Keith Vertanen (HCC), has been identified as one of only 71 instructors who received an exceptional “Average of 7 Dimensions” student evaluation score during Spring semester 2017. Keith’s score is 4.53 (out of 5.0) with an enrollment of 105. Keith received the same recognition in Spring 2016 with a score of 4.49 with an enrollment of 85.
ICC Annual Retreat was held on April 21. Co-Director Dan Fuhrmann presented ICC Achievement Awards to two researchers for their outstanding research and honorable contributions to the ICC in 2017. Zhuo Feng from the Center for Scalable Architectures and Systems (SAS) and Shane Mueller from the Center for Human-Centered Computing (HCC) were this year’s recipients.
Shane Mueller is Associate Professor in the Department of Cognitive and Learning Sciences with an expertise in Cognitive and Computational Modeling. He has recently been awardedDARPA’s Explainable AI (XAI) Grant to develop naturalistic theories of explanation with AI systems and to develop a computational cognitive model of explanatory reasoning. In addition to this effort, he has served as Co-PI of several proposals in collaboration with other HCC members from the KIP, CS, and Math departments. He has continuously published his works in top journals and conferences, such as IEEE and Cognitive Modeling Communities and organized several conferences. Another significant achievement is developing PEBL: The Free Psychology Experiment Building Language for HCI and Psychology Researchers, which is widely used across the world. Zhuo Feng is Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Zhuo has received funding as the sole PI on three National Science Foundation (NSF) grants since 2014 with a total of $1.1 million. He received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from NSF in 2014, a Best Paper Award from ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 2013, and two Best Paper AwardNominations from IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in 2006 and 2008. His publications include 16 journal papers (14 IEEE/ACM Transactions) and 34 ACM/IEEE conference papers.
Three ICC members are finalists in the 2017 Distinguished Teaching Awards presented by The William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning. Nominees are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the instructional mission of the University. Based on more than 50,000 student ratings of instruction responses, ten finalists have been identified for the 2017 awards. The ICC member finalists are:
Associate Professor / Professor Category
- Mari Buche (DataS), Associate Professor
- Yu Cai (CyberS), Associate Professor
Assistant Professor / Lecturer / Professor of Practice Category
- Jeffrey Wall (CyberS), Assistant Professor
Nilufer Onder (DataS) has been identified as one of only 91 instructors at Michigan Tech who received an exceptional “Average of 7 dimensions” student evaluation score during fall semester 2016.
Onder’s scores were 4.95 (Excellent Teacher) and 4.71 (Average of 7 dimensions). These are in the top 10% of similarly sized sections across all courses/sections on campus. Only 111 sections university-wide (out of more than 1050 evaluated) were rated this highly by students.