PhD student Cory Bart wins Best Research Paper award at SIGCSE

March 27, 2017 laurie

Cory Bart, computer science PhD student, won the Best Research Paper award at the SIGCSE conference in March. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium is the largest computing education conference worldwide organized by ACM SIGCSE. It attracts around 1,300 researchers, educators, and others interested in improving computing education in K-12 and higher education. Ryan Whitcomb, computer science undergraduate student, along with CS faculty members: Dennis Kafura, Cliff Shaffer, and Eli Tilevich are co-authors of the paper.

ABSTRACT
To successfully bring introductory computing to non-CS majors, one needs to create a curriculum that will appeal to students from diverse disciplines. Several educational theories emphasize the need for introductory contexts that align with students’ long-term goals and are perceived as useful. Data Science, using algorithms to manipulate real-world data and interpreting the results, has emerged as a eld with crossdisciplinary value, and has strong potential as an appealing context for introductory computing courses. However, it is not easy to nd, clean, and integrate datasets that will satisfy a broad variety of learners. The CORGIS project (https://think.cs.vt.edu/corgis) enables instructors to easily incorporate data science into their classroom. Specifically, it provides over 40 datasets in areas including history, politics, medicine, and education. Additionally, the CORGIS infrastructure supports the integration of new datasets with simple libraries for Java, Python, and Racket, thus empowering introductory students to write programs that manipulate real data. Finally, the CORGIS web-based tools allow learners to visualize and explore datasets without programming, enabling data science lessons on day one. We have incorporated CORGIS assignments into an introductory course for non-majors to study their impact on learners’ motivation, with positive initial results. These results indicate that external adopters are likely to nd the CORGIS tools and materials useful in their own pedagogical pursuits.

Assistant Professor Kurt Luther receives National Science Foundation CAREER award

March 21, 2017March 21, 2017 laurie

Assistant professor of computer science Kurt Luther has been recognized by the National Science Foundation with a Faculty Early Career Development Award to study and improve the capabilities of crowdsourced investigations. The issue is of particular importance in an era where speed can sometimes best factual and accurate reporting of news. Luther will use an innovative expert-led crowdsourcing approach to collect data using a platform called CrowdSleuth. The software will assist collaboration between crowds and experts, such as journalists, historians, and law enforcement, as they attempt to discover new information and verify details of investigations.

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Dick Nance, former CS department head, to be recognized by NC State Libraries

March 17, 2017 laurie

Dr. Richard Nance and his wife Barbara will be recognized by the NC State University Libraries (NCSU) as Life Members of the Friends of the Library. Dr. Nance is an emeritus professor and former department head of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. NCSU Life Members have made a long standing commitment to helping improve the collections and services of the NCSU Libraries. Dr. Nance is one of the founding members of the Simulation Archive (http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation/) and continues to serve on the Advisory Board that guides the development and building of the Archive. As a leader in the field of simulation, Dr. Nance has also contributed to a unique collection of oral history interviews with simulation pioneers. Dr. Nance and his wife Barbara have also helped to build the Simulation Archive Endowment to enhance and sustain the Archive for generations of students and scholars. They will be recognized at the annual Friends of the Library Spring Meeting, on Friday, March 31 at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library. The event is a lunch with an exclusive look at upcoming renovations of the D. H. Hill Library and a special viewing of rare books and materials from our Special Collections Research Center. Items from the Simulation Archive will be on view for attendees before the lunch.

He received BSIE and M.S. degrees from N.C. State University in 1962 and 1966 respectively, and the Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1968. He has served on the faculties of Southern Methodist University and Virginia Tech. Nance has held research appointments at the Naval Surface Weapons Center and at the Imperial College of Science and Technology (UK) as well as visiting appointments at Old Dominion University and Brunel University (UK). He was also appointed Visiting Distinguished Honors Professor for the spring semester 1997 at the University of Central Florida. Nance is the author of over 150 papers on discrete event simulation, performance modeling and evaluation, computer networks, and software engineering. He has held several editorial positions and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS).

Nance has consulted for major private businesses and organizations, and his long-term research relationship with the U.S. Navy led to the establishment of the Systems Research Center at Virginia Tech in 1983. He was named to the John Adolphus Dahlgren Chair in Computer Science in 1988. He was instrumental in the development of the Simulation Archive at N.C. State and currently chairs the advisory committee. Nance has received several awards for his editorial and professional contributions, most recently the INFORMS Simulation Society Lifetime Professional Achievement Award in 2007. He was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1996 and a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in 2008. In 2006 he was recognized by the faculty of the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering of N.C. State as one of the 12 Distinguished Alumni over the first 75 years of the department’s history.