Christine F. Reilly

Ranking Users Based on Influence in a Directional Social Network

This paper describes the preliminary work on a study that ranks users in a directional social network by their influence during a particular time period. Our method considers a user with high influence to be one who has a high ratio of forwarded messages to the number of messages she posts. After implementing our influence ranking program, we plan to compare our method with others in the literature. This comparison will evaluate the similarity of the lists of influential users that are generated by these different methods. We will also evaluate the ease of use and time required by each of the influence calculation methods.

UTPB: A Benchmark for Scientific Workflow Provenance Storage and Querying Systems

A crucial challenge for scientific workflow management systems is to support the efficient and scalable storage and querying of large provenance datasets that record the history of in silico experiments. As new provenance management systems are being developed, it is important to have benchmarks that can evaluate these systems and provide an unbiased comparison. In this paper, based on the requirements for scientific workflow provenance systems, we design an extensible benchmark that features a collection of techniques and tools for workload generation, query selection, performance measurement, and experimental result interpretation.

Emulating a corporate software development environment through collaboration between student projects in six courses

Corporate software development often takes place within a complex organizational structure, potentially encompassing many individuals. With constant improvements in network and communication technologies, those organizations may be widely distributed through time and space. In computer science and education, group projects are typically included as part of an undergraduate and graduate engineering curriculum to help prepare students for the dynamics of the business workplace. However, the groups tend to be much smaller than those typically found in the international corporate world where engineers are required to participate in large groups that are dispersed through geography and time zones. We describe a collaboration between student projects in six courses that aims to emulate such an international corporate software development environment. The collaboration brought together three faculty members and over 90 undergraduate and graduate students to work on a software project for a real client. Through this experience, we learned valuable lessons regarding the importance of communication and coordination between the faculty and student participants in a large-scale project.

The impact of math preparedness on introductory programming (CS1) success (abstract only)

At our university, like at many other institutions, the pass rate in the introductory programming (CS1) course is relatively low, in the approximate range of 50% to 75%. We would like to discover factors that have an impact on student success in introductory programming in order to better advise and place our students into the course at the appropriate point in their academic careers. Our main motivation for increasing the CS1 pass rate is to help our students graduate on time. It has long been thought that mathematics background is a factor in determining a students success in introductory computer science courses. Currently, our students must be concurrently enrolled in college algebra or placed into a higher mathematics course. However, given our current low pass rate, we wonder whether this is the proper prerequisite. In order to gather information about mathematics background, we administered a questionnaire to the students enrolled in the class during Spring 2013. We then analyzed the pass rate of our introductory programming students in relation to their mathematics background. Our findings indicate that students who are prepared to take calculus I in the same semester as they take introductory programming were more likely to pass introductory programming. These findings suggest that changing our math prerequisite to pre-calculus may increase the pass rate in our introductory programming course.

Instrumenting a logic programming language to gather provenance from an information extraction application

Information extraction (IE) programs for the web consume and produce a lot of data. In order to better understand the program output, the developer and user often desire to know the details of how the output was created. Provenance can be used to learn about the creation of the output. We collect fine-grained provenance by leveraging ongoing work in the IE community to write IE programs in a logic programming language. The logic programming language exposes the semantics of the program, allowing us to gather fine-grained provenance during program execution. We discuss a case study using a web-based community information management system, then present results regarding the performance of queries over the provenance data gathered by our logic program interpreter. Our findings show that it is possible to gather useful fine-grained provenance during the execution of a logic based web information extraction program. Additionally, queries over this provenance information can be performed in a reasonable amount of time.

An evaluation of how changes to the introductory computer science course sequence impact student success

Our university, as with many others throughout the world, has a relatively low pass rate in the introductory computer science courses. Over the course of more than fifteen years, various changes have been made to the introductory course sequence with the hope of improving student success. We describe these changes and perform an initial analysis of student course performance that finds little change in pass rates. We propose new changes to the course sequence and to individual courses within this sequence. These new changes are focused on increasing student engagement and developing the problem solving skills that are necessary for being a successful computer science major. We propose pilot projects that implement these changes and outline evaluation strategies for these pilot projects.

Bridging the divide: Strategies for college to career readiness in computer science

The conversations and debates concerning how a students time on campus translates to better results upon graduation are not going away. Every day institutions of higher education are challenged to explicitly demonstrate and provide a clear articulation of the value of education as measured by post-graduation employment. We discuss strategies implemented in a computer science program to address the issue of student preparation for the workplace of the 21st century. We discuss the extension of more traditional experiential learning methods including project based courses, capstone courses, cooperative experiences and internships to assist students in developing the necessary skills required to transition from college to the workplace.

Promoting Inclusion of Underrepresented Populations in Computing

Promoting inclusion of underrepresented groups in computing and technology fields remains a critical issue in computing education. Gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background are all key factors that limit access to technology and have lasting impacts on students and their career choices. This paper reports a new effort to broaden participation in computing, focused on recruitment and retention, through a new local student chapter of Association for Computing Machinerys Committee on Women (ACM-W). The new chapter was created at the University of Texas-Pan American, a primarily undergraduate, Hispanic-serving regional university in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas.