Northwest students Keenan Piveral-Brooks, left, and Jack Hill placed first at the Consortium for Computer Science in Colleges Central Plains annual conference for their poster, “Designing a Distributed Social Network.” (Submitted photo)

Two Northwest Missouri State University students had the best poster this spring at the Consortium for Computer Science in Colleges Central Plains annual conference.

Senior computer science majors Jack Hill, of Kearney, Missouri, and Keenan Piveral-Brooks, of Pickering, Missouri, received the top prize for the their research and poster, “Designing a Distributed Social Network,” at the April 6 contest in St. Charles, Missouri.

Hill and Piveral-Brooks explored the building of a distributed network system as a solution to freeing social networking platforms from the costs of web hosting and maintenance. They developed a theoretical model for content distribution and created and tested their concept with a Raspberry PI cluster. Dr. Scott Bell and Dr. Nathan Eloe, assistant professors of computer science and information systems at Northwest, served as faculty mentors on the project.

Posters are judged on the quality of research, presentation and the poster as well as lessons learned. The students competed against peers from colleges and universities in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska.

Northwest students won the contest for the second consecutive year. Northwest students Bradley Taylor and Daniel Favor won last year’s poster contest with their research, “A look into the Virtualized Network and Virtualized Penetration Testing Lab.”