The University’s chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery held their 16th annual Reflections|Projections student computing conference. The conference boasted a number of speakers influential in the world of technology, while also hosting a job fair for students in computer science/engineering and an artificial intelligence coding competition.

The job fair, held Friday, was attended by recruiters from a number of companies in computing and web development. Facebook, which recently held the “Facebook Hackathon” at the University in early October, sent representatives along with other leading computing and technology companies, such as Intel, Microsoft and Lockheed Martin.

At the computing career fair, attendees were not encouraged to wear traditional business attire. Students took advantage of a more relaxed atmosphere. In addition to their resumes, they shared accounts of their nonacademic projects.

“Some of the most intense, difficult pet projects I’ve ever heard of are being attempted by some of the students here,” said Dan Muriello, Facebook representative. “It’s very intimidating.”

The series of speakers was kicked off by Stephen Wolfram, inventor, scientist and business leader. His talk focused on breakthroughs in programming. One goal, Wolfram said, was to move away from using programming codes, such as C++ or JavaScript, and instead input commands in “natural language,” or conversational English.

“From ancient times, there was science fiction, where people would walk up to a computer and ask it some factual question, and it would be able to answer,” Wolfram said.

The idea is now being realized by Wolfram|Alpha, an online search engine Wolfram has developed for the purpose of “knowledge-based computing”.

Another speaker geared his talk toward those with a passion for the artistic aspects of technology. Jeph Jacques, author of the well-read Web comic “Questionable Content,” spoke about his experience becoming a career web cartoonist.

“We’ve had a variety of speakers from all aspects of the computer science and computer engineering fields,” said Bhargav Nookala, senior in LAS and co-chair for the conference.

MechMania, the conference’s artificial intelligence programming competition, attracted 20 teams of programmers from across the Midwest. Teams were presented with scenarios similar to that of the board game “Risk,” with an objective to take over as much territory as possible with an artificial intelligence. Developers spent 24 hours, from 9 a.m. Saturday to 9 a.m. Sunday, creating a program that would autonomously defeat those created by other teams.

“You can consider it like any other competition, only for programmers,” said Richard Otap, graduate student who helped run the contest.

The most successful program was written by “Aperture Illusion,” a team of three computer science students from Purdue University.

Quinn Baetz, senior in Engineering and member of the second-place team from the University, said he noticed the intensity of the programmers seemed to increase this year.

“In previous years, people seemed to go home pretty early, at around 4 or 4:30 (a.m.),” Batez said. “But this year, everyone was there pretty much until the last minute.”