Category Archives: Computer Science

West End Building Earns Top Sustainability Certification – Dartmouth News

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The Class of 1982 Engineering and Computer Science Center was recently awarded a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinum certification, the U.S. Green Building Councils highest designation for sustainable design.

LEED is the internationally recognized benchmark for eco-friendly building design, construction and operation. The Green Building Council evaluates water usage, energy sources and consumption, indoor air quality, and numerous other sustainability factors to determine whether a building deserves the certification.

The recognition is a welcome validation of our efforts to prioritize sustainability and energy efficiency on campus as we work toward a low-carbon future, saysJosh Keniston, vice president ofcampus services.

The expansive 160,000-square-foot Class of 82 ECSC building, which houses the Thayer School of Engineering, the Department of Computer Science, and the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship,opened its doors to faculty, researchers, and students last spring.

The building achieved platinum certification by meeting rigorous standards for performance, including a 35% reduction of water usage and 55% reduction of energy usage compared to a conventional construction project.

The Class of 1982 Engineering and Computer Science Center opened last spring in the West End of campus and has won recognition for its sustainability features, including solar power. (Photo by Eli Burakian 00)

Designed with a high-insulation, energy-efficient envelope, the building encloses a mix of classrooms, research and teaching labs, and an expansive central atrium that is both naturally skylit and ventilated.

High-performance heat recovery, reduced lighting power, and cascading ventilation are among the numerous energy conservation measures employed. A solar panel array on the roof will supplement the buildings energy needs. The project also recycled 95% of the construction waste.

This is exciting for Dartmouth as this certification serves as real confirmation that we are designing and constructing energy-efficient buildings aligned with our sustainability goals, saysPatrick OHern, senior director of project management services.

The ECSC is the second LEED Platinum building at Dartmouth, afterthe Class of 1978 Life Science Center, which earned the designation in March 2012. The McLaughlin Cluster Residence Halls, the Fahey-McLane Residence Hall, and theBlack Family Visual Arts Centerare LEED Gold certified, while the Floren Varsity House and Kemeny Hall and Haldeman Center were granted LEED Silver status.

The Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society, Dartmouth Hall, and the current renovations to the Andres and Zimmerman residence halls are currently awaiting certification.

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West End Building Earns Top Sustainability Certification - Dartmouth News

WVU Today | Top WVU seniors named, eight honored with 2023 … – WVU Today

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A four-year Army ROTC National Scholar beginning medical school in the fall, a Fulbright Scholar eager to work as a teaching assistant in Bulgaria and an aspiring teacher who has reached out across the state to help combat stereotypes about Appalachian dialects are among the graduating seniors receiving the Order of Augusta, the most prestigious West Virginia University student award.

The eight students exemplify academic excellence and a passion for helping others, and are poised to take the next steps toward becoming the new generation of physicians, engineers, writers, teachers and advocates focused on addressing health care and educational disparities and finding innovative solutions to global challenges.

The WVU Order of Augusta and Outstanding Senior award recipients represent the best and brightest of graduating seniors at the University, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Maryanne Reed said. Each of these students is exemplary and has made a positive impact through academic excellence, leadership and service. They will undoubtedly be forces to be reckoned with, as they lead change in their local communities and the world.

All the 2023 Order of Augusta scholars are members of the WVU Honors College.

Each year, I continue to be awed by the momentous contributions our students make, both inside and outside of the classroom, Dean of Students Corey Farrissaid. As the top 1% of their graduating class, these students have made an everlasting impact on the quality of student life at WVU. I look forward to seeing what their futures hold and have no doubt we will continue to see great things from these outstanding graduates.

The honorees, who are among 52 students named WVU Foundation Outstanding Seniors, will be recognized at a drop-in event from 12:30-4:30 p.m. Friday, May 12, in the Betty Boyd Lounge of Elizabeth Moore Hall.

Lillian Bischof from Wheeling will graduate with dual degrees in chemical engineering and finance. She has maintained a 4.0 grade point average while conducting undergraduate research on clean energy solutions and serving in leadership roles to help empower women in business and foster STEM interest in young girls.

CHS teacher named National Computer Science Teacher of the Year – Citrus County Chronicle

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Our county certainly has much to be proud of in the accomplishments of the teachers, staff and administrators of our Citrus County School System. The current beacon of educational excellence is Citrus High Schools teacher Jerome Swiatek. Earlier this month, he was chosen over 2,800 teachers nationwide to be recognized as the Project Lead the Way 2022-23 National Computer Science Teacher of the Year.

Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is a national nonprofit organization that works with US students at all grade levels in the areas of science, engineering and biomedical science. Each year PLTW recognizes teachers who inspire, engage and empower their students.

Mr. Swiatek has been teaching at Citrus High School for 13 years. He was a founder of the CHS Academy of Computer Science and served as the first science teacher for the program. Since its beginning in 2017, the program has grown from 40 students to more than 200 students.

Get more from the Citrus County Chronicle

During the recognition ceremony at Citrus High, the president of PLTW celebrated Mr. Swiateks accomplishments with his students, noting his leadership of his students in taking classroom learning into the outside world. The students who were present at the ceremony spoke of his impact on them. They recognized his passion for teaching and the fact that he cares about their futures.

Mr. Swiatek is the latest in an extensive list of teachers, staff and administrators from Citrus County who have been recognized at the state and national levels for excellence in working with our students.

Crystal River High School teacher Danielle Doherty-Koch received the 2021-22 Kern Teacher of the Year Award from PLTW for empowering student experiences and transforming teaching in biomedical science.

Our Assistant Superintendent Scott Hebert was selected as the Florida Teacher of the Year in 1999. Since then, our county has had several finalists for the Florida Teacher of the Year recognition.

In 2020, Citrus Springs Middle Schools Althea Council was named the Florida School Related Employee of the year. Additionally, Citrus has recently had five finalists in this category.

Superintendent Sandra Sam Himmel was selected as the Florida Superintendent of the Year in 2020 by the Florida Association of District School Superintendents.

These are but a few of the fine individuals that we have working with our students in Citrus County schools. The employees of our school system make a positive difference each and every day in the lives of our children.

The mission statement of the Citrus County School District is: Where learning is the expectation and caring is the commitment. It is clear that our School District and its employees take this mission very seriously each and every day as they educate our students to be successful citizens.

Congratulations to Jerome Swiatek on his recognition as National Computer Science Teacher of the Year by PLTW. You have made our county proud.

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CHS teacher named National Computer Science Teacher of the Year - Citrus County Chronicle

The role of complexity for digital twins of cities – Nature.com

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26 Students Win First Place in Creative Activities and Research … – CSUF News

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Biological science major Samantha Hubbard won a first-place award for her research focusing on desert tortoises.

Studying the impacts of climate change on desert tortoises. Smart-home technologies for the formerly homeless. Helping parents cope with their childs acute lymphocytic leukemia steroid chemotherapy.

These are some of the topics of winning student presentations in Cal State Fullertons Student Creative Activities and Research Day competition.

The spring event showcased 51 poster presentations, featuring individual and team presenters from across disciplines. Of these posters, 39 were led by undergraduate student presenters and 12 by graduate student presenters.

It was the first time the competition was held in person since the 2020 pandemic. More than 130 students and faculty members attended the conference-style format, held during the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects 2023 Research Week.

Student Creative Activities and Research Day is a unique experience for undergraduate and graduate students to be part of the larger scientific and creative community, said Archana McEligot, professor of public health and director of CSUFs Undergraduate Research Opportunity Center. Student participation in research is a transformative experience and has far-reaching beneficial impacts for academic and professional development.

Individual and team presenters from all eight colleges were awarded first-place awards, with multiple ties in two colleges.

First-place winners, all undergraduates unless otherwise noted, their majors, poster presentation titles and faculty mentors, are:

College of the Arts

Hunter Ivanjack, Jasmine Young-Lynch, Shima Roohani and Kimberly Ruiz, art, Bonding Over Boards. Faculty mentor: Mary Anna Pomonis, assistant professor of art

College of Business and Economics

Ryan Akhlaghi, business administration, The Mindset to Master ADHD: Exploring the Effect of Metacognitive Reflection Interventions on ADHD and ADHD Symptoms. Faculty mentor: Phoenix Van Wagoner, assistant professor of management

College of Communications

Nandini Bhakta, communicative disorders, Promoting Cultural Humility and Research Interest in Undergraduate Students Through Community Outreach Activities. Faculty mentor: Ying-Chiao Tsao, associate professor of communication sciences and disorders

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Eugene Pettiford, electrical engineering, Smart-Home Technologies in Permanent Supportive Housing for the Formerly Homeless. Faculty mentor: Kiran George, professor of computer engineering

Anthony Massis, mechanical engineering, Wall Modeled Large Eddy Simulation for Automotive Aerodynamics. Faculty mentor: Salvador Mayoral, associate professor of mechanical engineering

Katherine Chen, Nolan Delligata, Alejandro Ramos, Stephanie Pocci and Ceasar Gutierrez, computer science, OpenDoors. Faculty mentors: Jin Woo Lee, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Paul Salvador Inventado, assistant professor of computer science

College of Education

Ainaria Johnson, special education graduate student, What Would They Want to Say If They Could? Using Aided Language Input to Increase the Expressive Communication of a Pre-Symbolic Preschool Child With Down Syndrome. Faculty mentor: Janice Myck-Wayne, professor of special education

College of Health and Human Development

Rosie Guillen, public health graduate student, Roid: Helping Parents Cope Through Their Childs ALL (acute lymphocytic leukemia) Steroid Chemotherapy. Faculty mentor: Jasmeet Gill, associate professor of public health

College of Humanities and Social Science

Zahra Tahmasebi, psychology graduate student, Moral Wrongness of Accidental Harm. Faculty mentor: Jessie Peissig, chair and professor of psychology

College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

Daisy Tarin and Jade Omandam, biological science, Heterologous Expression of a MopA-like Manganese Oxidizing Protein From Roseobacter sp. Azwk-3b. Faculty mentor: Hope Johnson, professor of biological science

Samantha Hubbard, biological science, Investigating Species Interactions With Desert Tortoise Burrows at Boyd Deep Canyon UC Reserve. Faculty mentor: William Bill Hoese, professor of biological science

Abigail Anastasi, biochemistry, Understanding the Role of Phosphorylation in the Unstructured Regions of Polypyrimidine Tract Binding Protein 2. Faculty mentor: Niroshika Keppetipola, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry

Fernando Bustos, Carolynn Cao, Michael Filice, Cedar Hofstetter, Olga Luna Flores and Chris Quinonez, mathematics, The Teaching Equity-Minded and Active Mathematics Tool (The TEAM Tool). Faculty mentor: Alison Marzocchi, associate professor of mathematics

Can AI be regulated? | On Point – WBUR News

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Artificial intelligence systems are permeating into everyday life faster than ever before.

"The AI systems that are currently being developed and the ones that have been released recently represent a type of technology that is intrinsically very difficult to understand and very difficult to guarantee that its going to behave in a safe way," Stuart Russell says.

That's why thousands of researchers who develop AI recently wrote an open letter pleading for help regulating the very technology they're creating.

Today, On Point: Can AI be regulated?

Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at University of California at Berkeley. His textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is the leading AI textbook around the world. He co-signed the Future of Life Institute letter titled Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter."

Peter Stone, professor of computer science and director of robotics at the University of Texas at Austin. Executive director of Sony AI America. Hes the standing committee chair of the 100 year study on AI. He co-signed the Future of Life Institute letter titled Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter."

Louis Rosenberg, CEO and Chief Scientist of Unanimous AI.

Laura Grego, senior scientist and the research director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The atomic bomb. First detonated at the Trinity Test site in New Mexico, on July 16, 1954.

Less than a month after the Trinity test, President Harry Truman authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

More than 200,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Cold War and threats of mutually assured destruction soon followed.

Though atomic weapons were developed in wartime the technologys developers were not in lockstep about its use.

Two months before the U.S. bombed Japan, and a month before the Trinity test, an influential group of scientists wrote a letter to Truman, warning the president of what the country was creating.

LAURA GREGO: The Franck report was one instance of a semi-regular drumbeat by nuclear scientists to try to raise visibility about the dangers of these weapons.

CHAKRABARTI: Laura Grego is senior scientist and research director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Franck report named after James Franck, the Nobel prize-winning scientist who chaired the committee that wrote it, was sent to President Truman in June of 1945.

GREGO: The Franck report came out of the group at University of Chicago whose technical job in the Manhattan Project was to develop the methods to produce plutonium for the American bombs. In 1945, they'd completed a lot of that work. In other parts of the Manhattan Project, they were still really busy completing the bomb work.

But a lot of that had been done and they had some time to sit back and consider the effects of the technology that they had produced. And a group of seven really eminent physicists and I think one was a biologist and one was chemist sat and thought through these ideas, and they produced this report called the Frank Report, which was warning that if the United States use the bomb on Japan, it would unleash a set of results that would be really bad.

The Franck report noted that by the summer of 1945, the war in Europe had ended. That changed the stakes, they believed, writing:

If the United States were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race for armaments and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.

CHAKRABARTI: In fact, even J. Robert Oppenheimer noted in 1945.

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: There seem to be two great views among scientists and no doubt would be among others if people knew about it. On the one hand, they hoped that this instrument would never be used in war, and therefore they hope that we would not start out by using it. On the other hand, and on the whole, we were inclined to think that if it was needed to put an end to the war and had a chance of so doing, we thought that was the right thing to do.

Laura Grego says the Franck report urged even more action:

We therefore feel it is our duty to urge that the political problems, arising from the mastering of nuclear power, be recognized in all their gravity, and that appropriate steps be taken for their study and the preparation of necessary decisions.

GREGO: We ended up at one point during the Cold War with more than 60,000 weapons, each of which were much larger than what were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even today, the U.S. is prepared to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize and upgrade its nuclear arsenal.

In 20 years, we'll have 100 years of the atomic bomb. And we're not close to controlling that. We are still organized around these technologies of mass destruction. So I do think have we been better able to control that right at the very beginning of the technology, we would be in such a better place today.

The Guardian: "AI has much to offer humanity. It could also wreak terrible harm. It must be controlled" "In case you have been somewhere else in the solar system, here is a brief AI news update. My apologies if it sounds like the opening paragraph of a bad science fiction novel."

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Can AI be regulated? | On Point - WBUR News

Engineers ‘grow’ atomically thin transistors on top of computer chips … – Science Daily

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Emerging AI applications, like chatbots that generate natural human language, demand denser, more powerful computer chips. But semiconductor chips are traditionally made with bulk materials, which are boxy 3D structures, so stacking multiple layers of transistors to create denser integrations is very difficult.

However, semiconductor transistors made from ultrathin 2D materials, each only about three atoms in thickness, could be stacked up to create more powerful chips. To this end, MIT researchers have now demonstrated a novel technology that can effectively and efficiently "grow" layers of 2D transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials directly on top of a fully fabricated silicon chip to enable denser integrations.

Growing 2D materials directly onto a silicon CMOS wafer has posed a major challenge because the process usually requires temperatures of about 600 degrees Celsius, while silicon transistors and circuits could break down when heated above 400 degrees. Now, the interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers has developed a low-temperature growth process that does not damage the chip. The technology allows 2D semiconductor transistors to be directly integrated on top of standard silicon circuits.

In the past, researchers have grown 2D materials elsewhere and then transferred them onto a chip or a wafer. This often causes imperfections that hamper the performance of the final devices and circuits. Also, transferring the material smoothly becomes extremely difficult at wafer-scale. By contrast, this new process grows a smooth, highly uniform layer across an entire 8-inch wafer.

The new technology is also able to significantly reduce the time it takes to grow these materials. While previous approaches required more than a day to grow a single layer of 2D materials, the new approach can grow a uniform layer of TMD material in less than an hour over entire 8-inch wafers.

Due to its rapid speed and high uniformity, the new technology enabled the researchers to successfully integrate a 2D material layer onto much larger surfaces than has been previously demonstrated. This makes their method better-suited for use in commercial applications, where wafers that are 8 inches or larger are key.

"Using 2D materials is a powerful way to increase the density of an integrated circuit. What we are doing is like constructing a multistory building. If you have only one floor, which is the conventional case, it won't hold many people. But with more floors, the building will hold more people that can enable amazing new things. Thanks to the heterogenous integration we are working on, we have silicon as the first floor and then we can have many floors of 2D materials directly integrated on top," says Jiadi Zhu, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student and co-lead author of a paper on this new technique.

Zhu wrote the paper with co-lead-author Ji-Hoon Park, an MIT postdoc; corresponding authors Jing Kong, professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and a member of the Research Laboratory for Electronics; and Toms Palacios, professor of EECS and director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL); as well as others at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Ericsson Research. The paper appears today in Nature Nanotechnology.

Slim materials with vast potential

The 2D material the researchers focused on, molybdenum disulfide, is flexible, transparent, and exhibits powerful electronic and photonic properties that make it ideal for a semiconductor transistor. It is composed of a one-atom layer of molybdenum sandwiched between two atoms of sulfide.

Growing thin films of molybdenum disulfide on a surface with good uniformity is often accomplished through a process known as metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Molybdenum hexacarbonyl and diethylene sulfur, two organic chemical compounds that contain molybdenum and sulfur atoms, vaporize and are heated inside the reaction chamber, where they "decompose" into smaller molecules. Then they link up through chemical reactions to form chains of molybdenum disulfide on a surface.

But decomposing these molybdenum and sulfur compounds, which are known as precursors, requires temperatures above 550 degrees Celsius, while silicon circuits start to degrade when temperatures surpass 400 degrees.

So, the researchers started by thinking outside the box -- they designed and built an entirely new furnace for the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition process.

The oven consists of two chambers, a low-temperature region in the front, where the silicon wafer is placed, and a high-temperature region in the back. Vaporized molybdenum and sulfur precursors are pumped into the furnace. The molybdenum stays in the low-temperature region, where the temperature is kept below 400 degrees Celsius -- hot enough to decompose the molybdenum precursor but not so hot that it damages the silicon chip.

The sulfur precursor flows through into the high-temperature region, where it decomposes. Then it flows back into the low-temperature region, where the chemical reaction to grow molybdenum disulfide on the surface of the wafer occurs.

"You can think about decomposition like making black pepper -- you have a whole peppercorn and you grind it into a powder form. So, we smash and grind the pepper in the high-temperature region, then the powder flows back into the low-temperature region," Zhu explains.

Faster growth and better uniformity

One problem with this process is that silicon circuits typically have aluminum or copper as a top layer so the chip can be connected to a package or carrier before it is mounted onto a printed circuit board. But sulfur causes these metals to sulfurize, the same way some metals rust when exposed to oxygen, which destroys their conductivity. The researchers prevented sulfurization by first depositing a very thin layer of passivation material on top of the chip. Then later they could open the passivation layer to make connections.

They also placed the silicon wafer into the low-temperature region of the furnace vertically, rather than horizontally. By placing it vertically, neither end is too close to the high-temperature region, so no part of the wafer is damaged by the heat. Plus, the molybdenum and sulfur gas molecules swirl around as they bump into the vertical chip, rather than flowing over a horizontal surface. This circulation effect improves the growth of molybdenum disulfide and leads to better material uniformity.

In addition to yielding a more uniform layer, their method was also much faster than other MOCVD processes. They could grow a layer in less than an hour, while typically the MOCVD growth process takes at least an entire day.

Using the state-of-the-art MIT.Nano facilities, they were able to demonstrate high material uniformity and quality across an 8-inch silicon wafer, which is especially important for industrial applications where bigger wafers are needed.

"By shortening the growth time, the process is much more efficient and could be more easily integrated into industrial fabrications. Plus, this is a silicon-compatible low-temperature process, which can be useful to push 2D materials further into the semiconductor industry," Zhu says.

In the future, the researchers want to fine-tune their technique and use it to grow many stacked layers of 2D transistors. In addition, they want to explore the use of the low-temperature growth process for flexible surfaces, like polymers, textiles, or even papers. This could enable the integration of semiconductors onto everyday objects like clothing or notebooks.

This work is partially funded by the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the National Science Foundation Center for Integrated Quantum Materials, Ericsson, MITRE, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The project also benefitted from the support of TSMC University Shuttle.

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Best and Brightest: Dedication to community and computer science – Colorado Springs Gazette

Written by admin on May 2, 2023 — Leave a Comment

For Air Academy High School senior Kaci McBrayer, community service both locally and nationwide are core passions.

McBrayer comes from an Air Force family. Her father, Brandon McBrayer, is still on active duty, and shes lived for over seven years in Japan, as well as in South Korea.

The exposure to different cultures has instilled in McBrayer a deep curiosity for life, but also served to broaden her worldview and appreciation for the different ways people make their way through the world.

Mathematics teacher John Thek of Yokota High School in Japan wrote that McBrayers experience living internationally has enriched her educational background exponentially.

During her years at Yokota High School, McBrayer eagerly participated in volunteer opportunities, including with the Junior Volunteer Program at her local hospital and in a virtual SAT math bootcamp program for US students.

McBrayer has accumulated over 200 hours of community service. Service is meaningful to me because it allows me to take a step back from my life and become immersed in the selfless assistance of others, McBrayer said. Getting to see my impact firsthand brings me a sense of fulfillment.

Recently, McBrayer volunteered with the Colorado Springs Fire Department, donating and installing fire and carbon-monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers in a local mobile home community. It was an experience that affected McBrayer deeply, both in the sad reality of the levels of poverty in her community, but also with the beautiful sense of increased safety she helped leave behind.

Outside of her obvious dedication to community, McBrayer is also a supremely talented student and an AP Scholar of Distinction with a GPA of 4.53. Thek, who has taught Mathematics since 1969, wrote that McBrayer is one of the strongest Mathematics students I have ever had the pleasure to teach.

McBrayer has been accepted to the US Air Force and US Naval Academies, but is waiting on a wavier for medical disqualification. Whether McBrayer attends a military academy or Auburn University, she decided long ago to seek a career in cybersecurity and computer science. She hopes to pursue the Department of Defenses Cyber Scholarship Program in college with the ultimate goal of joining a government agency like the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation or National Security Agency.

For all of her academic achievements, McBrayer also prides herself on her athletic abilities. But in 2021, after years of high-level play in soccer, she severely tore the ACL on her left knee and was faced with not only surgery but a months-long rehabilitation process. McBrayer who had never experienced a serious sports injury, said she panicked as the surgery approached.

Post-surgery and physical therapy brought their own challenges and mental blocks. McBrayer found herself too petrified to bend or even lift her leg. But with the support of her surgeon, sister, and family McBrayer made a brilliant recovery and within three months stood at the top of Mount Fuji at 12,388 feet for the second time having beat both her father and sister to the summit.

After a another six months of hard work, McBrayer was cleared to play soccer again just prior to the start of her junior year.

I felt the strongest I have ever been, McBrayer said. My performance significantly improved. I gained a new appreciated for my abilities I also supported my teammates with a renewed sense of compassion.

By her own standard, McBrayer said she finds satisfaction in mastering any skill and that she accomplishes the most when she is pushed past her limits, academically, in sports and in life. Tearing my ACL was one of the hardest obstacles I have overcome, physically and mentally, and I believe I am a better person for it, McBrayer said.

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Best and Brightest: Dedication to community and computer science - Colorado Springs Gazette

#NUforNE: Supporting the Tech Revolution | News – University of Nebraska Omaha

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About the #NUforNE Series: This article is part of the University of Nebraska's #NUforNE series. #NUforNE features students, faculty, staff and alumni from across the University who are making an impact on Nebraska.

A technology revolution is here. Across the nation, employers are reshaping their workforces to accommodate new needs and goalsmost of them related to tech. Companies are hiring more workers with technical expertise to help with strategy and innovation.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that computer and mathematical jobs will increase at the second-fastest rate of any other field over the next decade. In that same span, it estimates that data scientists and information security analysts will be among the ten fastest-growing occupations and software developers will produce the third-largest jobs increase of any occupation.

Business leaders across Nebraska are looking to raise the states tech profile.

This next generation goes where the technology jobs are, said Bryan Slone, president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry. We need to be known as a technology state.

Yet, Nebraska is facing a workforce crisis, with not enough workers to go around.

This is where the University of Nebraska at Omaha steps in. The states only metropolitan university, it works hand-in-hand with business partners in Nebraskas largest city. Its College of Information Science & Technology (IS&T) educates students in computer science, cybersecurity, information systems, data analytics and other tech disciplines. IS&T works closely with Omaha companies on hiring students for full-time and internship positions, filling the tech workforce pipeline with UNO graduates.

Dr. Martha Garcia-Murillo is the dean of the College of Information Science & Technology. She exudes a calm but strong presence and a passion for the students in her college.

Garcia-Murillo received her doctoral degree in economics and political economy at the University of Southern California.

When she was applying for her Ph.D. at USC, the family she was providing childcare for saw her filling out scholarship paperwork. They told her, Martha, if you dont get a scholarship, we will fund you. The family eventually paid for her first year of graduate school, creating a major impact on Garcia-Murillo.

She is now focused on providing scholarships for IS&T students.

I think that it's important to be able to provide scholarship opportunities to studentsit can make a huge difference in their lives. It did in mine, Garcia-Murillo said.

The Omaha community includes many students who are economically disadvantaged or are the first in their family to go to college. Without scholarships, academically accomplished students may need to work to support themselves. If they are working at retail restaurants or coffeeshops, it reduces the opportunities for internships that allow them to lead projects, get engaged in a professional organization, and build an outstanding resume.

I want them to substitute their non-IT job for an IT job, Garcia-Murillo said. When they graduate, they should leave with resumes that help them get the very best jobs.

Garcia-Murillo is focused on experiences that build students professional portfolios. She has developed a unique program, Learn and Earn, which takes an IS&T student through four years of job experience during their time at the college.

First-year students take a one-credit class where they participate in three job shadows. Their second year, they engage in micro-internshipsshort projects between five and 35 hours that are paid. And their third and fourth years, they have paid internships the entire year.

My objective is to create a learning community for the entire IS&T student body, Garcia-Murillo said. Learn and Earn ensures that were offering experiential opportunities to everyone.

Dr. Levi Thiele, UNOs director of career development, is excited about Learn to Earnwhich she describes as combining career-oriented curriculum, employer-based experiential learning and financial assistance.

Students learn through their preparation for successful careers. They earn payment for their work, which improves equity and access to experiential learning opportunities, she said.

Experiential learning is the process of learning by doing. By engaging IS&T students in hands-on experiences and reflection, they are better able to connect theories and knowledge learned in the classroom to real-world situations.

Were preparing students to be independent thinkers, to be professionally minded, to be in leadership positions, to be discerning and make good judgments, Garcia-Murillo said.

Job shadowing, micro-internships and internships also familiarize students with companies in the Omaha area.

When you graduate students with real-life experience, its more likely that theyll be placed into our local economy if theyve had encounters with local companies or projects, Garcia-Murillo said.

The college completed a survey with students who took the first-year seminar class, asking them, What companies do you want to work for after you graduate? More than 100 students answered the question, but only 10 students were able to identify Nebraska companies.

Employers are concerned about students leaving Nebraska. But many of our students don't actually understand the opportunities they have here, Garcia-Murillo said. Everything we're building in the college is intended to ground them to Nebraska and expose them to more companies.

UNO is a metropolitan university. A large majority of the student body comes from non-traditional backgrounds; many are supporting families.

Our student body comes from an underserved community with very little economic support, said Dr. Joanne Li, UNOs chancellor.

A college degree not only makes a difference for IS&T graduates, it also makes a difference for their families and their communities. Upon graduation, 78% of IS&T graduates are employed in their field of study and earn a median salary of $75,000.

UNOs values of strengthening the community through collaboration and partnershipsand improving Omahas quality of lifeis at the heart of IS&T's Learn and Earn.

The tech field is promising for disadvantaged students in many ways. Not only do they grow personally, but they earn an income that allows them to break out of povertynot only for themselves, but their families and their communities, Garcia-Murillo said. There are ripple effects that go beyond the individual and their job.

The Learn and Earn program meets three of UNOs strategic goalsstudent success, workforce development and social mobility, Thiele said.

Martha Garcia-Murillo and the team at IS&T have been visionaries. They have intentionally and thoughtfully structured the Learn and Earn program to meet student and workforce needs.

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#NUforNE: Supporting the Tech Revolution | News - University of Nebraska Omaha

New Tool Helps AI and Humans Learn To Code Better – Stanford HAI

Written by admin on May 2, 2023 — Leave a Comment

Last December, during a meandering walk near the Mississippi River in New Orleans after the 2022 NeurIPS Conference, Stanford associate professor of computer science and psychologyNoah D. Goodman and PhD student Eric Zelikman stumbled upon an idea that could change how large language models (LLMs) solve tasks: They needed to try guiding LLMs to solve problems the way people do by breaking down hard tasks into smaller pieces and solving them one at a time.

I'm not sure I thought it actually would work, recalled Goodman. But their idea did work and much better than they could have hoped. In a new paper, their team, with PhD students Qian Huang and Gabriel Poesiaandco-led by Stanford Graduate School of Education assistant professor Nick Haber, showed that LLMs that implemented Parsel a natural language processing framework they proposed that automatically solves and combines the solutions to many small problems to solve a large one performed 75 percent better than baselines on competition-level coding problems.

The result came as a surprise to the team, given that before the walk in New Orleans, they designed Parsel as a tool to help students learn how to code.

Now, a tool for teaching could actually be used to significantly advance the capabilities of LLMs. Before the Parsel framework, complex code written by LLMs was prone to failure because a single mistake would cause the entire program to break. Leveraging Parsel means that LLMs can finally write successful multi-part code based on the same algorithmic reasoning style that human programmers use, and all thats needed is natural language as input.

To use Parsel as a tool for education, a student would start by simply typing plain English to tell it what behaviors a new program must be able to do to accomplish a task. From those descriptions, Parsel then identifies which parts are related and need to be run together in a sequence, starting with the simplest tasks first. Finally, Parsel runs through different iterations of these coded parts, testing each of them until it lands on the version that satisfies everything the student requested.

In this way, Parsel does the heavy lifting in generating code with correct syntax and allows students to focus on the bigger picture. What we struggle to teach kids in introductory computer science is this idea of algorithmic decomposition, and syntax often gets in the way of learning that core skill, said Goodman.

But the researchers realized that LLMs have the opposite problem. While they can easily generate the syntax for a given programming language, they struggle to use algorithmic reasoning to build complex programs with many parts. It means that every line of code they generate is an opportunity to mess up. Some piece is going to break, said Haber.

To find out if this kind of reasoning would help the performance of LLMs on competitive coding tasks, the researchers prompted LLMs to first create a higher-level sketch with step-by-step instructions before diving into the problem. Then, the LLMs used the sketch to generate Parsel code a natural language decomposition of the task into function descriptions and test cases to run the task.

They soon found that not only were their LLMs doing better than all previous models on a variety of competition-level coding problems from the APPS (Automated Programming Progress Standard) dataset but they could also be used to successfully generate step-by-step movement plans for an embodied robot or even generate a mathematical proof.

This sort of reasoning that we're forcing it to do is something quite domain general we demonstrated interesting results around coding in particular, but I think there are a lot of directions, said Haber.

Nothing quite like the Parsel framework had ever been attempted before, according to the scholars. Up to the point that Parsel existed, I don't believe anyone thought it was currently possible to generate these kinds of programs from entirely natural language, said Zelikman.

Moving forward, Goodman, Haber, Zelikman, and their colleagues are excited to continue working on Parsel as a tool for computer science education. The education side is really exciting, Zelikman emphasized. Were going to do more work developing that and seeing how it can be made more accessible to students.

They also plan to continue testing Parsel to see how much it can help LLMs solve complex tasks that are more reflective of what programmers do in the real world. Haber noted that while it was exciting that they were able to show such dramatic improvements, they were limited by the datasets available and the difficulty of being the first ones to define a measure of success for such a pioneering new framework. Most prior work focused on coding problems that would normally be solved with a single function, which are not representative of real-world programming.

In the future, the team expects Parsel to evolve and expand beyond education and coding improvements for LLMs. It certainly leads me to dream pretty wildly with where the next five to 10 years might take this, said Haber. You might imagine that these are things that can code with people, that can offload a lot of the dirty work in creating programs, and somehow free up people's ability to be thinking on a very different level when they're creating.

Stanford HAIs mission is to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition.Learn more.

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New Tool Helps AI and Humans Learn To Code Better - Stanford HAI

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#NUforNE: Supporting the Tech Revolution | News – University of Nebraska Omaha

New Tool Helps AI and Humans Learn To Code Better – Stanford HAI

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