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January 17, 2005 Vol. 76,
no. 1S
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| SITTING
PRETTY: Berkeley students embraced Patrick
Shyu's Final Distance website for its ability to make class
scheduling a snap. That won him the Gene Kan Memorial Scholarship,
which is worth $1,000. Shyu says he plans to take those who helped
him with the website out for a steak dinner. |
EECS senior
wins Gene Kan Memorial Scholarship for 'elegant' and useful technology
With a stroke of programming
genius, EECS senior Patrick Shyu in 2002 created Final Distance, the
website that generates your ideal class schedule and is now used by
thousands of Cal students. He also designed UCB Live!, a Cal event-finder.
For these two programs, Shyu was recently chosen as the inaugural winner
of the Gene Kan Memorial Scholarship. The award honors an undergraduate
student who has developed the most simple, useable and useful technology.
Winners receive a $1,000 cash prize.
"It was a very elegant solution," wrote Yaroslav Faybishenko (B.A. '01
LSCS), one of the scholarship's donors. "Its wide reach within the intended
audience leaves no doubt as to the author's talent."
Shyu says he's honored and hopes to inspire others to develop their
own projects. "Students can't just rely on coursework to get them by.
They must develop zeal through independent work."
The scholarship was established in memory of Gene Kan (B.S. '97 EECS).
Kan, a gifted programmer who graduated from EECS in three-and-a-half
years, believed in taking an alternative path to solving old problems,
his friends say. Kan had a whirlwind career with Gnutella, the controversial
distributed search network he helped develop, and InfraSearch, a real-time
search engine he and his colleagues subsequently created based on Gnutella-type
technology. In June 2002, Kan took his own life after suffering from
a career setback and depression. Funds for the memorial scholarship
were donated by Faybishenko and several other of Kan's friends.
In addition, Faybishenko was so impressed with a project by Eric Chin
that he awarded the BioE senior a $400 bonus prize. Chin submitted an
idea for detecting disease in live animals in order to help prevent
human consumption of contaminated meat.
Applications for 2005 will be available in late spring, and Engineering
News will cover the announcement then.
Read more about Shyu's work at www.coe.berkeley.edu/engnews/spring03/14s/hotornot.html.
For information on Gene Kan, including the scholarship and a documentary
about him, go to www.coe.berkeley.edu/engnews/fall03/EN12F/documentary.html.
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