Category Archives: Computer Science
Orange Pi 800 Offers the Raspberry Pi 400 Keyboard Some Fresh Competition – PCMag
Orange Pi has been making single-board computers to compete with the Raspberry Pi for years, but now it's going after the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer.
As Liliputing reports(Opens in a new window), Orange Pi announced the Orange Pi 800(Opens in a new window) keyboard computer, which just like the Raspberry Pi 400, offers a complete personal computer squeezed inside a keyboard housing. All you need to do is add a display and power.
The Orange Pi 800 uses a six-core Rockchip RK3399 (dual-core ARM Cortex-A72 and quad-core Cortex-A53) complete with an ARM Mali-T860MP4 GPU, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 64GB of eMMC storage, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 5.0. On the outer casing you'll find two USB 3.0 ports, a single USB 2.0 ports, MicroSD card slot, HDMI, VGA, 26-pin IO interface, a Type-C power port, combined headphone and MIC port, and a speaker. Cooling is handled using a piece of heat-conducting silicagel, so there's no fan spinning inside.
The keyboard is capable of running a couple of displays at up to 4K resolution. It includes support for Chromium OS as well as Orange Pi OS(Opens in a new window), which is based on Arch Linux. This keyboard computer should therefore work very well with other Linux distributions, especially considering the Rockchip RK3399 has been around for six years now.
Orange Pi hasn't released pricing or availability yet, but its website shows a currently dead link for the keyboard being sold via Amazon. As the Raspberry Pi 400 sells for $70 and has a very similar spec, we should expect the Orange Pi 800 to cost roughly the same when it does appear.
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‘Gem of Northeastern,’ Molly White Takes on Crypto – News @ Northeastern – Northeastern University
Molly White has been making stands on principle since her early teens. Now her scrutiny of crypto is earning her national acclaim.
The Washington Post recently profiled White as the cryptocurrency worlds biggest critic. Via her website, Web3 is Going Just Great, White investigates and exposes scams and other questionable practices in the opaque and largely unregulated industry.
Molly White is a gem of Northeastern University, a Northeastern student posted on Reddit, a social media aggregation website, in response to the Post story.
It feels important to me to make information available to people, especially when other groups are trying to present a very different and I think unrealistic story, says White, a 2016 Northeastern graduate in computer science. Especially with crypto, I see a lot of real people being hurt by itpeople who dont have the money that they can lose who were sold the dream of financial freedom, or a ticket out of having to work two jobs, and then getting put in even more desperate situations.
Cryptocurrencies, which can be circulated digitally without government oversight, are vulnerable to volatile price swings as well as unreliable (and sometimes predatory) traders. White devotes her site to web3the blockchain foundation for cryptocurrenciesin recognition that everyday people are being exploited by outlandish investment schemes.
It feels like, as someone who is able and willing to do the research, that I have an obligation to do it, she says.
Born and raised in Maine, White was drawn to Northeastern by the promise of co-ops. She participated in two of them at HubSpot in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leading to six years of full-time employment as a software engineer before she left the company last month.
She began developing an online presence in her early teens as an editor and writer at Wikipediafirst about music, and later in praise of women scientists.
I discovered that anyone could edit Wikipedia when I was 13, White says. I have this sort of weird brain: I really enjoy documenting and archiving and collecting information. And I also have always been very passionate about free and open knowledge and access to information. I became a pretty active editor in high school and then continued to do it through college and afterwards.
After the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, Whites focus shifted to the alt-right, which exposed her to online vitriol and prepared her for the blowback that she has endured more recently from the crypto industry. She says she experienced online harassment as a result.
Its unpleasant sometimes, she says. Theres also a gender aspecteven before I started to edit in those topic areasof being a visible woman on the internet with opinions that tended to draw a fair amount of attacks. So I wish it was different.
She has found that those attacks have strengthened her resolve.
Im a very stubborn person by nature, she says. Being harassed online, or targeted in some ways, tends to make me angry that its happening, but also more determined to stick with it. I do what I can to minimize it and to protect myself and my family, but it feels important to continue doing what Im doingeven more so when there are people who try to stop it.
Her resilience is a family trait of which she is proud.
It was not a surprise to my family to have another stubborn daughter, White says, laughing.
White sees her efforts as part of a larger movement.
How can we move the web in a better direction? she asks. I think a lot of people look at me and think shes a crypto critic, she wants to stop crypto, she wants to tamp [innovation] down.
But White says she shares a lot of the same goals as some of the people who are working in the web3 spacefreedoms that include access to information and online communities around shared goals.
I worry that crypto and web3 are moving us in the opposite directionof limiting access to information and to communities, and financializing a lot of the interactions that we have online, she says. My goal is to open the web and make it a better place. Thats really the drive more than the hope to stop crypto.
Soon, she says, she will renew her less-famous career as a software engineer because writing software is my favorite thing.
But shell continue to watch over the crypto industry on behalf of those who are being exploited by it.
I just try to keep doing what I feel is impactful and helpful, White says. I imagine that will continue to be the goal, regardless of what shape it takes at any given point.
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'Gem of Northeastern,' Molly White Takes on Crypto - News @ Northeastern - Northeastern University
First, Brun Receive ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for Automating Formal Verification – UMass News and Media Relations
Doctoral student Emily First and Professor Yuriy Brun of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at UMass Amherst received a Distinguished Paper Award from the Association for Computing Machinerys special interest group on software engineering (ACM SIGSOFT) at the 2022 International Conference on Software Engineering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on May 23.
Their winning paper, Diversity-Driven Automated Formal Verification, introduces Diva, their tool to automatically generate proofs for the formal verification of software. Diva is the first to break the one-third barrier in formal verification, fully automatically proving 33.8% of the properties normally proven manually by software engineers, as evaluated by the researchers on a large benchmark of open-source software projects. Diva, funded by the National Science Foundation and an Amazon Research Award, expands on their previous proof synthesis tool TacTok, which was co-created with Arjun Guha, now at Northeastern University.
Formal verification of softwareproving that software does exactly what it is supposed to dois crucial when developing high-stakes systems, like those involved in aerospace or medical equipment, where the outcomes must be 100% correct. This process involves using interactive theorem provers (ITP) such as Coq, which are designed to allow for writing of software and of proofs of theorems about the software. Because writing proofs by hand is often prohibitively difficult, developers sometimes make use of tools like TacTok, or solver-based approaches like CoqHammer, to automatically generate them.
Diva, which stands for Diversity in Verification, learns a diverse set of models of what human-written proofs look like, and then generates new proofs for new software fully automatically using those models The key to Divas success is the diversity of the models, says Brun. By varying the learning parameters and data inputs, Diva generates many models. While one model may synthesize one kind of proof, another may synthesize another kind of proof. Together, these models can prove 68% more theorems than our prior tool, TacTok, and 77% more than ASTactic, another state-of-the-art proof synthesis tool.
Unlike TacTok and ASTactic, which also use existing proofs to learn a model, Diva uses an army-of-models approach, with numerous models attempting to guide proof synthesis for each theorem independently. Weve observed that when a model is going to prove a theorem, it often does so early on in its search, explains First. To ensure were spending computational resources on the right models and proving theorems as quickly as possible, we limit the amount of time each model gets to run before moving on to the next one, cycling back as necessary.
As the researchers explain, Divas cycling approach resulted in a 97% decrease in time required to prove a theorem, on average. Diva contributes to the suite of available tools that automatically generate proofs for the formal verification of software, providing access to an additional 11% of theorems that had not previously been provable by existing tools, according to their analysis of a benchmark over 10,000 theorems.
Diva is open-source and publicly available on GitHub. Brun, together with Talia Ringer, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Alex Sanchez-Stern, a postdoctoral researcher at UMass Amherst, recently received a $1 million grant from the DARPA PEARLS (Proof Engineering, Adaptation, Repair, and Learning for Software) program.
With the new funding from DARPA, we are leading an effort to improve automated formal verification even more, by learning more-complete models of proofs, improving the proof synthesis process, and applying these ideas to repairing proofs that break when software evolves, Brun says. Our project, titled PLATO: Enriched Tactic Prediction Models for Proof Synthesis & Repair, has already shown that augmenting models with information about identifiers, such as variable names, can further improve proof synthesis.
First is a doctoral student working with Brun in the Laboratory for Software Engineering Research (LASER) at CICS. Her research lies at the intersection of software engineering, programming languages, and machine learning, with a specific focus on creating tools to automatically generate proofs of software correctness. She received a bachelors in mathematics and computer science from Harvey Mudd College in 2017 and a masters in computer science from UMass Amherst in 2020.
Bruns current research focuses on software engineering and systems security, creating techniques to automate improvements in system quality, reliability, and performance. He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including an NSF CAREER award in 2015 and the IEEE TCSC Young Achiever in Scalable Computing Award in 2013. In 2019, he was elected an ACM Distinguished Member. He joined the CICS faculty in 2012. He received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Southern California in 2008.
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Forward, Together Forward scholarship winners continue the tradition of excellence | NIU Newsroom – NIU Newsroom
This years winners of the Forward, Together Forward scholarships continue a 14-year history of recipients who reflect the best that the NIU student body has to offer, both inside and outside of the classroom.
These students, each of whom will receive a $5,000 scholarship, exude the qualities that the award was created to honor and each stands as an outstanding tribute to those in whose honor the scholarship was created: Gayle Dubowski, Catalina Garcia, Julianna Gehant, Ryanne Mace and Dan Parmenter the five Huskies lost on Feb. 14, 2008.
The five recipients, who were honored in ceremonies in May, have all excelled inside and outside of the classroom. All have demonstrated leadership, determination, a commitment to service and a desire to make the world a better place after graduation.
Read on to learn more about the 2022 Forward, Together Forward Scholars.
A true Huskie since birth
Abigail Hostman says that she was born with Huskie DNA in her blood, which is why she was so excited to follow in her fathers footsteps and attend NIU. She hasnt wasted a moment of her time since she arrived on campus in the fall of 2020.
Hostman, who grew up in Cary, is a student in the NIU College of Business where she is double-majoring in human resource management and marketing, with a minor in Spanish. Despite the demands of such an aggressive academic load she has been very active on campus.
As a freshman, she was elected president of the NIU Society for Human Resource Management, a position typically reserved for upper division students. That impressed Professor of Management Mahesh Subramony, who advises the organization.
To take on this position during the pandemic is in itself a testament to her character, but her performance in her role brings to the fore her tremendous leadership potential, Subramony says, noting that, during Hostmans time as president, the groups executive board created annual goals and spearheaded two service-learning initiatives at area high schools.
She is the youngest and most engaged leader that I have come across in the last 12-plus years of my involvement with the organization, Subramony says. She is a true Huskie positive, energetic, hard-working, sincere and full of integrity.
In addition to her work with SHRM, Hostman has served as treasurer and service chair for NIUs chapter of the National Society of Leadership and Success and received that organizations Shining Star and Induction awards. She is also enrolled in the Honors Program at NIU and lived in the Honors House for two years.
Hostman accomplished all of these things despite being born with a hearing impairment, which was overcome through surgery and years of speech therapy, an experience that inspired her.
I want to show everyone that you can overcome any setbacks in life, regardless of the challenge, she says. My experiences at NIU will help me positively impact my community. Many people impacted my world, and I want to pay that forward. I am motivated to help other people the way they helped me.
Traveling on his mind
Ask Cole Boni about what he hopes his future will hold, and you had better be prepared to listen in three languages.
While attending high school in Oswego, Boni, who just completed his freshman year at NIU, attained the Illinois State Seal of Biliteracy in both Spanish and French, so, naturally, he is majoring in biomedical engineering. However, his linguistic skills will not go to waste, as he hopes to pursue graduate degrees in Finland, where he plans to focus on tissue engineering.
After obtaining my doctorate, I hope to go to other countries to experience their cultures, languages and all they have to offer, Boni says, naming Iceland and New Zealand as two countries where he hopes to live and work.
For now, Bonis attention is on his work at NIU, where he is part of the Honors Program and maintains a near-perfect GPA.
I rarely see a student like Cole, says mathematics instructor Brian Veitch. I believe his commitment to his education, his excellent communication skills and his ability to have meaningful discussions in a course so few excel in deserves to be rewarded and acknowledged. Hes a great example of what an NIU Huskie student can be.
Outside of the classroom, Boni is also actively engaged in the LGBTQIA+ community floor, where he has found a sense of belonging. It is a place where I feel comfortable with others and I can use the communitys resources to better myself and everyone else, he says.
Discovering her potential
It was the spring of 2019, during her second semester at NIU, that Hannah Schaumberg realized that she had much more potential than she gave herself credit for, and she set out to realize it with a vengeance.
As someone who was adopted from China, she became active in organizations that reflected her cultural heritage, including Circle K International (where she received the Marie Anderson Outstanding Club Member Award), the Chinese Club (where she served as president) and the Southeast Asia Club (where she served as treasurer).
She also sought out organizations that related to her passion for art, including the National Art Education Association (where she served as vice president) and the Student Advisory Committee in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She also racked up more than 200 hours as a Huskie Service Scholar and serves as a peer counselor. Her efforts earned her awards and accolades including a Golden Apple scholarship and the prestigious Kevin D. Knight Leadership Award.
Through it all she has maintained a near perfect GPA. More importantly, she discovered a passion within herself for art education. I believe everyone should have the chance to learn how art can benefit them. I would love to teach high schoolers in a rural community, she says, hinting that she would like to do so in her hometown of Sterling. I hope to bring back what I learned at NIU to my community and show them that we can achieve anything we set our minds to, she said.
Paul Kassel, dean of the NIU College of Visual and Performing Arts, who has known Hannah throughout her time at NIU, has no doubt she can attain whatever goal she sets for herself. She is a formidable presence on campus and a leader of organizations, Kassel says. Hannahs potential for future achievement is limited only by what is possible in 24 hours!
A leader and a motivator
While at NIU, Jacob Eul decided to reach for the stars or, at the very least, the planet Mars.
Eul, who recently completed his sophomore year and is studying computer science, started down that path when he joined the Mars Rover Team. There, he works with students from across the university to design and build vehicles that can withstand the rigors of space travel and the harsh conditions on the red planet. He is part of a team developing software that would allow the vehicle to navigate the rough terrain of Mars.
Not all of his activities are quite as out of this world.
He also works as a laboratory assistant in the Computer Science Data, Devices and Interaction Laboratory, and is collaborating with a fellow computer science student on a project with Argonne National Laboratory researchers to build a web application for collecting and formatting data for scientific publications.
When not working on his programing, Eul, who maintains a GPA of 3.8, and is part of the University Honors Program, works as a community advisor in a campus residence hall.
Being a member of the NIU community means being the best student and community member that I can be. For me, that means not only doing well in my studies but also engaging in the communities around me, Eul says.
His commitment to making the world a better place extends to his plans for the future. Eul hopes that his NIU education will allow him to develop software that improves and enriches peoples lives by automating routine tasks, freeing up time for more substantive work. He also dreams of creating his own business to teach children how to program.
Professor of Computer Science Pratool Bharti has no doubt that Eul will turn those dreams into a reality
Jacobs personal qualities are as impressive as his intellectual abilities. He has the skill to motivate people and the leadership qualities to make others sail through trying times, Bharti says. He possesses every quality that is required to achieve his future goals.
Improving the world for all
Stormy Kara is a Huskie who is going places, though likely not by car.
Throughout their time at NIU (Karas pronouns are they, their) Kara has participated in a number of projects, both inside and outside of the classroom, that reflect their desire to see a society less reliant on automobiles.
That work has included creating a YouTube site highlighting local train stations for rail enthusiasts, an internship with the Chicago Transit Authority and participation in a sociological study analyzing why some people choose to travel by water taxis to and from Chicagos Chinatown.
Stormy embodies what a persistent, gritty, Huskie does, because they collected the data during the summer of 2020, during difficult times, says Professor of Sociology Carol Walther, who helped oversee the project. I am confident that these data will produce a sociological article (written by Kara) informed by ethnic theory of entrepreneurship, specifically related to the concept of panethnicity.
Professor Randy Casperson, who teaches filmmaking, says he believes that Karas interest in transportation underlies a broader commitment to building stronger communities. Their connection to and advocacy for mass transportation seems foundational to Stormys intellectual curiosity and overall concern for seeking alternatives to the status quo and broadening their own worldview as well as, with their current and future media work, broadening an audiences understanding of the way communities work, Casperson says.
Kara, of Charleston, Ill., just completed their junior year, and has a near-perfect GPA while double-majoring in communication and sociology. They are an active member of the Pride movement, which works to secure a safer, more equitable world for members of the LGBTQ community.
They believe that being a Huskie includes working for the betterment of the world for all.
A Huskie is proactive in improving their community by taking advantage of opportunities to do so, whether they be large-scale community service projects or something as simple as picking up litter outside of a dorm, Kara says.
Media Contact: Joe King
About NIU
Northern Illinois University is a student-centered, nationally recognized public research university, with expertise that benefits its region and spans the globe in a wide variety of fields, including the sciences, humanities, arts, business, engineering, education, health and law. Through its main campus in DeKalb, Illinois, and education centers for students and working professionals in Chicago, Naperville, Oregon and Rockford, NIU offers more than 100 areas of study while serving a diverse and international student body.
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Combating the Commodification of Higher Education | Higher Ed Gamma – Inside Higher Ed
American higher education has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as the United Statessentrepreneurial, market-driven system of health care.
Institutions of higher learning, like health care providers, vie aggressively for resources, prestige, and customers (whether patients or students) within highly competitive marketplaces. Extreme stratification, in reputation and resources, characterizes both the health care and higher education sectors.
Institutional competition, in turn, strongly incentivizes colleges and universities to take steps to stand out in highly visible ways that enhance their standing and status. Its no surprise that campuses compete with one another in terms of facilities, amenities, breadth of programs, andeven food.
But intense competition also discourages most schools from radically diverging from established norms lest they narrow their appeal by appearing eccentric, odd, or struggling. At first glance, American higher education appears to be extraordinarily diverse, consisting of liberal arts colleges, research-oriented institutions, public and private, urban and rural campuses, religious colleges, military academies, seminaries, technology institutes, commuter and residential campuses, and online providers. All true.
Yet most campuses share certain common elements, including credit hours, fixed-length terms, standardized start dates, distribution requirements, department-based majors, letter grades, and more.
Conformist pressures, however, create opportunities for alternative providers who target unmet needs and underserved markets. In medicine, these includes urgent care centers, for-profit emergency rooms, boutique and concierge practices, and specialized clinics and treatment facilities. In higher education, alternatives to business as usual include the mega online providers, such as Western Governors, Southern New Hampshire, and Coursera, various boot camps and skills academies, and industry certifications that aim to serve those who find the opportunities provided by traditional colleges and universities too costly or time-consuming, or insufficiently career-focused.
The top health centers and higher education institutions have acquired richly deserved reputations for excellence and innovation. Yet in both sectors, significant numbers of potential beneficiaries remain poorly served. Indeed, the free-for-all higher education marketplace has transformed the GI Bill, which once offered an international model for the democratization of access to higher education and colleges ability drive upward social mobility, into a funnel that channels all too many veterans into for-profit institutions with exceedingly poor outcomes.
Highly entrepreneurial, marketized systems of higher education and healthcare are exceedingly vulnerable to scams. In the absence of rigorous oversight and regulation, quacks and charlatans exploit opportunities for profit. Higher educations counterpart to overtreatment, over prescription, and over diagnosis in the health realm are the many masters and certificate programs and other certificate offerings with uncertain or even negative payoffs, in clear violation of the gainful employment rules that are supposed to ensure that graduates attain incomes that allow them to repay their debts.
Ina recent article inEdSurge, Jeffrey R. Young reminds us about a prescient 1997 essay by the late David Noble, a noted historian of science and technology, who condemned the rise of digital diploma mills, online institutions more interested in enrolling as many students as possible at the lowest possible cost than in providing a quality education or a degree with genuine value in the job market.
These institutions, Noble argued, had abandoned a collegiate ideal that rested uponstudents close interaction with professors in favor of a model that rested on the mastery of a fixed body knowledge and skills.
But the larger problem that Noble identified the commodification of higher education was not confined to online providers with their narrow curricula, cookie cutter courses, and alternate staffing models. In the brave new world of higher education that has emerged over the past quarter century, colleges and universities are, first and foremost, credential providers and commercial enterprises.
Their students are customers and human capital to be developed. Faculty members and departments are incentivized to be as entrepreneurial as possible. Campuses are increasingly valued politically as drivers of local economies and of regional economic development and as incubators of basic and applied research. Learning, far from being developmental or transformational process, is increasingly viewed as transactional and equated with passing the requisite number of courses.
Is it possible to break free from the commodification of higher education, or is American higher education trapped in a Weberian iron cage, in which campuses are prisoners of a system that values throughput, efficiency, rational calculation, and bureaucratic control above learning?
After all, isnt a college education supposed to be the very opposite of a commodity, stressing instead intellectual seriousness, mentoring, community, dialogue, discovery, and personal growth?
My own view is that it is indeed possible to provide a transformational, developmental, relationship-rich education within the matrix of todays highly bureaucratized institutions. Many institutions already do this for honors students. But unfortunately, these programs, which feature designated faculty members, dedicated advising, special seminars, rich research opportunities, and a wealth of co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, are confined to a small subset of the undergraduate population.
How can we scale such opportunities? Here are a few suggestions.
1.Empower a number of individual faculty members to organize cohorts with a thematic focus.In exchange for overseeing a community of learners and offering a special credit-bearing seminar, provide those faculty members with a modest stipend and student engagement funds.
2. Create a wide variety of cohorts to serve students with differing interests.Some cohorts might emphasis research, and not just laboratory research, but qualitative and data driven and archival research. Other cohorts might focus on community service, civic engagement, or the arts. Still others might be career-focused, emphasizing business, computer science, healthcare fields, including nursing, law, public policy, and technology. Then there might be cohorts that are maker and project oriented. The goal is to embed as many undergraduates as possible in a community of interest.
3.Recognize active participation in a cohort program with a special designation on the students transcript.Students deserve to be rewarded for taking part in a cohort program and their involvement in the activities needs to be institutionally acknowledged. A transcript notification recognizes their programmatic engagement.
4.Expand opportunities for students to interact with faculty.Students who build educational relationships with faculty members outside the classroom are more successful academically. Plus professors who know students personally are able to write stronger letters of recommendation.
Lunches or informal group meetings are great ways for undergraduates to get to know a faculty member outside a classroom setting and learn about graduate school and opportunities for research, internships, and scholarships. The payoff far exceeds the modest cost.
5.Showcase undergraduates research and creative achievements.Celebrate faculty-supervised undergraduate research and arts projects with poster sessions, brief (two- or three-minute) oral presentations, and student and faculty panels. A showcase offers students a chance to communicate the importance of their research and creativity to a broad audience. It also gives them an opportunity to polish their presentation skills and bolster their resumes as they prepare to apply for jobs or graduate school. Above all, this event introduces the entire campus community to the students vision, inventiveness, ingenuity, and passion.
Karl Marx had a term to describe those 19thcentury communitarians, like Charles Fourier, John Humphrey Noyes, Robert Owen, and Henri de Saint-Simon, who strove to create cooperative communities inside capitalist societies. He called these visionaries utopian socialists and dismissed their dreams as fanciful and unrealistic.
In fact, however, some of their communities lasted for decades and, more than that, inspired many womens rights advocates, sex radicals, labor organizers, diet and dress reformers, abolitionists, and advocates of world peace with dazzling visions of a world rid of status hierarchies and exploitation.
Theres nothing utopian or original about the kinds of community building initiatives that this posting proposes. If we want to combat the commoditization of higher education, just follow these steps, which are eminently doable.
All implementation requires is the will to create campuses where every student has a community to call their own.
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Combating the Commodification of Higher Education | Higher Ed Gamma - Inside Higher Ed
Lecturer in Programming and Computer Science job with MASARYK UNIVERSITY | 295576 – Times Higher Education
Department:Department of Computer Systems and CommunicationsFaculty of InformaticsDeadline:30 Sep 2022Start date:January or February 2023 / By mutual agreementJob type:full-time | part-timeJob field:Science and research | Education and schooling
Dean of the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University announces an open competition for the position:Lecturer in Programming and Computer Science
Number of open positions:1 for full-time / part-time employment is possibleWorking Hours:full-time (40 hours per week), part-time (at least 20 hours per week)Expected start:January or February 2023 / By mutual agreementSalary:CZK 58000/monthDeadline for applications:September 30,2022
Job description keypoints
The successful candidate must have
Applicants should submit
Please submit your application, including all required documents, preferably online via the MU e-application atLecturer in Programming and Computer Science. In case this way of submission would not be possible, we also accept apaper application with adeclaration of the reason for such asubmission.
Further information is available:
In April 2021 the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, successfully completed the Initial Phase and has been successfully certificated by the European Commission. In line with its commitment to involve, in area of human resources, the principles ofthe European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers, the Faculty has been constantly working on HR Excellence in Research Award (HRS4R).
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SIU student team finishes second in the nation in Solar Cup competition – SIU News
A team of students from Southern Illinois University Carbondale finished second in its portion of the U.S. Department of Energys Solar District Cup. The team designed a system that integrated solar energy, storage and other technologies for The Ohio State University medical campus. Team members pictured are, from left, Olivia Sapp, Nelson Fernandes, Prem Rana and Aron Taylor.(Photo by Russell Bailey)
June 06, 2022
by Tim Crosby
CARBONDALE, Ill. A team of students from Southern Illinois University Carbondale finished second in its division in the U.S. Department of EnergysSolar District Cup Collegiate Design Competition.
The Solar District Cup challenges multidisciplinary student teams, including engineering, urban planning, finance and other majors, to design and model distributed energy systems for a campus or urban district. The 2021-2022 competition at The Ohio State University tasked teams to design systems for its medical campus that maximizes energy offset and financial savings.
Kanchan Mondal, director of the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Materials Engineering at SIU, who helped organize the team, said SIUs high finish in its first such competition demonstrates the quality of its education, devotion to student success and commitment to sustainability, which are among the pillars of SIUs strategic plan, Imagine 2030.
The energy and effort from students who have formed and led successful teamsalso speaks highly of the faculty who are the indirect and often invisible force behind the headlines, Mondal said. Our faculty are dedicated to engaging and challenging students beyond the classroom through research and design activities. Taking up a national challenge such as the Solar Cup and preparing them for a successful career is conscientious service to society.
Mondal singled out SIU student Nelson Fernandes, who graduated in May with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering and who served as project manager for the team. The Solar Cup team was a subgroup of the universitysGreen Roof Team, which took its name from an innovative sustainability project started atop the Agriculture Building in 2010. It features space for native plants, growing vegetables and flowers, and conducting research while demonstrating the benefits of sustainable roofs.
Fernandes said the competition focused on skills engineers and professionals need in the field, from initial feasibility and conceptual design to the development plan and final design.
During my time at SIU, faculty and professors on campus provided incredible resources and opportunities that allowed me to explore my passions and understand my values professionally and personally, said Fernandes, who along with other graduates has transitioned the Green Roof team into a business post-graduation.
Our business mission is focused on developing educational kits and courses based on the campus projects we have been working on over the past three years, he said. All for the vision of a cleaner and more sustainable world through providing educational opportunities.
The SIU team, which also included students from two other universities, submitted its proposal for a photovoltaic (energy-generating) roof system to the competition in late fall and gained entry into the finals, along with 34 other teams from the initial 65.
Along with Fernandes, other team members include Stephen Schulte, senior in computer science from Mascoutah; Olivia Sapp, senior in electrical engineering from Benton, and Aron Taylor, junior in mechanical engineering from Carbondale, from SIU, as well as Gustavo Felicio Perruci, an SIU alumnus now working on his doctorate at the University of Texas at Dallas. Team members also come from Case Western Reserve University and Broward College.
Sponsors and advisers of the team also include Southern Illinois businesses C.H. Electrical in Pittsburg, Supplied Energy in Greenville and AES Solar in Carterville.
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SIU student team finishes second in the nation in Solar Cup competition - SIU News
How Two Africans Overcame Bias To Build A Startup Worth Billions – Forbes
It was the summer of 2018, and Ham Serunjogi, a 24-year-old Ugandan immigrant, thought the pitch he was making to a Palo Alto venture capital firm was going well. He had explained how his fintech startup, Chipper Cash, would enable African consumers to send money to each other, across national borders, more cheaply and easily than the antiquated banking systema sort of Venmo for the continent.
Then came a question from one of the partners: Why dont you go look for donations and grants to fund this? Because, Serunjogi replied, this will be a profit-making business. The clueless partner persisted: Why dont you talk to Unicef or an impact investing firm? Serunjogi discreetly declines to name the firm, or to say which VC later told him that regardless of what the metrics are, I have to apply a discount to this business because its in Africa.
Follow the Money: Chipper president Maijid Moujaled and CEO Ham Serunjogi in their San Francisco headquarters, where they located for access to venture capital.
Those memories still sting, even though Chipper Cash has now raised $300 million from a roster of blue-chip VCs, most recently in November at a $2.2 billion valuation. These were things Id have to take with a straight face. But it was outrageous, and it still is, Serunjogi says from the San Francisco office where he, cofounder Maijid Moujaled and nearly a fifth of the companys 350 employees are based. The two founders each have an estimated 10% stake in Chipper, translating into paper fortunes north of $200 million.
Sheel Mohnot, a former partner at 500 StartupsChipper Cashs first backerchalks up some early investor resistance to ignorance about Africa. No one was investing in Africa at the time, he says. That has changed. Per CB Insights, venture capitalists invested $1.5 billion in African fintech companies last year, up sevenfold from 2020. Sub-Saharan Africans today have 605 million registered mobile money accountswith which they can send cash via text messageup from 469 million in 2018. That makes the area fertile ground for more advanced consumer financial apps.
Four years after its founding, Chipper Cash has 5 million registered users in seven countries, including Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria. It offers not only low-cost money transfers but bill payment, crypto trading and the ability to buy U.S. stocks. Excluding crypto transactions, it booked more than $75 million in revenue in 2021, compared with $18 million in 2020.
The idea for Chipper Cash was seeded when high-school-age Serunjogi saw the problems his father encountered trying to move money through Africas ossified banking system. Serunjogis family lived in Gayaza, a Ugandan town 10 miles outside Kampala, the capital. His parents owned a farm, and his father also ran an IT operation helping local businesses set up networks. Though hardly rich, the family sent Serunjogi and his two brothers to a private high school and enrolled them in a competitive swim club. In 2010, Serunjogi, then 16, made the Ugandan Youth Olympic team. After having problems completing a bank transfer, his father was forced to fly to South Africa with an envelope full of cash to pay his sons swim coach while they were training there.
After high school, Serunjogi followed his older brother to Grinnell, a small liberal arts college in Iowa known for its strong academics, where both swam varsity. At Grinnell he met Moujaled, a Ghanaian computer science major who had started a popular student coding group. Almost immediately, the two began talking about developing an African money transfer app. But first they wanted real-world tech experience and needed work visas. So during his junior year Serunjogi sent cold emails to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and snagged an internship with Facebook, which turned into a full-time job in Dublin after he graduated in 2016.
In the spring of 2018, Serunjogi texted Moujaled, who was working as a software engineer in San Francisco, to say it was time to get going. Serunjogi quit his job and moved into Moujaleds studio apartment, sleeping on an air mattress in the kitchenette. The two used their combined savings of less than $30,000 and Moujaleds ongoing salary as seed capital. They launched a test version of their app in July 2018, letting customers send money from Uganda to Ghana for free.
They took pitches to more than 50 VC firms until, in November 2018, 500 Startups agreed to invest $150,000. Before the papers were signed, Mohnot wired $40,000 to Chipper after Serunjogi told him he was about to miss rent. I will be eternally grateful to him for that, Serunjogi says.
Chippers free, easy-to-use app was a big improvement over the available alternatives. For example, Kenyas M-Pesa, which launched in 2007, charges 1% to 2% for many domestic transfers.
By mid-2019 Chipper Cash was available in Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. It soon expanded to Nigeria, Africas biggest market with more than 200 million people, and by the end of the year, it had 600,000 customers. It also introduced a foreign-exchange markup fee of 2% to 5% to start generating revenue. As bitcoin rose from $14,000 to $20,000 in the fall of 2020, Chipper began to let users buy and sell bitcoin and ether, establishing a second lucrative line of business: trading fees. It reached a $2.2 billion valuation in late 2021, with investment from firms including Sam Bankman-Frieds FTX, Ribbit Capital and Bezos Expeditions. Transactions grew from $200 million in the first quarter of 2021 to $1.6 billion 12 months later.
All that growth comes with added high-stakes challenges. One is liquidity: Chipper needs to make sure it has enough funds in each country to support instant transfers. When it doesnt, transaction times can slow to a full day or longer. Money can solve that problem. A bigger worry is competition. Senegal-based startup Wave offers similar services (albeit in different countries so far) and notched a $1.7 billion valuation last year. Other remittance companies such as Remitly and Wise dont yet let people send money from one African country to another, but theres nothing stopping them from entering the market.
For now, Serunjogi is focused on maintaining Chippers steep growth, moving to profitabilityand helping Africans while doing so. Customers benefit, he says, when they can move money easily and have new ways to invest and build wealth. Im a deep believer in the role of entrepreneurship and capitalism in improving the lives of people who live in developing countries.
The rest is here:
How Two Africans Overcame Bias To Build A Startup Worth Billions - Forbes
Computer Scientist and Educationalist, Prof Simon Peyton Jones to receive OBE | BCS – BCS
Prof Simon Peyton Jones, Chair of Computing at School (CAS) and of the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE), is to receive an OBE for his services to education and computing science.
Prof Peyton Jones is co-founder of CAS, the UK-wide, teacher-led network, supported by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
His work to deliver outstanding computing education is recognised in the Queens Birthday Honours ahead of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations.
Computing at School (CAS) was founded in 2008 by a small group led by Prof Peyton Jones and Simon Humphreys.
CAS began as a small volunteer group working to establish computer science in schools and support teachers.
Today the network is made up of over 360 volunteer communities covering the whole of the UK and has 20,000 members sharing advice, guidance, and peer-to peer support, in person and across digital platforms.
As Chair of CAS, Prof Peyton Jones was at the heart of the reforms that led to the new National Curriculum subject, Computing, which was introduced in September 2014.
Since 2019, Prof Peyton Jones has been Chair of the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE). He leads the NCCEs Academic Board, supporting and inspiring all those working in computing education, including industry partners, academics, and teachers.
Prof Peyton Jones said: I am thrilled to receive this honour, but I do so on behalf of every member of Computing at School! The award recognises the re-imagining of computing as a foundational and creative subject that equips and empowers all children. It celebrates the passion, expertise, and sheer energy of CAS's volunteers, and the vibrant richness of the community that we have built together. There is no them; there is only us.
Julia Adamson, Director of Education at BCS said: Professor Peyton Jones is a force for good globally when it comes to computing education.
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Computer Scientist and Educationalist, Prof Simon Peyton Jones to receive OBE | BCS - BCS
Computer Science < University of NebraskaLincoln
Description
Website: https://computing.unl.eduemail: computing@unl.edu
The University of NebraskaLincoln School of Computing offers Nebraskas only comprehensive program of higher education, research, and service outreach in computer science, computer engineering, and software engineering.
The School of Computing offers a challenging baccalaureate degree program in computer science that prepares graduates for professional practice as computer scientists, provides the basis for advanced studies in the field, and establishes a foundation for lifelong learning and achievement. The bachelor of science degree in computer science is accredited by the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET, http://www.abet.org.
The School of Computing also offers a degree of bachelor of science in computer engineering and a bachelor of science in software engineering. All students with a major in the School of Computing should see their advisor during the first semester to ensure they understand the requirements for each School of Computing undergraduate degree program. Students should consult with their advisors each semester for registration advising.
Entering students may select from several introductory courses according to their interests. The Computer Science I courses (CSCE155A Computer Science I, CSCE155H Honors: Computer Science I, CSCE155E Computer Science I: Systems Engineering Focus, and CSCE155T Computer Science I: Informatics Focus) all provide a foundation in designing and programming computing solutions and prepare students for more advanced CSCE courses, including CSCE156 Computer Science II. These courses are designed to meet different interests. CSCE155A is designed for students majoring in Computer Science. CSCE155H is for honors students. CSCE155Eemphasizes computing for systems engineering, such as control systems, mobile computing, and embedded devices and is designed for students majoring in computer engineering. CSCE155Tfocuses on data and information processing, such as document or database applications, online commerce, or bioinformatics. CSCE156 is for students with a background in designing and programming computing solutions, such as is provided by CSCE155A. CSCE101 Fundamentals of Computer Science is for students seeking a broad introduction to computer science with brief instruction in computer programming. CSCE100 Introduction to Informatics focuses on the use of data-centric and information technologies and on issues and challenges in the application of computing in the sciences, engineering, the humanities, and the arts.
Program Assessment. In order to assist the school in evaluating the effectiveness of its programs, majors will be required in their senior year to complete a written exit survey. Results of participation in these assessment activities will in no way affect a student's GPA or graduation.
Graduate Programs. The School of Computing offers several graduate degree programs: master of science in computer science, master of science in computer science with a computer engineering specialization, master of science in computer science with a bioinformatics specialization, doctor of philosophy in computer science, doctor of philosophy in engineering with a computer engineering specialization, doctor of philosophy in computer science with a bioinformatics specialization, and joint doctor of philosophy in computer science and mathematics. See the Graduate Studies Catalog for details.
Students are expected to meet minimum university entrance requirements. After being admitted to the college, students desiring to pursue a degree in computer science must go through the Professional Admission process, which is automatically performed for qualifying students at the end of the sophomore year. In order to be considered for Professional Admission to the computer science program, students must receive a "P" or "C" or above in CSCE310 Data Structures and Algorithms (RAIK283H Honors: Software Engineering III) and have a GPA of at least 2.5 (semester and cumulative). If a student's cumulative GPA drops below 2.4, the student may be placed on restricted status, may be removed from the College, and my not be able to graduate.
Students must have high school credit for (one unit is equal to one high school year):
Students must have an ACT (enhanced) score of 24 or greater (or equivalent SAT). Students who lack entrance requirements may be admitted based on ACT scores, high school rank and credits, or may be admitted to pre-engineering status in the Exploratory and Pre-Professional Advising Center. Pre-engineering students are advised within the Exploratory and Pre-Professional Advising Center.
Students for whom English is not their language of nurture must meet the minimum English proficiency requirements of the University.
Students who lack entrance units may complete precollege training by Independent Study through the University of NebraskaLincoln Office of On-line and Distance Education, in summer courses, or as a part of their first or second semester course loads while in the Exploratory and Pre-Professional Advising Center or other Colleges at Nebraska.
Students should consult their advisor, their department chair, or Engineering Student Services if they have questions on current policies.
Students who transfer to the University of NebraskaLincoln from other accredited colleges or universities and wish to be admitted to the College of Engineering (COE) must meet COE freshman entrance requirements and have a minimum cumulative GPA of 2.5 and becalculus-ready. Students not meeting either of these requirements must enroll in the Explore Center or another University college until they meet COE admission requirements.Students transferring from UNO, UNL, or UNK to the College of Engineering must be in good academic standing with their institution.
The COE accepts courses for transfer for which a C or better grade was received. Although the University of NebraskaLincolnaccepts D grades from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and at Omaha, not all majors in the COE accept such low grades. Students must conform to the requirements of their intended major and, in any case, are strongly encouraged to repeat courses with a grade of C- or less.
All transfer students must adopt the curricular requirements of the undergraduate catalog current at the time of transfer to the COEnot that in use when they entered the University of NebraskaLincoln. Upon admission to Nebraska, students wishing to pursue degree programs in the COE will be classified and subject to the policies defined in the subsequent section.
Students who were previously admitted to COE and are returning to the College of Engineering must demonstrate a cumulative GPA of 2.5 in order to be readmitted to COE.
In the event of a dispute involving any college policies or grades, the student should appeal to his/her instructor and appropriate department chair or school director (in that order). If a satisfactory solution is not achieved, the student may appeal his/her case through the College Academic Appeals Committee on his/her campus.
Students must fulfill the requirements stated in the catalog for the academic year in which they are first admitted at the University of NebraskaLincoln. In consultation with advisors, a student may choose to follow a subsequent catalog for any academic year in which they are admitted to and enrolled as a degree-seeking student at Nebraska in the College of Engineering. Students must complete all degree requirements from a single catalog year. The catalog which a student follows for degree requirements may not be more than 10 years old at the time of graduation.
Graduates of the computer science program will be able to:
The above student outcomes have been approved by the ABET Engineering Area Delegation for use beginning with the 2019-20 academic year, and have been adopted by the School of Computing faculty.
Computer science majors have the option to declare one or more focus areas from the areas listed below. To receive a focus area certificate from the School of Computing, students must meet all degree requirements and complete three courses (9 hours) with a grade of C or higher in each course within the desired focus area(s). To declare a focus area, contact your advisor. Focus areas available to computer science majors include:
Complete at least one minor or a second major.
The business minor for Raikes is required for computer science majors in the Raikes School.
A grade of C or above is required for all courses in the major and minor, excluding ancillary courses.
Students in the computer science program must take CSCE 10 with the grading option Pass/No Pass. In addition to the University of NebraskaLincoln's requirements regarding Pass/No Pass grading, the following restrictions apply to courses taken with the Pass/No Pass option:
Thirty (30) of the 120 credit hours must be in courses numbered at the 300 or 400 level. Of those 30 hours, 15 credit hours must be completed in residence at the University of NebraskaLincoln. Thirteen (13) hours of the CSCE courses must be at the 400 level for students not completing the Raikes School version of the major.
Students must complete at least 30 of the 120 total hours for their degree at the University of NebraskaLincoln. Students must complete at least half of their major coursework, including 6 credit hours at the 300 or 400 level in their major, and 15 of the 30 credit hours required at the 300 or 400 level in residence. Credit earned during education abroad may be used toward the residency requirement only if students register through the University of NebraskaLincoln.
Students majoring in computer science may not declare a minor in informatics or software development.
Eighteen (18) hours of computer science courses as follows.
Eighteen (18) hours of computer science courses, including:
A grade of C or above is required for all courses in the major and minor, excluding ancillary courses.
Up to 3 hours of Pass/No Pass CSCE coursework may be counted toward the minor.
Students minoring in computer science may not declare a minor in informatics or software development. The computer science minor is not available to students majoring in computer engineering or software engineering.
The following represents a sample of the internships, jobs and graduate school programs that current students and recent graduates have reported.
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