Professor Of Computer Science Research Articles

The Design and Realization of Large-Scale Free-Form Sculptures

Two new sculptures conceived and designed by Brent Collins and Carlo Séquin are currently in their final phase of fabrication and were scheduled to be installed at the beginning of May 2012 in a Science Building at Missouri Western State University. Fabrication problems encountered in these sculptures prompt this review of various issues one may encounter when taking a small sculpture model and scaling it up to a larger-than-human dimensions. This talk will review the design and realization processes for a few large-scale sculptures based on Collins' geometrical inspirations, involving materials that include: compressed snow, translucent epoxy, cast bronze, and carved granite. Bio: Carlo H. Séquin has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. His research interests lie in the fields of Computer Graphics, Virtual Environments, and Computer Aided Design Tools. He has built CAD tools for the layout of integrated circuits, for the conceptual phase in architectural design, for the design of mechanical systems, and – more recently – for artists who create abstract geometrical sculptures. During the last few years, Séquin has also been very active in the field of mathematical visualization, tackling problems at the intersection of geometry and topology. The visualization models created in this context form again a bridge to the world of art and sculpture.

Beyond Swinging: Hinged Dissections that Twist or Fold

A geometric dissection is a cutting of a geometric figure into pieces that can be rearranged to form another figure. Some dissections can be connected with hinges so that the pieces form one figure when swung one way on the hinges, and form the other figure when swung another way. In addition to using “swing hinges”, which allow rotation in the plane, we can use “twist hinges”, which allow one piece to be flipped over relative to another piece via rotation by 180° through a third dimension. Furthermore, we can use “fold hinges”, which allow rotation along a shared edge, a motion that is akin to folding. This talk will introduce a variety of twist-hinged and fold-hinged dissections of regular polygons and stars, and other figures such as polyominoes. The emphasis will be on both appreciating and understanding these fascinating mathematical recreations. I will employ algorithmic and tessellation-based techniques, as well as symmetry and other geometric properties, to design the dissections. The goal will be to minimize the number of pieces, subject to the dissection being suitably hinged. Animations and video will be used to demonstrate the hinged dissections, in addition to actual physical models. Bio: Greg N. Frederickson is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. His primary area of research is the design and analysis of algorithms, and he has served on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, Algorithmica, and IEEE Transactions on Computers. He also pursues interests in mathematical recreations, specifically geometric dissection. On this topic he has published three books and a number of articles. He has twice won the George Polya Award from the Mathematical Association of America.

A new landscape for distributed and parallel data management

The inaugural issue of Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD) appeared in 1993. It was an outcome of this journal’s founding editor Dr. Ahmed Elmagarmid’s vision. In the first editorial, he noted the need to provide a high quality forum to “publish original results related to databases and systems that use distributed or highly parallel platforms, parallel algorithms, issues resulting from parallelism and distribution of application and data.” DAPD indeed started at the right time, and its relevance grew as database technologies were increasingly deployed in large-scale distributed infrastructures and used parallelism and distribution to improve scale and performance. DAPD faithfully served this mission and made a space among database journals with its focus. Ahmed was early in identifying the topics that grew in importance, such as interoperability in multidatabase systems, object-oriented databases, knowledge bases, and managing biological, spatial, scientific and statistical data. Ahmed carried the ball as the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for over 15 years, and then as a co-EIC once he called upon me to join him four years ago. A couple of years ago, Ahmed took up a significant leadership position at the Qatar Foundation, and along with that, significant responsibilities. So it is understandable that Ahmed has decided to pass on the DAPD leadership role to others. I am confident that the database community will continue to receive the benefits of Ahmed’s leadership and service, but DAPD owes its immense gratitude for all that he has done for this journal. This occasion also affords me a privilege to welcome one of the best known database researchers, Divyakant (Divy) Agrawal. Divy has been on the faculty of Computer Science Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara since 1987 where he currently serves as a Professor of Computer Science. He is an active

James Michaels (A) and (B)

This two-part case describes a challenging and painful period for James Michaels, a young and openly gay assistant professor of computer science at a small Midwestern liberal arts college. To James's surprise and disgust, a male student harasses him using a homophobic slur in an e-mail. The case chronicles not only the harassment incident, but also how college administrators and faculty colleagues handle this allegation. James soon finds himself in complete disappointment with the outcome and unsure how to proceed. He perceives that the college administrators, along with some of his colleagues, discount the severity of the harassment incident and in doing so disregard his rights and fail to hold the offending student fully accountable for such policy-violating behavior. Students assigned this case, taking into account James's perspective, are asked to identify and recommend specific strategies to achieve justice and accountability in this context.

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Central Computer Science Concepts to Research-Based Teacher Training in Computer Science: An Experimental Study

The significance of computer science for economics and society is undisputed. In particular, computer science is acknowledged to play a key role in schools (e.g., by opening multiple career paths). The provision of effective computer science education in schools is dependent on teachers who are able to properly represent the discipline and whose in-depth knowledge of the subject encompasses recent advances in the research. This article examines the assessment of content and process concepts relevant for K-12 computer science education by computer science teachers and computer science professors. The findings show that computer science professors attach more importance to content concepts of computer science (e.g., algorithm, model, system) in terms of several process concepts (e.g., analyzing, problem solving, investigating) than computer science teachers. These results should be taken into account by training programs for both pre-service and in-service teachers of computer science.

An interview with Robert Soare

University of Chicago's Robert Soare, the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, offers his reflections on Alan Turing.

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Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance

G ender differences in mathematics participation rate, mean and high-end performance, and variance in distribution of performance have been reported on numerous occasions. The reasons for these findings have been the subject of much debate. For example, the greater male variability hypothesis, originally proposed by Ellis in 1894 [42] and reiterated in 2005 by Lawrence Summers when he was president of Harvard University [48], states that variability in intellectual abilities is intrinsically greater among males. If true, it could account for the fact that all Fields medalists have been male. If gender differences in means and variances are primarily a consequence of innate, biologically determined differences between the sexes, one would expect these differences to be similar among countries regardless of their culture and to remain fairly constant across time. Such a finding would suggest that little can be done to diminish these differences. In support of this hypothesis, Machin and Pekkarinen [26] claimed that greater male variance in mathematics performance was a “robust phenomenon”, that is, observed among fifteen-year-olds in thirty-five out of the forty countries that participated in the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In addition, women’s nature might include a tendency to prefer the more nurturing fields, such as nursing and teaching young children, to the more quantitative ones, such as mathematics, physics, and engineering. If so, it might not make sense to encourage and direct any but the unusual female toward studying and seeking employment in these latter fields. This viewpoint has led some folks to propose that it may be a waste of time and money to expend resources directed toward trying to increase participation of women in these mathematics-intensive fields (e.g., [5], [6], [46], [49], [50]). Alternatively, boys and girls may be born similar in their innate intellectual potential but end up displaying differences due to a variety of sociocultural factors present in their environment, for example, gender-stratification ([2]). If true, one might see differences among countries and changes over time in mathematics variances and mean performances. This gender-stratified hypothesis is consistent with several recent findings. For example, Hyde and collaborators ([20], [25]) reported that girls have now reached parity with boys in mean mathematics performance in the United States, even in high school, where a significant gap in mean performance existed in the 1970s. Likewise, both Brody and Mills ([3]) and Wai et al. ([51]) noted a drop in nonrandom samples of students under thirteen years of age, from 13:1 in the 1970s down to approximately 3:1 by the 1990s in the ratio of U.S. boys to girls scoring above 700 on the quantitative section of the college-entrance SAT examination. The percentage of Ph.D.’s in the mathematical sciences awarded to U.S. citizens who are women has increased from 6 percent in the 1960s to 30 percent in the past decade ([4], [9]). Sociocultural, legal, and educational changes that took place during this time span may account for these dramatic improvements in mathematics performance and participation by U.S. females. Gender differences in opportunities and outcomes within countries have been quantified by a variety of measures. The Gender Gap Index (GGI) is a composite, weighted measure of the gap Jonathan M. Kane is professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. His email address is kanej@uww.edu.

Interview with Pascal Van Hentenryck on Constraint-Based Programming

Pascal Van Hentenryck is professor of computer science at Brown University and the director of the local optimization laboratory. Before coming to Brown in 1990, he spent four years at the European Computer-Industry Research Center (ECRC), where he was the main designer and implementor of the CHIP programming system, one of the first modern constraint programming systems. During the last 15 years, he developed a number of influential systems, including the Numerica system for global optimization, the

From Both Sides, Now: Librarians Team Up with Computer Scientist to Deliver Virtual Computer-Information Literacy Instruction

Two members of the library faculty at Seton Hall University teamed up with a respected professor of mathematics and computer science, in order to create an online course that introduces information literacy both from the perspectives of the computer scientist and from the instruction librarian. This collaboration is unique in that it addresses the issues of information literacy both from the internal and external design and workings of computer processes; how logic is programmed into the computer and how information is retrieved. Students ultimately become both designers and users—the quintessential computer-literate life-long learner.

Interview with Ethan Munson

Ethan Munson is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994. His research focuses on tools for managing software documents and on human-computer interaction. Dr. Munson is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award, several research grants from industry, and four NSF educational grants. He is active in conference organization and was Chair of ACM SIGWEB from 2006 to 2011.

Editorial Introduction of New Editor-in-Chief (EIC) and Deputy EIC

After a brief review of the publishing statistics for the IEEE Embedded Systems Letters , the current Editor-in-Chief (EIC) introduces the new leadership team of Prof. Krithi Ramamritham as EIC and Catherine Gebotys as Deputy EIC. This leadership emerged after an extensive search for the EIC earlier this year. Prof. Ramamritham is an Endowed Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and the author of almost 500 papers spanning many areas of embedded systems including real-time systems, distributed systems, databases, and sensor networks. Prof. Ramamritham is a researcher par excellence to lead the journal, and brings a wealth of experience in journal leadership from his tenure as EIC of the Real-Time Systems Journal and has been associated with many editorial boards. Dr. Catherine Gebotys is a Professor and a Professional Engineer with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, and is the author of over 100 papers in the areas of electronic design automation, embedded systems security, and low-power design, Dr. Gebotys brings a wealth of research and practical experience built over two decades in the industry and academia.

Silver Bullet Talks with John Savage

Gary McGraw interviews John Savage, the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Savage served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the US Department of State during the 2009–2010 academic year. In his lengthy career, he has held many positions and received several honors for his work in theoretical computer science and computational nanotechnology. His latest book is Models of Computation: Exploring the Power of Computing. Hear the full podcast at www.computer.org/silverbullet or www. cigital.com/silverbullet.

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An interview with Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell, a Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, has written a compelling and engaging book entitled Complexity: A Guided Tour, published just last year by Oxford University Press. This book was named by Amazon.com as one of the 10 best science books of 2009. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, biologically inspired computing, cognitive science, and complex systems.

Introduction to Special Section: Causality in Health Services Research

Introduction to Special Section: Causality in Health Services Research

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An Interview with Joseph F. Traub

Joseph F. Traub is the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor, Santa Fe Institute. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses his early research, organizations and other entities he has created, and offers his view on several open-ended topics on the future of computing. --Editor