You are invited to spend one-zero-one-zero—that is, ten—minutes with Gorkem Asilioglu, Computer Science, on Thurday, March 18, from 5:30 to 5:40 p.m. EST.
Asilioglu is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. His research interests include computer architecture, high-performance computing, programming languages, and CS education.
We look forward to spending 1010 minutes with you!
The Department of Computer Science will present a lecture by Dr. Kelly Steelman, Cognitive and Learning Sciences, on Friday, March 19, 2021, at 3:00 p.m.
The title of the lecture is, “Keeping Up with Tech.”
Steelman is interim department chair and associate professor in the Department of Cognitive and Learning Sciences. Her research interests include basic and applied attention, models of attention, human performance in aviation, display design, tech adoption, and technology training.
“Keeping Up with Tech”
COVID has revealed much in the past year, including our dependence on technology and the challenges that many of us experience trying to keep up with it. Dr. Kelly Steelman has spent the past 15 years studying human attention and applying it to support the introduction of new technologies in contexts ranging from aviation to education.
In her presentation, Steelman will provide an overview of her research, using examples from Next Gen Aviation and the BASIC Digital Literacy Training Program to illustrate how understanding human attention can help us predict the consequences of introducing new technology, improve the design of technology, and support training to help people keep up with the rapid pace of technological change.
The Department of Computer Science will present a lecture by Tim Frick, founder and president of Mightybytes, on Friday, April 9, 2021, at 3:00 p.m.
In his talk, “People, Planet, Pixels: Toward Sustainable Digital Products and Practices,” Frick will discuss how sustainable web design and responsible digital practices can help create an internet that is clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient.
“People, Planet, Pixels: Toward Sustainable Digital Products and Practices”
Tim Frick started his digital agency Mightybytes in 1998 to help purpose-driven companies, social enterprises, and large nonprofits solve problems, amplify their impact, and drive measurable results. He is the author of four books, including Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services. Tim regularly presents at conferences and offers workshops on sustainable design, measuring impact, and problem solving in the digital economy.
The internet has a larger environmental impact than the commercial airline industry. It currently produces approximately 3.8% of global carbon emissions, which are rising in line with our hunger to consume more data. Increasingly, web technologies are also being used to sow discontent, erode privacy, prompt unethical decisions, and, in some countries, undermine personal freedoms and the well-being of society. Web technology has the potential to bring huge benefits to society and the environment, but only if we use it wisely.
In this talk, author and digital agency owner Tim Frick will discuss how sustainable web designand responsible digital practices can help us create an internet that is clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient—principles outlined in the Sustainable Web Manifesto, of which Tim is a co-author. Elements of this talk are also based on Tim’s book, Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services. Creating an internet that works for people and planet is possible. The methods described in this talk will show you how.
by Registrar’s Office
The commencement team has begun planning an exciting celebration for our 2020 and Spring 2021 graduates. Unfortunately, the indoor commencement ceremony has been canceled, and students were recently notified, but that isn’t stopping us from celebrating their successes.
In place of the traditional ceremony, graduates will be celebrated in an outdoor event along the campus mall on the afternoon of Friday, April 30. While planning is in the early stages, departments will be asked to take part in the celebration by cheering on their students as they participate in this sendoff. With that, departments, faculty, and staff are asked to save the date. The time is approximately 1 to 4 p.m., though not everyone will celebrate at the same time as graduates will be split into groups by their college to keep gathering sizes smaller.
Thank you in advance for your assistance and support. Additional information will be provided as plans progress.
by Pavlis Honors College
The 21st Design Expo will continue virtually, but with a twist! Combining lessons learned from our first successful Virtual Design Expo and the desire to engage student teams synchronously, the Design Expo committee is excited to invite the Michigan Tech community, program friends and sponsors to register for this year’s Design Expo held via Gatherly, a platform used to simulate synchronous interactions and discussions, similar to a live MUB ballroom event.
Similar to last year’s Virtual Design Expo, more than 1,000 students in the Enterprise and Senior Design programs will come together to put on a virtual showcase of their work and compete for awards. This year, a panel of judges, made up of distinguished corporate representatives, alumni, community members, and Michigan Tech staff and faculty will critique videos of team projects, solutions, and results. We will kick-off and close the event via Zoom. At 11:30 AM participants will transition over to Gatherly, for the live two-hour synchronous showcase for student projects.
This event is free and open to the public. We encourage current and future students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni, families of students. etc to help us celebrate our students and their achievements—register today to virtually attend Design Expo.
Monday, April 12
Thursday, April 15
Interested in judging for the 21th annual Design Expo? This year, judges will have the flexibility to judge team videos anytime between noon on April 12 through 1:30 p.m. on April 15. In addition to video judging, judges will be asked to attend Design Expo between 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. during the Judging Hour on April 15 to visit assigned teams via Gatherly.
Judges will be selected based on the availability to attend Design Expo during the synchronous event starting at 11:30 a.m. Judges will be assigned three to five teams to view and evaluate team videos over a four-day period (April 12-15) using an electronic ballot sent out via email and/or text message.
Judges will then judge the same three to five teams during the synchronous events 11:30-1:30 p.m. There will be a designated judging hour 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. but judges may continue scoring teams until 1:30 p.m.
Please consider serving as a judge — we welcome all Michigan Tech faculty, staff, alumni, industry representatives, community members, and anyone interested in the great work of our students!.
Click here for more information on attending and judging Design Expo. Check out all of the details of Design Expo here. For questions, please reach out to Briana Tucker.
by Graduate Student Government
Registration for this year’s virtual Graduate Research Colloquium (GRC) will close at 11:59 PM tomorrow (March 2). The event will be held on Thursday April 1, and Friday April 2.
GRC is a great opportunity to work on your presentation skills and prepare for upcoming conferences. Students are free to give an oral presentation, a poster talk, or both. All talks will be scored by judges from the same field as the presenter, who will give valuable insight and feedback on how you can improve your talk. Cash prizes are available for the top 3 places in both oral and poster presentations ( 1st – $300, 2nd – $200, and 3rd – $100). Registration closes Tuesday, March 2, at 11:59 PM. Only a research abstract is due at the time of registration. Register today.
Guidelines to record a video for the poster session and to compile slides for an oral presentation are available on the event website. The video and slide submission deadline for the event is 11:59 PM, Monday March 22, 2021. Full information on the event can be found on our website.
Feel free to contact Sarvada Chipkar if you have any questions or concerns.
The Department of Computer Science will present a lecture by Meryl Spencer, Michigan Tech Research Institute, on Friday, February 26, 2021, at 3:00 p.m.
Spencer’s lecture is titled, “Advancing Robotics through competition.”
Meryl Spencer is a research scientist with the Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI). Her research interests include Multi-Agent Teaming, Robotics Simulation, Applications of Graph Theory, Biomimicry For Robotics, Emergent Behavior, Reinforcement Learning, and Camouflage Detection in Machine Learning.
“Advancing Robotics through competition ”
Michigan Tech is a top competitor in the DARPA Subterranean challenge, which pits teams of fully autonomous vehicles against difficult underground environments to find artifacts hidden in caves and mines. In this talk, Dr. Spencer will give an explanation of the graph-based approach the Michigan Tech team is using to enable joint searching of gps-denied environments with a heterogeneous team of robots.
The 2020-2021 CTL Instructional Award for Innovative or Out of Class Teaching is being presented to two instructors, and Assistant Professor Leo Ureel, Computer Science, and Libby Meyer, senior lecturer, Visual and Performing Arts.
Ureel was nominated in recognition of his “student-centric efforts which have increased retention and diversified the cohort of first-year computing students.”
Ureel’s presentation, “Three course innovations to support communication,” will be presented at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 18, 2021, as part of the CTL Instructional Award Presentation Series.
Link here to register for the event.
Ureel is a member of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems’s (ICC) Computing Education Center.
Meyer’s presentation, “Beyond Carrots and Sticks: Mastery Based Grading and Narrative Assessment” will also be presented on February 18.
During spring 2017, academic deans were asked to begin recognizing instructors making contributions in these areas as part of the Deans’ Teaching Showcase, effectively nominating them for instructional awards.
CTL and Provost’s office members along with previous awardees then select one individual in each category from a pool composed of the Showcase and those nominated to the Academy of Teaching Excellence.
Three course innovations to support communication Introductory courses present many communication challenges between faculty and first year students. In this context, we discuss three innovations used in our introductory computer science courses.
The first is the use of Snap, a high-level, visual programming language, as a form of pseudocode during the first five weeks of the course to build student vocabulary and problem solving skills before tackling programming in Java.
The second is a Code Critiquer developed as a Canvas plugin to provide immediate guidance and feedback to students when they submit their programming assignments.
The third is a grade visualization tool that helps students understand their current performance in the course and project a range that will contain their final grade. While not everyone teaches introductory computer science, we discuss how these or similar innovations and tools might apply to your course.
College of Computing Dean Dennis Livesay will host two 60-minute virtual Town Hall meetings for College undergraduate and graduate students on February 23 and February 25, 2021.
At the Town Hall meetings, student are invited to share with Dean Livesay their thoughts and input about the College, curriculum, degree programs, departments, and other topics of interest.
The Undergraduate Town Hall is February 23, 2021, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. Join that meeting here: https://michigantech.zoom.us/j/87889920742.
The Graduate Town Hall is February 25, 2021, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. Join here: https://michigantech.zoom.us/j/82512917783.
Dr. Vijay Garg, University of Texas Austin, will present a lecture on February 19, 2021, at 3:00 p.m. The lecture is hosted by the Department of Computer Science.
Vijay Garg is a Cullen Trust Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and B. Tech. in computer science at IIT, Kanpur.
His research interests are in distributed computing, discrete event systems and lattice theory. He is the author of “Elements of Distributed Computing” (Wiley, 2002), “Introduction to Lattice Theory with Computer Science Applications” (Wiley, 2015), and “Modeling and Control of Logical Discrete Event Systems” (Springer, 2012). He is an IEEE Fellow.
Applying Predicate Detection to Discrete Optimization Problems
We present a method to design parallel algorithms for the constrained combinatorial optimization problems. Our method solves and generalizes many classical combinatorial optimization problems including the stable marriage problem, the shortest path problem and the market clearing price problem.
These three problems are solved in the literature using Gale-Shapley algorithm, Dijkstra’s algorithm, and Demange, Gale, Sotomayor algorithm. Our method solves all these problems by casting them as searching for an element that satisfies an appropriate predicate in a distributive lattice. Moreover, it solves generalizations of all these problems — namely finding the optimal solution satisfying additional constraints called lattice-linear predicates.
For stable marriage problems, an example of such a constraint is that Peter’s regret is less than that of Paul. Our algorithm, called Lattice-Linear Predicate Detection (LLP) can be implemented in parallel with without any locks or compare-and-set instructions. It just assumes atomicity of reads and writes.
In addition to finding the optimal solution, our method is useful in enumerating all constrained stable matchings, and all constrained market clearing price vectors. The talk is an extended version of a paper that appeared in ACM SPAA’20.