John D. Hastings, Ph.D.
Dustin Kozal of Kearney, a senior at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, is among undergraduate students from Harvard, MIT and Carnegie Melon to receive a Computing Research Association Honorable Mention for research.
“The Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Award program is a significant award that recognizes select undergraduates for their research achievements in computing and continued research potential,” said Dr. John Hastings, UNK assistant professor of computer science and information systems.
A computer science major, Kozal designed and implemented a Web-based, Java enabled program for the knowledge discovery decision support system within the National Agricultural Decision Support System (NADSS) that is being developed for the USDA Risk Management Association (RMA). He worked under the guidance of Dr. Sherri Harms, UNK assistant professor of computer science.
“The knowledge discovery system finds relationships between global climatic events and local extreme weather events, using spatio-temporal data mining algorithms,” Dr. Harms said. “Kozal planned, researched, designed and implemented the Web-based front-end design.”
Kozal has had research published three times within conference papers and has presented research findings at the National Conference of Undergraduate Research (NCUR), UNK Student Research Day, National Conference on Digital Government Research, Regional Mathematics Workshop, and the International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies.
