User:OasisGames/Reflections Projections

Reflections Projections (stylized as reflections|projections and sometimes shortened to r|p) is an annual technology-related conference hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery. The conference has been held in the fall each year since 1995 and features a job fair, numerous guest speakers from various fields in computing, technology and occasionally webcomics, as well as an AI programming competition. The conference is noted for being free for general attendees and being run entirely by student volunteers.

History
reflections|projections began as the 1995 Midwestern ACM Chapter Conference. The conference was originally held in the Digital Computer Laboratory but has since moved most of its operations to the Siebel Center for Computer Science. A job fair was incorporated into the conference in 1996. Other events that have been part of the conference have included movie showings, barbecues, as well as an evening social. Early instances of the conference included registration fees for general attendance, though the conference is now free.

1995
The first conference featured Steve Wozniak as its keynote speaker. It was sponsored by Andersen Consulting, Citrix Systems, Enterprise Integration Technology, O'Reilly & Associates, Silicon Graphics and Symantec. "Reflections, Projections" was the theme for the conference and would later become the title for the conference as a whole.

1996
The second conference also used the "reflections, projections" theme. It included keynote speeches by representatives from Spyglass, Inc. and Be Inc. as well as general talks by local UIUC presenters. Sponsors for the 1996 conference included AMD, Boeing, Citrix Systems, Cray Research, Intel, Northrop Grumman, Symantec and others.

1997
The 1997 conference was sponsored by Abbott Laboratories, Andersen Consulting, Silicon Graphics, Boeing, John Deere, Green Hills Software, HP, InstallShield, Intel, Microsoft, the NSA, State Farm, Symantec, and Tellabs. The conference included talks on OpenGL, web commerce, and the Y2K bug.

1998
The 1998 conference was the first to bear the name "Reflections | Projections". Corporate sponsors included Wolfram Research, Crowe Chizek, Abbott Laboratories, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as Microsoft, HP, Allstate, Lockheed Martin and TRW.

1999
Topics for the 1999 conference included OpenBSD, artificial intelligence and open-source software with talks by Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum and others.

2001
The 2001 conference included a keynote talk by Fred Brooks, as well as general talks by John Draper, and Alexy Pajitnov. This conference also included workshops on Windows and Perl.

2002
The 2002 conference included a PGP key signing party, talks by Michael Hart, Ian Murdock, Marcus Brinkmann, and Hal Berghel. Sponsors included Allstate and Microsoft, as well as Abbott Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, Lucent Technologies, Lockheed Martin and the NSA.

2003
The 2003 conference included talks by Matt Blaze, Seth Schoen, Vernon Burton, as well ass Mike Kulas and Mark Allender.

2004
Sponsors for the 2004 conference included ADM, Apple, Nvidia, Volition, Xanga, Microsoft and ThinkGeek. Speakers included Jimmy Wales, Thomas Cormen, Owen Astrachan, David Anderson, Richard Gray, Bruce Sterling, and Phil Zimmermann. This was also the first conference to use the current logo.

2005
Sponsors for the 2005 conference included Google, Amazon.com, Apple, Microsoft, Cerner, Palantir Technologies, Wolfram Research and others. Speakers included Peter Hofstee, Stephen Wolfram, Blake Ross, and Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka.

2006
Sponsors for the 2006 conference included Amazon.com, Cisco Systems, Bank of America, Electronics Arts, General Electric, Morgan Stanley, Nvidia, Palantir Technologies and others. Speakers included Adrian Bowyer, Burnie Burns, Robert X. Cringely, Chris DiBona, Jawed Karim, Max Levchin, Yale Patt, and Joel Spolsky.

2007
Sponsors for the 2007 conference include Amazon.com, Argonne National Laboratory, Bank of America, E-Trade, Electronic Arts, Facebook, Google, Intel, LimeWire, Microsoft, Yahoo, VMware and others. Speakers included Phil and Kaja Foglio, Randall Munroe, Gary McGraw, Jon Stokes, Eric Traut, Jeffrey Ullman, and Steve Yegge.

2008
Sponsors for the 2008 conference included Bloomberg, Caterpillar Inc., Cerner, Citadel LLC, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Navteq, Northrop Grumman, the NSA, Nvidia, Raytheon, Sun Microsystems, SpaceX, VMware, Yahoo and others. Speakers included Al Aho, Jeff Bonwick, Scott Draves, Rands, David Roundy, Dave Thomas, William Townsend and Larry Wall.

2009


Sponsors for the 2009 conference included Bank of America, Beckman Coulter, Bungie, Cerner, Facebook, General Electric, Infosys, Intel, LimeWire, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, the NSA, Palantir Technologies, Palm, Raytheon, Salesforce, SpaceX, State Farm, ViaSat and VMware. Speakers included Alex Martelli, Bram Moolenaar, Raymond Chen, Ryan North, Douglas Crockford, Alexis Ohanian, and Robert J. Lang.

2010
Sponsors for the 2010 conference included Alcatel-Lucent, Andreesen Horowitz, Bazaarvoice, Cerner, Chopper Training, Country Financial, Facebook, Factset Research, General Electric, Palm, IGT, Infosys, Intel, Interactive Intelligence, Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, Microsoft, Orbitz, Palantir Technologies, Riverbed, Salesforce, Selerity, VMware, ViaSat, WMS Gaming, Wolverine Trading and Yelp. Speakers included Jeph Jacques, George W. Hart, Aaron Swartz, and Stephen Wolfram.

2011
Speakers for the 2011 conference will include Cliff Click, Joshua Bloch, Jon Hall, Mark Russinovich, Scott Klemmer, Mark Makdad, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Powers, Ari Gesher, Jason Fennell, Rachael Brady, Fred Gallagher, and Jay Kreibich. Sponsors for the conference include Adreesen-Horowitz, Apple, Inc., Bazaarvoice, Bright Edge, CME Group, Dropbox, Esri, Facebook, Google, Halcyon Molecular, HP webOS, IMC Financial Markets, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir, Salesforce, Twitter, Vista Print, VMware, Wolfram Research, and Yelp. The MechMania programming competition is being sponsored by Dropbox and will make use of a REST API and JSON.

MechMania
Running alongside guest speaker presentations at the conference is an artificial intelligence programming competition called MechMania. The competition typically attracts student groups from neighboring universities. MechMania is usually funded by a corporate sponsor which provides monetary prizes to the victors. During the opening ceremony of the conference, participants are presented with the rules to a game for which they must build an AI. Teams have twelve hours after this presentation to formulate a strategy and 24 hours to write and submit their solutions. Final judging for the competition has varied but usually involves a tournament bracket. Sponsors for the competition have included Google, Microsoft, O'Reilly & Associates, Amazon.com, Dropbox and others.