How does an identified need lead to a functional technical solution? How can creativity transform complex problems into captivating,real products? The answers can be found in the educational preparation of the STEM professionals who use their expertise to launch widely-used apps, engineer self-driving cars, and innovate better practices for scientific research, health systems, transportation, banking, and communications.

STEM graduates are at the forefront of innovation and change, bettering society with their discoveries. After all, the future of the world and its economies relies heavily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics making professionals in the field well-deserving of the hefty salaries and wide variety of employment opportunities they command.

Becoming a STEM professional requires the right combination of education and experience. Now, envision an ideal educational institution that offers 24/7 access to state-of-the-art facilities, opportunities to gain industry experience, early exposure to project-based learning, individualised guidance from experts in small classrooms, and ample resources for post-graduation support.

At Grand Valley State University (GVSU) theres no need to imagine such a combination of resources for STEM students. The GVSU Seymour & Esther Padnos College of Engineering and Computing (PCEC) boasts all these offerings and more.

Outstanding outcomes are common at the School of Computer and Information Systems. Source: Grand Valley State University

PCEC is home to a variety of undergraduate and graduate STEM programmes that develop world-changing, technical experts. PCEC graduates have established meaningful careers creating their own businesses, developing high-impact technologies, and leading multinational corporations.

Thomas Rudd is a perfect example of the successes experienced by PCEC graduates. After completing his BS in Information Systems, he spent 18 months on a project that improved data storage. His customers ended up being over 200,000 of Fords employees around the world. He even gave the multinationals CEO a demo. Rudds next destination was Fords Cybersecurity Engineering team where he spent 10 months working on their Security Information & Event Management system. Today, he is thriving in Seattle, Washington as a Cloud Support Engineer in Amazons Intelligence Initiative Programme. Thomas credits his successes to his Grand Valley education which provided him with IT fundamentals and specialised knowledge in a range of areas.

Outcomes like these are common for those who apply their passions in the GVSU School of Computer and Information Systems. Here, undergraduate majors include Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, Information Technology, and several minors that complete the experience. Those interested in graduate studies could choose to pursue Applied Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, or Data Science and Analytics.

For those looking to build the future, the GVSU School of Engineering provides an excellent launch pad. Undergraduates can opt to form connections between science, medical knowledge, mathematics and creativity by majoring in Biomedical Engineering; they could integrate electrical engineering with computer science to analyse and solve problems with Computer Engineering; or they could develop a wide range of electrical and electronic technologies through Electrical Engineering.

The college also hosts programmes in Interdisciplinary Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; as well as Product Design and Manufacturing Engineering (one of only a few such programs in the world). Those with a solid foundation could advance their career with a Master of Science in Engineering.

Those who wish to form connections between science, medical knowledge, mathematics and creativity can do so by majoring in Biomedical Engineering. Source: Grand Valley State University

If youre on a quest to begin an impactful career managing workplace health and safety, the college offers a BS in Occupational Safety and Health Management. This bachelors degree provides real-world experiences and countless opportunities to build a strong professional network though student organisations and/or conferences.

PCEC is committed to preparing highly qualified industry professionals. Individuals who wish to gain a competitive edge in their fields can do so with one of five Professional Science Masters Degree programmes: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Cell and Molecular Biology, Data Science and Analytics, or Health Informatics and Bioinformatics.

Each path offers flexible class schedules and evening meetings which make it all the more accessible for students with existing responsibilities. The best part? Most end up sharing their newfound knowledge in reputable companies such as Priority Health, VanAndel Research Institute, Meijer, Spectrum Health, Integrated DNA Technologies, Cisco Systems, and NxGen MDx.

Regardless of your choice, every PCEC programme offers access to industry internships or co-op experiences. In fact, theyre integrated into all programmes at the undergraduate level. Since these are paid positions, those enrolled rack up a stellar ROI early on. Most opportunities even result in job offers contributing to the colleges nearly 100% employment upon graduation rate. Dont just take our word for it; listen to these PCEC students share their perspectives about Grand Valley State University.

STEM experts are in high demand in the United States and around the world. They are needed in every industry. In fact, the top 20 employers of PCEC graduates are in 19 different industries! According to the US Bureau of Labour and Statistics, employment in STEM occupations is projected to grow 8.8% by 2028, and healthcare-related occupations, such as Biomedical Engineering, Occupational Safety and Health Management, and Health Informatics, are projected to grow even more. Meanwhile, non-STEM occupations will only grow by 5%.

Whats more, the STEM field is becoming increasingly diverse. According to data from the US Census Bureau, more women are being represented in the field. In 1970, the US only recorded a mere 8% of female STEM workers the number rose to 27% in 2019.

To fast-track to your dream STEM career in West Michigan a state known for its beautiful great lakes, automotive innovations, and multinational corporation headquarters and beyond, apply to the GVSU Padnos College of Engineering and Computing here.

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The Turing Award, dubbed the Nobel Prize of computing, is bestowed upon computer scientists who have demonstrated long-lasting impact and trend-setting technical achievements in computing, and is generally considered a lifetime achievement award. As such, the announcement of the award is a moment of celebration for the whole community. This was different for the 2020 award, announced in March 2021 by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to be shared between Alfred Aho of Columbia University and Jeffrey Ullman of Stanford University.

Within hours of the awards announcement, social media was flooded with concerns by members of the computer science community over the selection. They recognized Jeffrey Ullman as an outspoken opponent of diversity, equity and inclusion over the past decades, arguing that the selection violates ACMs own commitment to diversity and inclusion, listed as one of the four core values of the organization, as well as its declared mission of promoting the highest professional and ethical standards.

The significance of the social and ethical implications of the Turing Award is heightened by the fact that it commemorates the legacy of Alan Turing, who pioneered modern computer science, helped end World War II and faced a great deal of discrimination in his tragic life before dying by suicide. Posthumously, he received an apology from the British Prime Minister and a royal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II.

Soon, many congratulatory notes to Ullman were taken back. Some of the leading figures in the community, including Shafi Goldwasser (past Turing Award laureate and member of the Turing Award committee) expressed concerns in solidarity with the victims of Ullmans discriminatory behavior, joined by others including the Turing Award committee Chair Olga Sorkine-Hornung and Yann LeCun, a recent laureate of the award. Within days, an open letter condemning the selection emerged that quickly amassed over a thousand signatures, including by such influential scientists as fellows of ACM, MacArthur fellows and laureates of the Nevanlinna Prize, Abel Prize and Turing Award itself.

Like many of my peers, I learned much of computer science from Aho and Ullmans excellent textbooks. In fact, the educational contributions of the duo in the form of their textbooks has been included in their award citation. Senior undergraduates at Sharif University in Iran, where I studied, often apply to graduate programs abroad. For us, the leaders in computing were the names on our textbooks, such as Knuth, Sipser, Hopcroft, Aho and Ullman. We thought of them as influential educators, people to look up to and people to seek advice from. Some of us contacted Ullman, and he actually did respond. His words were, however, nothing about graduate school or computer science. They were rants of hate and bigotry against Iranians.

In the mid 2000s, tired of having to respond to emails from Iranians every few weeks, Ullman set up his infamous Answers to All Questions Iranian webpage, which he maintained until late 2020. In this page, he records his views against Iranians and other groups, such as Native Americans. Despite this, he continued to correspond with Iranian students. One such correspondence (as detailed in the above-mentioned open letter) was made public in 2011, causing public outrage and a complaint to Stanford by the National Iranian American Council. In response, according to The Stanford Daily, Stanford dismissed the allegations, saying that there is no plan to discipline Ullman for his statements. In contrast, in 2003, the University of Oxford suspended a professor for sending one email of such nature to a student.

Ullman maintains that Iranian students who are in Iran or have grown up in Iran past the 1979 revolution should not be educated in the US and calls for a blanket ban on admitting them to US schools. He has set a personal policy of wanting nothing to do with them: He wont work with them and he wont advise them, solely based on their national origin. He has also expressed a similar assertion regarding Chinese students, in a Google+ post in 2015 as well as in private correspondence as recently as 2020, though it is unclear if he has gone as far as declaring a ban on that group.

There is no question that Ullman is entitled to his opinions. However, when he turns those opinions to actions and policies against students, a red line has been crossed. At Stanford, national or ethnic origin is an explicitly stated protected category in the universitys non-discrimination policy. Moreover, Stanfords commitment to diversity and inclusion, as stated in 2019, asserts to support all members of the community independent of cultural background, ethnicity, gender identity, or political affiliation. Stanfords Core Policy Statements (Section 4.2.2) considers exclusions for facultys conduct directly related to academic values in reference to the extent of their academic freedom.

Ullman and Stanford argue that he has no involvement in admissions. However, an outspoken and influential senior faculty (who has also chaired the department) can affect a departments climate as a whole. Moreover, in graduate admissions in nearly every US school, despite the existence of an admissions committee, selection is directly influenced by individual faculty members. As a crude heuristic, I looked over the list of 1,074 Ph.D. theses, as of this writing, done at Stanford Computer Science. Among the authors, I notice only 6 Iranian names, only one of whom has done an undergraduate degree in Iran. In contrast, Stanford Electrical Engineering lists 4,731 theses, and among those, I can identify about 176 Iranian names (the contrast gets sharper in recent decades). Of course, that might not prove anything for such a complex issue, but at least signifies a telling gap.

Regardless, for a faculty member to set a unilateral policy of discriminating against a group of students is already an action, one that goes against academic values that they have the duty to uphold. Furthermore, just being subject to Ullmans behavior could have been enough to deter young students from graduate studies altogether. Several computer scientists from Iran are now on the faculty at Stanford. The late Maryam Mirzakhani, a Stanford professor and the only woman so far to be awarded the Fields medal, completed her undergraduate studies in Iran. In Ullmans view, she should have been excluded.

Ullmans controversy is not about freedom of speech, nor politics. It is a purely academic one. It is not about separating the artist from the art. It is about the art itself. At a time when the computing community is struggling to broaden participation, Ullmans egregious actions are a disservice that goes against his own educational contributions for which he received a Turing Award. Factoring this into his overall academic impact, ACMs selection does not seem clear-cut anymore.

ACM first reacted to the controversy by tweeting that Ullmans statements do not reflect the views of ACM. In response to the open letter, ACM released a statement providing answers to precisely the two questions asked on the letter. Fourteen ACM Special Interest Groups released a separate statement expressing commitments to diversity and inclusivity. In summary, ACMs response is that the issue was missed since no complaint against Ullman had been on file with ACM, and that in future ACM will require nomination letters to indicate whether they are aware of any behavior inconsistent with ACM values. This is while ACM could have easily discovered the behavior by a simple web search, and of course nominators would have a conflict of interest to disclose any red flags.

While ACMs response is a positive step and promises long overdue reforms, it is far from sufficient. As time is now judging Stanfords dismissive reaction in 2011, which is partly responsible for todays controversy, it will judge any action ACM takes today. Ullman has had ample opportunity over the years to acknowledge harm and correct his behavior. Unfortunately, his April 2021 interview with San Jose Inside suggests otherwise, concluding that the conversation thus far hasnt swayed the professor.

I hope that, at the very least, ACM takes genuine and measurable steps to prove commitment to its stated values by impactful action and not just words. ACM should, foremost, recognize the damage done to the computing community and directly empathize with the victims of Ullmans actions, rather than strategizing to minimize the impact on the organization. Since Ullmans behavior is directly entangled with the educational impacts that contributed to the award, if ACM does not indeed share his views, the award citation and its public record should at least be amended with a disclaimer to reflect that. ACM should think of more effective reforms such as publicly announcing the nominees in advance and establishing clear mechanisms for rescinding awards in rare cases when relevant misconduct is discovered after the fact.

It is important to ensure that a clear precedent is set today by ACM that would not give a free pass to any future abusers of academic freedom. The computing community, which ACM aims to represent globally (as an international organization), needs to establish equal opportunity for everyone and ACMs selection this year has diminished much of the hard-earned progress. ACM needs to do better and bring back trust and hope to the community.

Mahdi Cheraghchi is a theoretical computer scientist and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of MichiganAnn Arbor. He is a senior member of ACM and IEEE.

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Clara is a healthcare provider who works with Black communities in Boston. Clad in a magenta blouse and a striped head scarf, she greets her patients by name and makes small talk before delving into questions about their diet and exercise. A small, framed cross is visible on the office wall behind hershes Christian herself and works predominantly with Black parishes around the city.

Clara isnt actually a person, though. Shes an animated virtual nurse developed by Timothy Bickmore, a computer science professor at Northeastern. Clara cant take vital signs or treat wounds, but she can make suggestions and help patients stay on track when it comes to general wellness matters, such as diet, exercise, and mental health.

Timothy Bickmore, a professor of computer sciences at Northeastern, received an NIH grant for his project to promote the COVID-19 vaccine among Black communities in Boston. Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University

Now, as COVID-19 vaccines become more accessible in Massachusetts, Clara will have a new jobto provide information about the vaccine to Black Bostonians, many of whom are distrustful of the vaccine, not least because of a long history in the United States of medical abuse and unethical clinical trials involving Black participants.

Theres a mistrust of the medical establishment based on generations of now-documented mistreatment of African Americans by doctors and the healthcare system in the United States, says David Wright, executive director of the The Black Ministerial Alliance of Greater Boston, a Christian community organization Bickmore partners with.

These vaccines were also created under an administration known for not telling the truth and using racist and xenophobic language, Wright says. Unsurprisingly, theres a mistrust of anything made under that administration.

For the past few years, Bickmore has worked with the alliance to promote spiritual and physical health throughout almost 30 Black parishes using his animated healthcare program. The vaccine project will be a continuation of this partnership.

We hope to provide information about where people can get vaccinated, and what they can expect, says Bickmore. We already have a relationship with the community, and they asked if we could help promote COVID-19 vaccines.

With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Bickmore and his team will launch the vaccine program within the next two months. New vaccine-related phrases will be added to Claras wordbank, and participants will be able to ask questions about the vaccine from the comfort of their own homes.

Even for individuals who dont have high computer literacy, the program is still easy to use, he says. Weve gotten great feedback. It seems to be working, and most people like it. Most of the time, theyre able to suspend their disbelief and really engage with the program.

Limited access to smartphones or computers could be an issue for some seniors, but overall, Wright doesnt think the technology aspect of the program will pose too much of a problem.

Id say a significant number of seniors regularly use smartphones, Wright says. I suspect the application will catch on as more and more people use it for church and community activities.

Bickmore and his team go to great lengths to tailor the program to the demographic of people they hope to help, in this case, Black Christians living in Boston. To build rapport, Clara incorporates Bible stories and spiritual language into the sessions.

The same way any good doctor would build trust with a patient, Clara shares personal information about herself with her patients and remembers things about their lives in order to build a social connection, Bickmore says.

The program is intended to last four years. In the coming years, if promoting the COVID-19 vaccine becomes a less-pressing issue, the team will also work on promoting influenza vaccines, another inoculation many Black people in the U.S. are hesitant to receive.

If you look at the literature, the most successful way to gain a patients trust is through face-to-face conversation, says Bickmore. Our animated counselor simulates just that, and shes actually particularly good at it.

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Newswise A research team at the NYU Center for Cyber Security (CCS) at NYU Tandon are participating in a major initiative in collaboration with data security company Duality supported by a $14 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design a revolutionary new microchip (codenamed Trebuchet). The microprocessor, to be designed by CCS researchers Mihalis Maniatakos, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Brandon Reagen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science and engineering, will accelerate and enable practical applications of an emerging type of encryption, called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

Typically, data encryption protects data in transit: its locked in an encrypted container for non-secure transit, then unlocked by the other party for analysis. But outsourcing to a third-party is inherently insecure. FHE is an advanced cryptographic technique, widely considered the holy grail of encryption, that enables multiple users to process encrypted data while the data or models remain encrypted, preserving data privacy throughout the analytics process.

The hardware Maniatakos and Reagen are developing as part of the 3.5 year project is of particular value to AI systems because it allows data scientists to train some of the most advanced machine learning (ML) models on encrypted data, enabling organizations to leverage greater amounts of diverse sensitive data for training.

With increased privacy concerns and tightening data protection regulations, organizations acrossindustries are looking for secure computing methods to train and execute AI models without exposing sensitive or confidential data, said Maniatakos.

FHE also secures outsourcing to a third party for processing, without that entity being able to unlock that data. One example of secure data outsourcing is the use of privacy-preserving machine learning, critical for such applications as personal DNA sequencing to scan for predisposition to some diseases.

FHE lets you encrypt your genome, send it to a service that predicts your predisposition to diseases, and you get the result back and decrypt it. The outsourced service cannot see your genome and cannot use it against you in any way, said Maniatakos.

Over the course of the project, Reagen will focus on hardware architecture, and Maniatakos the logic units for a feature called Large Arithmetic Word Sizes (LAWS) which can be used to accelerate FHE to practical speeds.

The Hardware to handle the numbers

The underlying mathematics behind FHE, developed in 2009, involve operations on polynomials of very high degrees (in the order of thousands) and with very big coefficients, requiring resource- and time-consuming computation. The solution lies in hardware that can natively process these very big numbers. Reagen, a computer architect who designs chips that can do very specific things to make them run much faster than general purpose hardware, is tasked with laying the groundwork for this chip.

To enable homomorphic encryption, my job is to take the building blocks of this unit not just memory, but a lot of parallel functionality as well as the LAWS units Mihalis is designing and customize, organize and allocate them on chip for a given area to maximize performance, which, at the end of the day, is the fundamental inhibitor of this encryption process. In fact, if performance were not an issue, everyone would be using FHE for the simple reason that you would never have to decrypt data. My job is to reclaim that performance.

Function-specific hardware (think of a graphics card, for example, or processing units designed for machine learning operations) is nothing new. For FHE, the key is in the bits a computer uses to represent numbers for the rapid calculations it performs. A typical processors architecture, organized for 32 bit operations, would take far too long and use too many resources to process the huge numbers required for FHE, explained Maniatakos.

You could do it, but it would be incredibly slow. It would be six orders of magnitude slower than unencrypted computation. Our task is to bring down the slowdown to maximum one order of magnitude.

At 32 bits, he explained, the largest number a chip can process is two to the power of 32 four billion which is fine for most applications. The problem is that with FHE the numbers processed are much bigger than 32 bits, in the order of thousands of bits and cant be represented natively, so computer has to split these numbers up, which incurs a lots of overhead.

Imagine we have a list of numbers, say one through 10, explained Reagen. Lets say that we first encrypt this data in such a way that this very small list of numbers turns into two lists where each element is 10 to 100 times as big. And suddenly, right off the bat, you increase the number size by a factor of 20 to 200. Now if you want to execute, say, multiplication functions on this bloated data you are not just going to be doing multiplication, you have to do many other functions that transform representations of the data. These meta-functions, in fact, take longer to run than the actual multiplication.

He added that designing customizations such as parallel hardware helps vastly increase computation speed by allowing multiple processes to happen at once at maximum throughput. Working as a team is important.

The key challenge in designing effective architectures is how to balance all of these processes and keep them fed with data, and collaboration with someone designing LAWS for the functional hardware units is critical to making sure performance is not left on the table.

The CCS team, in 2018, was actually the first to develop an early version of a homomorphic encryption chip that accelerated partial HE, allowing expression of a limited set of algorithms. This earlier version, making CCS the first to create a homomorphic encryption ASIC accelerator, allowed such applications as vote aggregation, and smart grid data applications.

For this project, the NYU Tandon team, after designing the chip, will hand the baton to collaborators at the University of Southern CaliforniaInformation Sciences Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, SpiralGen Inc.,Drexel University, and TwoSix Labs Inc. for integration, prototyping, fabrication and other processes.

The project at NYU Tandon will also fund four graduate students: Deepraj Soni, under the guidance of CCS Director Ramesh Karri; Homer Gamil, a research assistant under Maniatakos, who begins his Ph.D. work at NYU Tandon in September; and Karthik Garimella and Benjamin Heyman, doctoral and masters students, respectively, under Reagens guidance.

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Harrisburg, PA - Continuing the commitment to STEM education and career advancement, Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) Acting Secretary Noe Ortega participated in the Remake Learning Days Across America (RLDAA) Festival, designed to provide students in kindergarten through high school with learning experiences to build their employability skills and prepare them for future careers. Over the course of eleven days, more than 600 events will take place in-person and virtually across the commonwealth. Preparing students for in-demand careers, especially in the growing fields of science and technology, is a priority for the Wolf Administration.

With event themesranging from planets to pixels to paleontology to pig farms and more, students across the commonwealth have a variety of unique opportunitiesto explore STEAM during Remake Learning Days, said Acting Secretary of Education Noe Ortega. This annual festival offers learning experiences that will help students strengthen their skillsets and prepare them for dynamic careers of the future.

Acting Secretary Ortega joined students virtually and offered remarks for the Ask the Patent Agent - PPG Scientist Series event. During the event, middle and high school students also heard from PPG Patent Agent Linda Anderson on her role as a patent agent, the importance of patents, and what skills are necessary for the career.

The RLDAA Festival is May 6-16 and focuses on providing numerous learning activities where students can express their creativity, increase their collaboration and critical thinking skills, and create connections between their educational experiences and their futures. PDEs Career Ready PA program has collaborated with organizers of this years RLDAA Festival to help elevate and increase awareness around employability skills and career readiness. This collaboration includes the Career Ready PA Backpack challenge, which provides students with opportunities to earn badges submit an artifact for their career portfolio. Remake Learning is a stakeholder in the Career Ready PA Coalition supported by the 10 Career Ready PA regional liaisons.

The Career Ready PA Backpack Challenge creates opportunities for students to obtain artifacts for their career portfolios by participating in Remake Learning Days events in school or at home. The Challenge connects learners to free, live community events offering hands-on learning opportunities that help build employability skills, such as collaboration, critical thinking, and teamwork, said PDEs Special Consultant to the Secretary for Career Readiness, Dr. Laura Fridirici. Students document their meaningful engagement in these events, which could include meeting a scientist or making their own invention, as they explore and learn more about the skills needed for a variety of careers.Students who participate earn a Career Ready PA Backpack Challenge digital badge. PDE will track participation in these events, and when a school earns 100 badges, theyll receive a banner recognizing this accomplishment.

This year, many of the programs offered to students are virtual, which creates and expands access opportunities for students while maintaining health and safety guidelines. Students can participate in the RLDAA events in their classrooms or individually at home. Pennsylvanias seven PBS stations have also joined the festival to provide media support, assist with promotions, increase access, and offer events.

The pursuit of artifacts is student-driven, very active and inquiry-based, and offer a deeper reflection on the skill sets needed in todays workforce which helps students understand how their academic learning is preparing them for adult life, said Remake Learning Director Tyler Samstag. Remake Learning Days allow organizations to open their doors so that young people can go into that environment and engage with people who use STEM skills and practice hands-on creating for a living.

For more information on Remake Learning Days Across America, visit their website.

The importance of STEM education has been strongly implemented in the Wolf Administration.

For Pennsylvania to perform as one of the nations leaders in STEM education, the Wolf Administration has dedicated several resources to the expansion. Recently, Governor Tom Wolf announced $10.8 million in PAsmart Advancing Grants to expand access to computer science and STEM education for Pennsylvania learners. Combined with PAsmart Targeted Grants announced in 2020, the Wolf administration has awarded nearly $20 million to bolster STEM and computer science (CS) in schools during the 2020-21 school year. Over the last three years, the Wolf Administration awarded 453 PAsmart grants to expand computer science classes and teacher training at over 765 schools across the commonwealth.

For more information about Pennsylvanias education policies and programs, please visit the Department of Educations website at http://www.education.pa.gov or follow PDE on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

MEDIA CONTACT: Kendall Alexander, kenalexand@pa.gov

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Acting Secretary Joins Students, Teachers Across the State for Innovative Learning, Workforce Readiness Festival - Pennsylvania Pressroom