CSU, Chico News

Two students from California State University Chico took top honors at the 20th annual Student Research Competition held May 5 and 6 at CSU, Channel Islands. Robert Abbott, a fall 2005 graduate of Computer Science took first place in the Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science category and Sarah Horylev, a spring 2006 graduate with an MA in history, was runner-up in the Graduate Behavioral and Social Sciences category.

The CSU research competition is open to all undergraduate or graduate students currently enrolled, as well as alums who received their degrees in spring, summer or fall 2005. The competition showcases the excellent research conducted by CSU undergraduate and graduate students. More than 160 students entered papers this year in 10 different disciplines. Students make oral presentations before juries of experts from a variety of public and private agencies and corporations.

Abbott's entry was titled "Context Driven Spell Checking." He received a $500 prize for his spell check that detects typos and misspellings that result in actual words., "The spell checker is far from perfect, but shows promise," said Abbott. "Much of my effort was directed toward making it run on modern PCs and determining appropriate thresholds for flagging errors so as to maximize the number of mistakes caught, while minimizing the number of correct words incorrectly labeled as mistakes."

Abbott provided these examples: "Untied States" (a typo) should almost definitely be "United States." "Right of Passage" (a mistake) should be "Rite of Passage." When the distinction isn't so clear, his program suggests the choices that are most likely. For example, "red instrument" is perfectly valid nearly everywhere "reed instrument" occurs, but the latter is much more likely.

Abbott said his program has an error rate of 10 percent for false negatives, a rate much lower than the 100-error rate for false negatives of current spell check programs. "Robert has developed an innovative and clever algorithm for detecting wrong-word spelling mistakes," said Professor Tyson Henry, Abbott's research advisor. "The basic idea is to use statistical analysis of the context of a word to determine if it is used correctly. Robert's work is clearly suitable for a master's project, and it is impressive that an undergraduate student could develop such an innovative system." Abbott graduated with a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science. He is currently living in Virginia and working for Cubic Applications, Inc., a defense contractor. He plans to work on a new version of the program with Henry.

Horylev's entry was titled "Contras, Contadora and Human Rights: Ambassador John Negroponte's Role in Destablilizing Nicaragua's Sandinista Government, 1981-1985. Horylev received a $200 prize.

For her research, Horylev used newspaper articles and government documents, including reports written by Congressional delegations to Central America andNegroponte's confirmation hearings for U.S. representative to the United Nations in 2001, ambassador to Iraq in 2004 and director of national intelligence in 2005.

"Most important, though," said Horylev, "I looked at over 400 cables and memos that Negroponte wrote to members of the State Department, CIA and National Security Council during his ambassadorship. These were made available to the public in April 2005. I accessed them on the National Security Archive's Website." Horylev concluded that Negroponte played a very active role in the United States' attempts to destabilize the Sandinista government. Most of the contras were in Honduras, which is strategically located just north of Nicaragua, and the United States used Honduras as a type of base from which it launched the contra war. Negroponte was responsible for securing the Honduran government's continued support for the contra war. Additionally, Horylev said, during Negroponte's ambassadorship, he met regularly with Honduran leaders in order to secure this support and promoted a type of unofficial quid pro quo, in which the United States gave the Honduran government increased military and economic aid in return for allowing the contras to operate out of its country.

"Sarah's research was exceptional," said Horylev's advisor, history professor Steve Lewis. "She is an outstanding student and has already contributed significantly to the research surrounding our involvement in Nicaragua."

Horylev is planning to take a year off to travel in Central America and then she will return to the University to get her teaching credential. Her goal is to teach U.S. history to high school students.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 8:30 am and is filed under 2006 Spring.