Category Archives: Computer Science
Overhaul of Arkansas’ computer science requirement for high school … – Arkansas Online
A bill to overhaul Arkansas' computer science requirement for high school students was defeated in committee Tuesday.
Senate Bill 369 proposed giving more flexibility to students in career and technical education programs on how they can fulfill the state-mandated computer science requirement needed for graduation. Sen. Jim Dotson, R-Bentonville, the bill's sponsor, said the current computer science requirement is burdensome for students in a career and technical education program.
If approved, the bill would have allowed students to take a "computer science-related" course that is more applicable to their career path.
"Really, at the end of the day this bill is about options and opportunities for students," Dotson said.
The bill also would require the Department of Education to review career and technical education courses for weighted credit. Students who receive a platinum, gold, silver or bronze credential through Act WorkKeys -- a test used for career-oriented programs -- could transfer their credits to an institution of higher education.
But the bill failed after pushback from computer science educators and business representatives who said it would water down Arkansas' computer science requirement. All those who testified at Tuesday's hearing spoke against the bill, saying computer science classes were not just about preparing students for a career but rather teaching them other problem-solving skills or how to grapple with emerging artificial intelligence technology.
"Computer science is not a career pathway, it's part of every single aspect of our world," said Lee Watson, CEO of the Forge Institute, a cybersecurity firm. "How could we let a student graduate high school without access to this basic education? If we do we're not preparing them for the world which they are entering."
Randy Zook, CEO of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, also spoke against the bill, saying it would water down the state's talent pool for coders and cybersecurity specialists.
"It would be just a real loss in momentum to back away from our current requirement," Zook said.
Rep. Carlton Wing, R-North Little Rock, said he worried the bill would hurt Arkansas' standing as a national leader in computer science education.
"I think what we are doing with [career technical education] is also very important and fundamental to our next generation. I just don't want to see it come at the expense of our computer science courses," Wing said. "Any time Arkansas does something educationally that takes us to the top heap in the nation, I think that's something we want to protect with everything that we can."
Rep. Rick Beck, R-Center Ridge, said critiques of the bill presented a false choice by pitting career technical education against computer science courses.
Instead, Beck said the bill would allow the Department of Education to develop computer science classes that are more applicable to students in career technical education programs.
"We're not watering anything down. We are taking something and pinpointing it," Beck said.
In 2021, the Legislature approved a law requiring high school students to earn at least one credit in a computer science class before they can graduate.
Also Tuesday, the Senate approved Senate Bill 378 that would amend the 2021 law so public high schools would not be required to hire a computer science teacher.
While the bill passed the Senate without much opposition earlier this month, the House Education Committee voted the bill down on a split voice vote Tuesday.
Dotson said he has a similar piece of legislation, Senate Bill 470, that is on the agenda for the Senate Education Committee today.
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Overhaul of Arkansas' computer science requirement for high school ... - Arkansas Online
Computer Science and Robotics Exposition makes tech come to life … – Team Duval News
March 28, 2023 From flight simulators, to robotics and 3D printing, students from schools across the county got the opportunity to show off their technology projects and better understand how their studies can start them on a path to scientific-based jobs.
Held at the 121 Financial Ballpark on March 21, the Duval County Public Schools Computer Science and Robotics Expo hosted 23 different schools. The goal was to spark an interest in science and show students where technology can take them in the future.
Today is about fun, but the reality is we are setting the foundation for technology understanding for students. This is important for our county and our state because these are the kids that will be employed in those jobs in the future, said Dr. Peter Carafano, a Science Specialist with Duval County Public Schools.
Watch the video above to learn more about the Computer Science & Robotics expo.
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Computer Science and Robotics Exposition makes tech come to life ... - Team Duval News
Mississippi Educators and High School Students Recognized for … – The University of Southern Mississippi
Thu, 03/30/2023 - 09:19am | By: Ivonne Kawas
Pictured left: USM's Dr. Sarah Lee (left) with the2023 Educator Award Winner, Jacqueline Lewis. Pictured right: Dr. Lee and Honorable Mention awardee,Cam Ogletree.
The University of Southern Mississippi's (USM) School of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering and the National Center for Women and Information (NCWIT) - Mississippi Affiliate, recognized State Educators and 9th-12thgrade students at the Aspirations in Computing (AiC) Award Luncheon held at the Hattiesburg campus this month.
The awards recognize 9th-12thgrade women, genderqueer, and non-binary students for their computing-related achievements and interests, as part of an effort to encourage a diverse range of students to choose careers in technology. The Educator Award identifies exemplary formal and informal educators who play a pivotal role in encouraging these students.
Award recipients were selected from more than 3,300 applicants from all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, U.S. overseas military bases, and Canada. The recipients in Mississippi included: 6 Winners, 2 Honorable Mentions, and a Rising Star, along with the 2 Educator Awards.
We are proud of the students who received this prestigious award, said Dr. Sarah Lee, director of the School of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering. USM is committed to providing programs like Aspirations in Computing to broaden and engage more Mississippi students with computingrecognizing the value of computing and technology skills to students future success.
The event featured a keynote speaker, Rimika Banerjee from UC Berkeley, and a celebratory luncheon to honor the accomplishments of the awardees.
Mississippis AiC 2023 Educator Award Winner, Jacqueline Lewis from Enterprise High School (EHS) in Clarke County, was honored for playing a role in encouraging students to explore their interests in computing, coding, robotics, and mathematics. Additionally, Cam Ogletree, from Madison Central High School in the Madison County School District, was selected as the honorable mention.
Lewis, a strong advocate of recruiting women to STEM careers, is now completing her 17th year as a mathematics teacher. Prior to becoming a teacher, Lewis enjoyed a 17-year career in VLSI Design Automation and telecommunications software design.
In 2018, she brought AP Computer Science courses to EHS and has been growing the program (and specifically growing the percentage of female students) every year. In 2022 she chartered an EHS robotics team as part of the First Robotics FTC League and has built such a strong interest in that program that EHS will have 3 separate robotics teams in the 23-24 school year. Her teams are 50% female.
Lewis serves on the Mississippi Teacher Advisory Council and the Mississippi Computer Science Education Strategic Planning Team. She is a frequent speaker at math conferences and most recently presented "Visualizing DeMorgan's Theorem with Logic Gates" at the National CSTA Conference in Chicago. She is currently serving in her 4th year as an AP Computer Science Training Facilitator for Mississippi State University and Code.org.
Each recipient will receive recognition and prizes; induction into the AiC Community of more than 22,000 women, genderqueer, or non-binary technologists; access to resources, scholarships, and internship opportunities; and more.
The recipients for the 2023 NCWIT-Mississippi AiC Awards are:
Shreya Sinha | Madison Central High School
Madison, Miss.
Micah Hill | Laurel High School
Laurel, Miss.
Ava Noe | Mississippi School for Math and Science
Columbus, Miss.
Makiya Wilson | Brookhaven High School
Brookhaven, Miss.
Danielle McConnell | Mississippi School for Math and Science
Columbus, Miss.
Elise Jackson | Oxford High School
Oxford, Miss.
Honorable Mentions
Kendall Curry | Northwest Rankin High School
Flowood, Miss.
OJahnae Sanders | Gulfport High School
Gulfport, Miss.
Rising Star
Katie Notbohm | Madison Central High School
Madison, Miss.
About NCWIT Aspirations in Computing
NCWIT is the farthest-reaching network of change leaders focused on advancing innovation by correcting underrepresentation in computing. NCWIT convenes, equips, and unites more than 1,500 change leader organizations nationwide to increase the influential and meaningful participation of girls and women at the intersections of race/ethnicity, class, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, and other historically marginalized identities in the field of computing, particularly in terms of innovation and development. Find out more at their website.
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Suspect in death of computer science student in Dasmarias, Cavite identified Azurin – GMA News Online
The suspect in the killing of a 24-year-old computer science student in Dasmarias, Cavite, has been identified, Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Police General Rodolfo Azurin Jr. said Friday.
Azurin identified the suspect as Angelito Erlano, GMA Integrated News' Jun Veneracion said on Twitter.
A report by Luisito Santos on Super Radyo dzBB said policemen went to the house of the suspect and found some of the victim's belongings.
In a statement, the PNP said the police located the house of the suspect in Barangay San Nicholas 2 after backtracking CCTV footage.
Recovered were a black shirt with a white stripe and a blue t-shirt marked with a trademark eagle, which were used by Erlano during the crime, the PNP said.
A black backpack owned by the victim was also found in the house, it added.
According to the PNP, Erlano had once been arrested for robbery.
The government is offering a P1.1-million reward for anyone who can give information about the location of the suspect.
A massive manhunt for the suspect in the robbery with homicide case has been launched, the PNP said. Police are still in the area for continuing hot pursuit operations.
The SpecialInvestigation Task Group Daguinsin convened on Friday morning to discuss developments in the case build-up.
"We condemn this heinous crime and we will not stop until the perpetrator will be put behind bars. We call on the public to cooperate with the authorities and report any information that may lead to the arrest of the suspect," Azurin said.
On Tuesday, victim Queen Leanne Daguinsin was found dead with stab wounds inside her dorm room in Barangay Santa Fe. Based on the police investigation, Daguinsin suffered 14 stab wounds in different parts of her body.
Daguinsin's body was found after her classmates went to her dorm room to check on her because she had not been attending classes for days.
CCTV footage showed a man wearing a blue shirt, black cap, and face mask leaving the victim's dorm room. He was holding unidentified objects in both hands. Joviland Rita/KBK/VBL, GMA Integrated News
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Big Data Club wins Best Data Visualization at DataFest – UMass Dartmouth
Award is the fifth consecutive for Business and Engineering students
UMass Dartmouths Big Data Club, represented by undergrads John Willy, Kevin Chen, McCord Murray, Maggie Battersby, Ryan Berry, and Bryan Obidike, graduate students Rahul Chaube, Jitendra Prasad, and Nandini LokeshReddy, and faculty advisors Uday Kant Jha and Bharatendra Rai.
Last weekend, six undergraduate students from the UMass Dartmouth Big Data Club competed at the American Statistical Association's (ASA's) DataFest competition, bringing home the "best data visualization" award for the fifth consecutive year.
DataFest, hosted this year in the Charlton College of Business, is held annually between teams at UMass Dartmouth, Bridgewater State University, Bryant University, and Stonehill College. This year's competition included more than 40 students between the four institutions.
"In my opinion, this year's data was an incredibly complex and unusual dataset. I am ecstatic to say that our team had an outstanding performance," said Bharatendra Rai, Chairperson for the Department of Decision and Information Sciences and faculty advisor for the Big Data Club. "It was great to see graduate student mentors making themselves available from early morning to late night and helping to make this event a memorable and successful event for all participants."
Students in the competition are given a challenging dataset and tasked with creating a data visualization, developing insights from the data, and making use of an external data source within the 36-hour timeframe. Prizes are given out to the top team in each of those categories after every team presents their work to a panel of judges.
"It was great to have the opportunity to apply the computer science skills I've gained to a competition," said Maggie Battersby, a software engineering student at UMass Dartmouth.
Students who participate in the competitionenjoy an environment where they can work together to make the best visualization and insights possible. This allows them to teach each other data analytics and data science skills, as well as gain some practical experience in working with large datasets.
UMass Dartmouth's team included undergraduate students John Willy, Kevin Chen, McCord Murray, Maggie Battersby, Ryan Berry, and Bryan Obidike. Graduate students Rahul Chaube, Jitendra Prasad, and Nandini LokeshReddy attended the competition as mentors to the undergraduates. Assistant Teaching Professor Uday Kant Jha and Professor Bharatendra Rai served as faculty advisors.
"This was my first time mentoring at DataFest," said Nandini LokeshReddy, a graduate computer science student. "I had a chance to spend more time with the participants and come up with and put into practice various ideas."
Undergraduate or graduate students interested in joining the Big Data Club can contact Professor Rai at brai@umassd.edu for more information.
"In my opinion, this year's data was an incredibly complex and unusual dataset. I am ecstatic to say that our team had an outstanding performance,"
Charlton College of Business, College of Engineering, Departments Charlton College of Business, Departments College of Engineering, News and Public Information
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Big Data Club wins Best Data Visualization at DataFest - UMass Dartmouth
Mathematical Sciences Professor Helps Solve 50-Year-Old Problem – University of Arkansas Newswire
Chaim Goodman-Strauss
An aperiodic tile set with just one shape of tile.
Professor Chaim Goodman-Strauss of the Department of Mathematical Sciences is part of an interdisciplinary team that recently announced a solution to the "einstein" or "one stone" problem, a tantalizing question that has been asked for more than 50 years.
This problem asks about the ways in which a plane can be tiled. Intuitively, a tiling consists of breaking the plane into pieces without gaps or overlaps. Examples of tilings abound in the real world and in nature.
For example, an infinite checkerboard gives a tiling of the plane by squares. Other tilings are visible in the hexagons of a honeycomb or the tile mosaics of the Alhambra. These examples of tilings are periodic, though, that isthey possess a translational symmetry. We can imagine picking up the infinite checkerboard, sliding it up one square and then placing it back down where each piece still fits exactly into the checkerboard pattern.
Surprisingly, there exist finite collections of shapes that do tile the plane, but where none of their tilings have a translational symmetry. These are called aperiodic tile sets. The first examples were created in the 1960s and needed over 20,000 different shapes. This number was slowly reduced,and in the 1970s the British mathematician Sir Roger Penrose demonstrated an aperiodic tile set that used just two shapes. The question remained, is there an aperiodic tile set with a single shape?
Such a shape was just found by this interdisciplinary research team including professor Goodman-Strauss. The proof that this shape is indeed an aperiodic tile set appears a new preprint. This announcement generated a lot of excitement in and beyond the worlds of mathematics and computer science and was featured in a recent New York Times article.
"This is something I did not think I would see in my lifetime," said professor Edmund Harriss of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, "and it is beautiful that it was such an interdisciplinary effort. You have David Smith, a retired printing technician who had been seriously exploring ways to tile the plane for many years, who created the shape, and Joseph Myers, a software developer who found the two proofs, working together with Craig Kaplan, a computer science professor at the University of Waterloo, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss."
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Mathematical Sciences Professor Helps Solve 50-Year-Old Problem - University of Arkansas Newswire
Elon Musk and prominent computer scientists call for a halt to the AI race sparked by ChatGPT – The Philadelphia Inquirer
Are tech companies moving too fast in rolling out powerful artificial intelligence technology that could one day outsmart humans?
Thats the conclusion of a group of prominent computer scientists and other tech industry notables such as Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak who are calling for a 6-month pause to consider the risks.
Their petition published Wednesday is a response to San Francisco start-up OpenAIs recent release of GPT-4, a more advanced successor to its widely-used AI chatbot ChatGPT that helped spark a race among tech giants Microsoft and Google to unveil similar applications.
What do they say?
The letter warns that AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity from flooding the internet with disinformation and automating away jobs to more catastrophic future risks out of the realms of science fiction.
It says recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one not even their creators can understand, predict, or reliably control.
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, the letter says. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.
A number of governments are already working to regulate high-risk AI tools. The United Kingdom released a paper Wednesday outlining its approach, which it said will avoid heavy-handed legislation which could stifle innovation. Lawmakers in the 27-nation European Union have been negotiating passage of sweeping AI rules.
Who signed it?
The petition was organized by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which says confirmed signatories include the Turing Award-winning AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio and other leading AI researchers such as Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus. Others who joined include Wozniak, former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a science-oriented advocacy group known for its warnings against humanity-ending nuclear war.
Musk, who runs Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX and was an OpenAI cofounder and early investor, has long expressed concerns about AIs existential risks. A more surprising inclusion is Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, maker of the AI image generator Stable Diffusion that partners with Amazon and competes with OpenAIs similar generator known as DALL-E.
Whats the response?
OpenAI, Microsoft and Google didnt respond to requests for comment Wednesday, but the letter already has plenty of skeptics.
A pause is a good idea, but the letter is vague and doesnt take the regulatory problems seriously, says James Grimmelmann, a Cornell University professor of digital and information law. It is also deeply hypocritical for Elon Musk to sign on given how hard Tesla has fought against accountability for the defective AI in its self-driving cars.
Is this AI hysteria?
While the letter raises the specter of nefarious AI far more intelligent than what actually exists, its not superhuman AI that some who signed on are worried about. While impressive, a tool such as ChatGPT is simply a text generator that makes predictions about what words would answer the prompt it was given based on what its learned from ingesting huge troves of written works.
Gary Marcus, a New York University professor emeritus who signed the letter, said in a blog post that he disagrees with others who are worried about the near-term prospect of intelligent machines so smart they can self-improve themselves beyond humanitys control. What hes more worried about is mediocre AI thats widely deployed, including by criminals or terrorists to trick people or spread dangerous misinformation.
Current technology already poses enormous risks that we are ill-prepared for, Marcus wrote. With future technology, things could well get worse.
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Rice U.’s Todd Treangen wins NSF CAREER Award – Rice News
By Patrick KurpSpecial to Rice News
Surrounding us is a vast and largely unknown world of microbial dark matter."
Our ability to read and write DNA at scale, uncovering yet-unseen pathogens and engineering microbes for societal benefit, has far outstripped the computational tools capable of tracking and preventing their misuse, said Todd Treangen, computational biologist and assistant professor of computer science at Rice University.
His five-year, $599,943 National Science Foundation CAREER Award funded by the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems within the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering will support the development of such tools. The project is titled A comprehensive computational platform for detecting yet unseen microbial pathogens.
The priority of this project is to characterize previously unseen pathogens that are likely to be dangerous to humans in pursuit of improved preparedness and prevention of pathogen spread, Treangen said. Im humbled by the award and proud to work alongside my research group at Rice.
Only about 500 such awards from the National Science Foundation are given annually in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Treangens CAREER Award is the fourth received by a Rice Engineering faculty member this year.
By microbial dark matter, Treangen means all microorganisms, including bacteria and viruses, that cannot be cultured in the laboratory.
The sequencing of genomic data found in nature is now democratized, opening the door to a digital library of countless documents of evolutionary history, Treangen said. For SARS-CoV-2 alone, there are now over 15 million genomes, and there are multiple petabytes of data available for download from the publicly accessible Sequence Read Archive.
By leveraging this mass of publicly available data, Treangen will pioneer new approaches for pathogen detection and monitoring by using scalable and accurate computational strategies. The work will employ existing approaches to biosurveillance coupled with innovative computational methods.
The computational approaches will be combined into a platform being created by Treangen called GuarDNA. It will integrate everything into the first-of-its-kind comprehensive platform designed for genomics-based biosecurity and biosurveillance, he said.
Thanks to recent scientific and technological advances, we are on the cusp of numerous discoveries specific to characterizing microbial dark matter, Treangen said.
His group focuses on developing open-source software tools capable of tackling emerging computational research questions specific to biosecurity, infectious disease and microbiome analysis.
Treangen earned his doctorate in computer science in 2008 from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. Before joining the Rice faculty in 2018, he worked as a research scientist at the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, and as a postdoctoral scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Institut Pasteur in Paris.
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2239114&HistoricalAwards=false
https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2023/03/220722_Treangen_Todd_Fitlow_015.jpgCAPTION: Todd Treangen is an assistant professor of computer science at Rice University. (Credit: Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
Computer science department: https://cs.rice.edu/
Treangen lab: https://www.treangenlab.com/
George R. Brown School of Engineering: https://engineering.rice.edu/
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nations top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,552 undergraduates and 3,998 graduate students, Rices undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplingers Personal Finance.
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Kid Finds Genius Way To Apply For Computer Science Internships – Unofficial Networks
The world of internships can be difficult. I was fortunate enough to land one here just around a year ago, allowing me to earn college credit doing something that I really truly enjoyed. At the end of the day, though, it seems like the best way to land an internship is to find a way to truly stand out, and I think this guy spotted at Palisades Tahoe is absolutely killing it.
I would argue theres a good chance that Palisades has plenty of people who would be willing to take this guys resume or just straight up interview him on the lift. Its smart andits pretty darn funny, so it at least fits the energy of the Pain McShlonkey Classic.I dont know, maybe Im being silly, but if I was in charge of hiring, Id at least hear him out.
Maybe this is the future of job applications. Maybe anyone whos looking for a job should start skiing with their resume taped to their back, or maybe we should all be doing it, just in case.
Featured Image Credit: u/SOSharkie via Reddit
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Kid Finds Genius Way To Apply For Computer Science Internships - Unofficial Networks
Scaler launches Scaler School of Technology, a four-year residential UG program in computer science – The Economic Times
Edtech platform Scaler (by InterviewBit) has announced the launch of Scaler School of Technology, a four-year residential undergraduate computer science program designed for the next generation of India's software professionals.Delivered in three phases, the first 18 months of the program will focus on mastering computer science fundamentals by building pedagogy with real-life cases, followed by one year paid industry internship with leading technology companies and one-on-one mentoring by industry veterans.
The final 18 months will allow students to specialise as senior engineers and machine learning/artificial intelligence engineers with specialisation in algorithmic trading or learning skills, which will help graduates build their careers in the top 0.1% of the companies in the world. The program also intends to provide a pre-placement offer (PPO) to 50% of the batch within two and a half years of joining the program.
Abhimanyu Saxena, Co-founder of Scaler & InterviewBit, said, "The 35,000-odd successful Scaler alumni in the global technology sector gave us the confidence to enter the UG education space and bring fundamental changes that will deliver results for all stakeholders.
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