Community

The Minorities at the College of Computing (M@CC) held its annual Throwback event on Tuesday, February 16th. Each year, Throwback is themed to give a certain era or genre of gaming -- board games and video games -- the spotlight once again. Previous years have highlighted 80’s-90’s videogames games and last year’s event was centered on multicultural board and video games from around the world (Throwback International). This year, M@CC focused on music gaming with games like Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, and Rock Band -- inspiring the event’s title, Throwback Hero.

A row of people with gardening hoes planting trees; a brigade of vigilantes scouring the streets for litter; a set of concerned people knocking at your door asking for any cans you’d be willing to donate. These common perceptions of community service are dry, especially cliché, and can take very little creative input. It is rather difficult to find a way to benefit the community that actually uses the skills we learn in school, and if such a way could be found, it is usually way above our current skill level.

ACM:The Georgia Tech chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (GTACM) is the professional organization on campus for Computer Science students. Each year, we bring companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google to talk about the latest technology and research in the industry. For GTACM members, these talks are great chances for students to get up close and personal with company programmers and recruiters.

Pincombe was the recipient of the 2009 Individual Inventure Prize for DialPrice, an application born from Yahoo's 24-hour Hack-U competition. He represented Georgia Tech in Hack-U 2007, and won overall against other universities such as Stanford in 2008. He has won recognition from Georgia Tech for his work in Voice-over IP (the technology behind Skype) which includes DialPrice. He has worked for several big-name companies, including Yahoo, Microsoft, and B2B Technologies. He is a third-year undergrad working towards a BS in Computer Science.

Flashback to 2008’s college football season for a moment, specifically the ‘Road to Tampa Bay’ chaos when hopes for Georgia Tech to make the ACC Championship were on thin ice. Praying for a Virginia Tech loss, Georgia Tech students spent their Saturdays at Bobby Dodd Stadium, half watching the football showdowns, half texting and navigating through mobile web browsers, searching for scores to regional ACC match-ups.