Faculty and staff from UALR’s Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering – the CyberCollege – conducted a two-day workshop for middle- and high school students and their teachers in central Arkansas schools on Jan. 12 and 13 in preparation of this year’s “Botball” season.Botball, a creation of NASA veterans of the Mars Rover project, is an intellectual team sport that uses computer programming and artificial intelligence skills pitting each team’s robot into an intense competition to complete a task. The competition promotes an interest in math and science and requires teamwork, logic, problem-solving skills, and engineering ability.
As educational coordinator for the region’s Botball competition, UALR CyberCollege faculty use the event to promote higher-thinking math and engineering skills and to recruit promising students to the CyberCollege program.
The tournament is the culmination of the Botball Educational Robotics Program through the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics in Norman, Okla.
For more information about UALR’s CyberCollege programs, contact Howard Walker at (501) 569-3333.
UALR Professor Rolf Wigand heads to Germany next week to deliver the keynote address at Europe’s eFinance Lab at the University of Frankfurt and discuss his research on the financial services industry.The conference in Frankfurt is titled Business Value through Information Technology: Financial Services Providers Learn from Other Industries and Benchmarks.
Wigand is the Maulden-Entergy distinguished professor of information science and management in the Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering at UALR. He will talk on Value Creation through Information Systems and Technology in Banking: Experiences, Comparisons, and Observations from Related Industries and Processes.
He was also invited to participate on a panel discussion titled Information Technology Outsourcing: Lessons Learned and Best Practices.
The eFinance Lab, a consortium of European financial services companies, conducts research on banks, brokerages, financial institutions, and mortgage companies.
Last year, Wigand and colleagues from Syracuse University and Penn State presented to the National Association of Realtors their findings on how information technologies are reshaping the real estate landscape in unexpected ways.