New alliances and continuing excellence

Greetings, and welcome again to Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE), the International Honor Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines. This year has seen some revisions in operating procedures, along with new chapters, a new alliance, and another bumper crop of awards to deserving students. Probably the most exciting of our changes is the hope of bringing a regular presence to the SIGCSE winter meeting. When the ACM Computer Science Conference (CSC) ceased its annual operation a decade ago, it left the International Computer Programming Contest (ICPC) and UPE National Meeting without a home. For many reasons, largely fiscal matters and UPE's role in founding the ICPC, the National Meeting has followed the ICPC. Unfortunately, with SIGCSE and ICPC strong enough to stand on their own without the former "Computing Week" umbrella, these activities eventually diverged, leaving us with very little connection to SIGCSE aside from an occasional booth, and of course this column. Fortunately, we are planning to test the waters at SIGCSE 2008, which should bring us together with our most natural constituency, computer science educators. See you there!