinkmann, and Hal Berghel. Sponsors included Allstate and Microsoft, as well as Abbott Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, Lucent Technologies, Lockheed Martin and the NSA.

2003

The 2003 conference included talks by Matt Blaze, Seth Schoen, Vernon Burton, as well as Mike Kulas and Mark Allender.

2004

Sponsors for the 2004 conference included ADM, Apple, Nvidia, Volition, Xanga, Microsoft and ThinkGeek. Speakers included Jimmy Wales, Thomas Cormen, Owen Astrachan, David Anderson, Richard Gray, Bruce Sterling, and Phil Zimmermann. This was also the first conference to use the current logo.[2]

2005

Sponsors for the 2005 conference included Google, Amazon.com, Apple, Microsoft, Cerner, Palantir Technologies, Wolfram Research and others. Speakers included Peter Hofstee, Stephen Wolfram, Blake Ross, and Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka.[3][4]

2006

Sponsors for the 2006 conference included Amazon.com, Cisco Systems, Bank of America, Electronics Arts, General Electric, Morgan Stanley, Nvidia, Palantir Technologies and others. Speakers included Adrian Bowyer,[5] Burnie Burns, Robert X. Cringely, Chris DiBona, Jawed Karim,[6] Max Levchin, Yale Patt, and Joel Spolsky.[7]

2007

Sponsors for the 2007 conference include Amazon.com, Argonne National Laboratory, Bank of America, E-Trade, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Google, Intel, LimeWire, Microsoft, Yahoo, VMware and others. Speakers included Phil and Kaja Foglio, Randall Munroe, Gary McGraw, Jon Stokes, Eric Traut, Jeffrey Ullman, and Steve Yegge.[8]

2008

Sponsors for the 2008 conference included Bloomberg, Caterpillar Inc., Cerner, Citadel LLC, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Navteq, Northrop Grumman, the NSA, Nvidia, Raytheon, Sun Microsystems, SpaceX, VMware, Yahoo and others. Speakers included Al Aho, Jeff Bonwick, Scott Draves, Rands, David Roundy, Dave Thomas, William Townsend and Larry Wall.

2009

Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, at reflections❘projections in 2009

Sponsors for the 2009 conference included Bank of America, Beckman Coulter, Bungie, Cerner, Facebook, General Electric, Infosys, Intel, LimeWire, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, the NSA, Palantir Technologies, Palm, Raytheon, Salesforce.com, SpaceX, State Farm, ViaSat and VMware. Speakers included Alex Martelli, Bram Moolenaar,[9] Raymond Chen,[10] Ryan North, Douglas Crockford, Alexis Ohanian, Don Stewart,[11] Tony Chang[12] and Robert J. Lang.[13]

2010

Sponsors for the 2010 conference included Alcatel-Lucent, Andreesen Horowitz, Bazaarvoice, Cerner, Chopper Trading, Country Financial, Facebook, Factset Research, General Electric, Palm, IGT, Infosys, Intel, Interactive Intelligence, Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, Microsoft, Orbitz, Palantir Technologies, Riverbed Technology, Salesforce.com, Selerity, VMware, ViaSat, WMS Gaming, Wolverine Trading and Yelp. Speakers included Jeph Jacques,[14] George W. Hart, Aaron Swartz, and Stephen Wolfram.

2011

Speakers for the 2011 conference included Cliff Click, Joshua Bloch, Jon Hall, Mark Russinovich, Scott Klemmer, Mark Makdad, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Powers, Ari Gesher, Jason Fennell, Rachael Brady, Fred Gallagher, Jay Kreibich, Ben Kamens, and Alex Bratton. Sponsors for the conference included Andreesen-Horowitz, Apple, Inc., Bazaarvoice, Bright Edge, CME Group, Dropbox, Esri, Facebook, Google, Halcyon Molecular, HP webOS, IMC Financial Markets, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir, Salesforce.com, Twitter, Vista Print, VMware, Wolfram Research, and Yelp.[15] The MechMania programming competition is being sponsored by Dropbox and made use of a REST API and JSON.

2012

The 2012 conference was the first to feature a startup fair, in addition to the annual job fair. Speakers included Zed Shaw and Stefano Zacchiroli. A gaming Q & A session was hosted by Steve Jaros of Volition and Erik Wolpaw of Valve. The conference also featured a startup panel consisting of representatives from Do, One, Braintree, and Bloc.

2013

The 2013 conference featured speakers Joe Lonsdale, Peter Norvig, and Robin Walker.

2014

The conference broke previous attendance records, bringing in nearly 2000 attendees. Speakers included Steve LaValle, Jay "Saurik" Freeman, David Albrecht, Alex Polvi, James Whittaker, Garrett Eardley, Drew Winship, Roger Wolfson, Jeff Bezanson, Kevin Petrovic, James Portnow, Chris Grier, and Kees Cook.

2015

The conference featured Alan Braverman, Anna Patterson, Cassidy Williams, Craig Reynolds, Greg Bauges, Jason Tan, Jerry Talton, Katherine Scott, Michael Armbrust, Roy Bahat, Winnie Cheng, Yisong Yue, and Gopal Kakivaya.

2016

The conference had an attendance of over 2000 students, professors, alumni, and others come to Siebel Center from September 29th to October 1st. The speakers at the conference featured Basil Alwan, Brad Nicholas, Ben Jun, Laura I. Gómez, Santanu Kolay, Nicole Hu, Don Dini, Clare Curtis, Maesen Churchill, Grace Huang, and Gabrielle Allen. Mechmania, sponsored by Palantir, was themed as 'The World of Mechmania' and had over 45 teams compete. The top sponsor for the conference was RetailMeNot. Puzzlebang also featured a set of online puzzles and, for the first time in the conference's history, an escape room inside one of the Siebel Center classrooms, created by CU Adventures.

MechMania

Running alongside guest speaker presentations at the conference is an artificial intelligence programming competition called MechMania. The competition typically attracts student groups from neighboring universities. MechMania is usually funded by a corporate sponsor which provides monetary prizes to the victors. During the opening ceremony of the conference, participants are presented with the rules to a game for which they must build an AI. Teams have twelve hours after this presentation to formulate a strategy and 24 hours to write and submit their solutions. Final judging for the competition has varied but usually involves a tournament bracket. Sponsors for the competition have included Google, Microsoft, O'Reilly & Associates, Amazon.com, Dropbox, Palantir, and others.

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1995 conference site
  2. ↑ Reflections/Projections Justin Donaldson
  3. ↑ SomethingAwful.com: Lowtax Speaks at the University of Illinois
  4. ↑ ACM Reflections/Projections Welcomes Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka
  5. ↑ The Replicating Rapid-prototyper (OpenOffice Presentation)
  6. ↑ "Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know" makes note of Jawed's talk at the conference
  7. ↑ Reflections|Projections 06: Great Software by Joel Spolsky (Video)
  8. ↑ Reflections/Projections and more links
  9. ↑
  10. ↑ Leaving Reflections | Projections 2009, travel marathon part two
  11. ↑ Multicore Haskell Now! ACM Reflections | Projections 2009
  12. ↑ Speaking at Reflections | Projections 2009
  13. ↑ ACM Reflections | Projections Brings Speakers, Competition, and Companies to Siebel Center
  14. ↑ Romance, Robots, and (Indie) Rock: An Interview With Jeph Jacques
  15. ↑ reflections❘projections 2011 conference site
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