Janice L. Pearce

Dispersion behaviors for a team of multiple miniature robots

To safely and efficiently guide search and rescue operations in disaster areas, gathering of relevant information such as the locations of victims, must occur swiftly. Using the concept of repellent virtual pheromones inspired by insect colony coordination behaviors, miniature robots can be quickly dispersed to survey a disaster site. Assisted by visual servoing, dispersion of the miniature robots can quickly cover an area. An external observer such as another robot or an overhead camera is brought into the control loop to provide each miniature robot estimations of the positions of all the other nearby robots in the robotic team. Each robot can then move away from the other nearby robots, resulting in the robot collective swiftly dispersing through the local area. The technique has been implemented using the miniature scout robots, developed by the Center for Distributed Robotics at the University of Minnesota, which are well-suited to surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

The funnel that grew our cis major in the cs desert

Across the US, plummeting CS enrollments and disappointing student retention have caused serious concern in recent years. Yet, in the Spring of 2007, the Berea College faculty unanimously adopted a CIS major in response to the rise in enrollment in CS0 and retention into CS1. This paper details how using a funnel approach to attract students into the discipline via multiple CS0-level courses resulted in the exception to the trend.

Using Virtual Pheromones and Cameras for Dispersing a Team of Multiple Miniature Robots

To safely and efficiently guide personnel of search and rescue operations in disaster areas, swift gathering of relevant information such as the locations of victims, must occur. Using the concept of ‘repellent virtual pheromones’ inspired by insect colony coordination behaviors, miniature robots can be quickly dispersed to survey a disaster site. Assisted by visual servoing, dispersion of the miniature robots can quickly cover an area. An external observer such as another robot or an overhead camera is brought into the control loop to provide each miniature robot estimations of the positions of all of the other near-by robots in the robotic team. These miniature robots can then move away from the other near-by robots on the team, resulting in the robot collective becoming swiftly distributed through the local area. The technique has been simulated with differing pheromone persistence levels and implemented using the miniature Scout robots, developed by the Center for Distributed Robotics at the University of Minnesota, which are well-suited to surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

Community-based projects for computing majors: opportunities, challenges and best practices

The use of community-based projects has been recognized as having pedagogical and experiential value for computing majors (e.g. [3], [4], [5], [6]). Community-based projects can be valuable learning experiences for computing majors as well as for faculty and community partners. However, these types of projects do present challenges for faculty and should be aligned with desired course outcomes. This panel will discuss the use of community-based projects from multiple perspectives. The expectation is that the panel will serve as a forum for the participants to share the opportunities, challenges, pedagogical motivations, and best practices obtained from prior experience. Exemplar projects will be highlighted. The panel also hopes the session motivates the audience to share their own experiences and sparks the interest of those faculty members who may have no prior experience with community-based projects.

Breaking up is hard to do--dispersion: from design to implementation

This article assesses the performance of a virtual pheromone-based sectored dispersion algorithm which is implemented on a low-cost miniature mobile robotic platform using sonar sensing. The approach is a distributed one and the robotic platform and sensor array are sufficiently inexpensive that they can be employed in undergraduate research and/or for coursework in a small college environment

Special Session: Converting Your Teaching (or Even Your Whole Department!) to Active Learning via POGIL

POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) is a form of active learning where students work collaboratively through activities designed to guide them to discover concepts on their own. POGIL is based on the principle that students will learn and retain more when they construct their own understanding of the computer science (CS) content. Working in groups of three to four, students develop process skills, such as problem solving, communication, and teamwork. This special session will first provide SIGCSE attendees the opportunity to experience a CS POGIL activity for themselves. We will then discuss different ways that instructors might adopt POGIL for use in their classroom, and how the adoption of POGIL by multiple instructors in a department can change the culture of the department.

Integrating International Students into Computer Science Programs: Challenges and Strategies for Success

International students are an important and desirable constituent in most computer science programs. These students help to enrich the programs, bring new perspectives into the classroom, diversify the student population, globalize the curriculum, broaden the perspective of domestic students, and generate revenue for the host institution. Each of these characteristics is desirable and increasingly important in todays highly connected world and job market. Most institutions invest resources in attracting international students and provide orientation sessions for them on arrival to help acclimate them to the new environment and to introduce them to other students. There are often clubs to provide support groups and social functions to help them meet and make friends with domestic students. However, challenges for international students, and for the faculty teaching them, persist at many institutions despite these efforts to help international students deal with culture shock, differing academic expectations and teaching methods, and different attitudes toward issues such as plagiarism.

Gender Equity in Computing: International Faculty Perceptions and Current Practices

In many countries serious effort has been put into developing and running programs that encourage girls to enjoy learning programming. At school level, many girls have done very well in these experiences, but despite their confidence and enthusiasm for programming at the time of the intervention, few have continued on to enroll in tertiary computing programs. In higher education institutions, numerous equity initiatives have attempted to improve both recruitment and retention, yet the pipeline continues to shrink. The running of interventions takes effort on the part of the academics to develop and much time, often in vacation periods, to deliver. As the success of these programs frequently relies on the goodwill of faculty, the authors formed an international multi-disciplinary working group to explore faculty attitudes and perceptions of these gender equity programs, and identify key features of enduring programs. In this paper, we gather and critically review existing literature resources with the aim of developing evaluation guidelines for the running of intervention programs from primary school to university education in order to encourage girls of all ages to seriously consider the prospect of undertaking a computing degree and to better support them during this time. Additionally, we explore the perceptions of faculty towards gender equity and gender equity programs, and discuss how faculty perceptions align with research findings. Our findings identify a clear need for gender equity programs, more consistent evaluation of the effectiveness of such programs including gathering, analysing and storing longitudinal data and more widespread dissemination of gender equity information to faculty.

When plans distinguish Bayes nets

We consider the complexity of determining whether differing probability distributions for the same Bayes net result in different policies, significantly different policy outcomes or optimal value functions.