People, papers and presentations

McMurtry College senior Sarah Nyquist, Baker College junior Chris Lui and Computer Science faculty member Erez Lieberman Aiden earned Best in Show honors Feb. 25 in IBM’s Innov8 with POWER8 Challenge, a contest in which IBM worked with undergraduates and graduate students at North Carolina State University, Oregon State University and Rice to tackle big data research using IBM’s latest high-performance computing tools. Rice’s team earned top honors based on Twitter votes from the IBM user community for its project, “Genome Assembly in a Week.” The results of the voting were announced at the IBM InterConnect2015 user conference in Las Vegas.