UMaine Student Attends Apple Worldwide Developers Conference
Joshua Komusin, a computer science major and math minor from South Berwick, Maine, recently attended Apple Inc.’s five-day annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Komusin was one of 150 college students out of thousands of applicants to win $2,000 scholarships to attend the conference. He was selected based on his application, which included his design of an app to transfer to the Apple iPad UMaine Spatial Information Science Engineering professor Kate Beard’s framework for visualizing historical environmental data gathered from the Gulf of Maine over long periods of time.
“I learned an immense amount about every aspect of not only developing for Apple products, but about creating usable technology in general,” Komusin says. “This was perfect in context with my project in data visualization, which is all about making the exploration of large volumes of data more intuitive.”
The conference also encouraged thinking outside the box. “That, along with all of the technological tips and tricks I learned, would have been enough, but meeting people from all around the world — Argentina, Australia, Ukraine, the UK — made it just that much more of an experience I’ll never forget,” he adds.
Komusin was present for Steve Jobs’ final WWDC keynote as CEO of Apple, heard Buzz Aldrin speak, and saw a presentation from Michael Johnson from Pixar’s R&D team. He credits New Media professor and director of UMaine’s ASAP Media Services Mike Scott for encouraging him to apply.
Contact: George Manlove, (207) 581-3756