Kinnis Gosha

Differential gender effects of a STEM-based intervention: an examination of the African American Researchers in Computing Sciences program

The Computing Research Association (CRA) was formed in 1972 as the Computer Science Board (CSB), which provided a forum for the chairs of Ph.D.-granting computer science departments to discuss issues and share information (CRA, 2009). Since 1989, women have never accounted for more than 24% of the computer science faculty at any given rank (e.g., assistant, associate, or full professor). Currently, women represent 21.7%, 15.4%, and 11.7% of computer science faculty at the assistant, associate, and full professor ranks, respectively. Women have been as much as 24% of the Ph.D. graduates in computing in a single year. Since 1998, African Americans have never accounted for more than 2.0%, 1.4%, and 0.7% of the assistant, associate, and full professors, respectively, in computer science. Furthermore, African Americans have never accounted for more than 2% of the Ph.D. graduates in computer science in a single year over that same time period. It appears women and African Americans overall are underrepresented among the ranks of computer science faculty, but to what extent?

The Classification of Aggressive Dialogue in Social Media Platforms

The significance of aggression for the understanding of human behavior cannot be over amplified. It associates the individual, behavior, habits, environment, and health (mental). Understanding specificity when it comes to types of aggression and aggressive behavior can help with implementing appropriate countermeasures to those who demonstrate aggressive behavior within their speech and behavior on social media platforms. Through a research synthesis utilizing different search engines to find work on hate speech detection, hate, anger, aggressive behavior in social media, and the consequences associated with these terms, it can be concluded that previous work on hate speech detection have developed methods that ignore the variety in speech, possible other categories of hate speech, the correlation of speech to human behavior, and demonstrate minimal to no empathy toward the users from which this data was extracted from. Categorizations of hate speech currently only include hate and offensive language. Another category that should be added is anger. Future studies should specify their searches to including aggressive behavior since it is the connection when analyzing human behavior and hate speech.

The Development of a Conversational Agent Mentor Interface Using Short Message Service (SMS)

Previous studies have investigated the role of embodied conversational agents in providing mentoring advice in faculty- student relationships. One limitation is the need for the protégé to visit a specific website to access the agent (mentor). This paper presents the design and development of a conversational agent mentor that uses a more pervasive application for dialogue, short message service (SMS). The SMS conversational agent has been constructed to be used as a virtual mentor, to mentor undergraduate computer science majors at a Historically Black College (HBCU) who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in computing. This study has been designed to compare the effectiveness of the SMS conversational agent to the original conversational agent, an embodied conversational agent (ECA).

Computing Career Exploration For Urban African American Students using Embodied Conversational Agents

1 MOTIVATION AND PROBLEM STATEMENT Computing jobs are increasingly making up a large portion of the STEM jobs in the workforce; however, very few of those jobs are held by African Americans. A 2008 report by the National Science Foundation [1] revealed that Black computer science bachelor’s degree graduates (not just those from HBCUs) are disproportionately likely to NOT go into a science or engineering job or further school. Approximately 29 percent of black graduates were employed in non-science and engineering jobs compared to 13 percent or seven percent for White or Asian graduates, respectively. The study conducted investigated the perception of computing careers of African American high school students using a virtual computing career exploration fair. Students interacted with virtual computing professionals, created with the use of embodied conversational agents (ECAs), through the Computing Careers Nowwebsite to learn about different positions in computing.

Development of a Twitter graduate school virtual mentor for HBCU computer science students

The problem being addressed in the study is the underrepresentation of African American tenured and tenure-track faculty in the STEM professoriate despite HBCUs producing the most STEM doctoral graduates. This study uses virtual mentoring as a tool to aid undergraduate STEM students in obtaining information on graduate school because mentoring is a crucial element in preparing African American students for tenured positions. The focus of study of the study is to compare which conversational agent interface, the Twitter Conversational Agent or Embodied Conversational Agent, the users find the most effective. The sample is composed of 37 African American HBCU male undergraduate students who are STEM majors and interested in graduate school. The participants must already use Twitter. The same number of students (37) used in Goshas study will be used for this study in order to receive an accurate comparison between the TCA and ECA. The study has not been executed yet, but it is intended to be executed soon.

Using SMS as an interface for a virtual mentoring system

Previous research has been done that has explored the use of embodied conversational agents as mentors in faculty-student relationships. This previous system requires users to go to a unique website to interact with the conversational agent. This paper presents the design and development of a conversational agent mentor that uses a more pervasive application for dialogue, short message service (SMS). The SMS conversational agent is constructed to be used as a virtual mentor, to mentor undergraduate computer science majors at a Historically Black College (HBCU) who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in computing. A study has been designed to compare the effectiveness of the SMS conversational agent to the original conversational agent, an embodied conversational agent (ECA).

Holistic Development of Underrepresented Students through Academic: Industry Partnerships

Underrepresented students and the institutions that serve these students need to recognize and address the unique challenges that impact their career pathways and successes. This special session will discuss challenges facing Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and how industry-academia partnerships can be a force in mitigating some of these challenges. We will explore how we as a community can work together to develop holistic programs to support student development and excellence. We will highlight the shortcomings, strengths and future of the Googler In Residence (GIR) program from the perspective of select participating colleges, as well as other successful initiatives in motion. It is also essential that promising interventions be shared and scaled across institutions that play an essential role in educating and preparing these students. We are still learning as we go, but this is an opportune time to come together as a community to share our challenges and solutions, to determine how we can move together and how we can all be involved as change advocates. It is meant to be interactive, create shared knowledge and help identify ways of moving forward serving MSIs.

Broadening Participation Research Project: Exploring Computing Careers through a Virtual Career Exploration Fair Using Embodied Conversational Agents (Abstract Only)

Research suggests that the African American population is continuously growing in America, yet African Americans are disproportionately represented when it comes to undergraduate and graduate degrees and careers in computing. Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) have been developed as tools to disseminate information about various jobs in computing. The ECAs used in this study are African American men and women in those fields. This paper is about a pilot study conducted at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia to assess user satisfaction and effectiveness of the website which houses those ECAs. Twenty-two male undergraduates who were pursuing a degree in computer science participated in a study where they engaged the ECAs to learn more about various computing careers. Those individuals who participated in the study said that the tool was easy to use and that they will consider a career in computing in the future. This pilot study will be used to conduct another study that will focus on African American, male and female high school students and individuals interested in obtaining a graduate degree and/or career in computing. The studys limitation is that there is no control group to compare the results with. Future work will include groups who will either interact with disembodied agents, agents that are presented as Caucasian, or a collection of agents who are more demographically diverse instead of trying to match the demographics of the target audience.

Introduction to Computer Science for Urban African American Students Using Sphero Robotics Workshop

This paper introduces the use of an all-day coding workshop as an intervention to introduce and expose African American high school students from a southeastern urban school district to coding and computing careers. The workshop is held at a local HBCU and led by African American undergraduates computer science majors who attend that HBCU. The workshop is focused on a robotic ball called an Sphero that allows users to control its motion and color by writing lines of code. Results from workshop showed an increase of interest in pursuing a career in computing after graduation compared to interest before the start of the workshop.

Evaluation of the Expert Advisement in a Virtual Graduate School Panel for Computer Science Students

The continually increasing population of underrepresented minorities (URM) and a shortage black students who are entering into academic majors involving Computer Science (CS), provide substantial justification for the U.S to invest in the creation of means that increase the presence of blacks in CS disciplines. One mean as such is the concept of a graduate school panel. It can be noted that graduate school panels are instrumental in the dissemination of post-baccalaureate CS education. This research is a worth-while attempt to virtualize audience-specific graduate school panels. We hypothesize that black students with access to the Virtual Graduate School Panel (VGSP) web-portal will be motivated and equipped to pursue graduate studies in CS disciplines. Current results show that our web-portal, the Virtual Graduate School Panel (VGSP), is favorable in usefulness to a sample of black undergraduate CS students. Notable limitations, such as a small sample and confinement to descriptive statistical test, lay the groundwork for future studies that will examine the effectiveness of the VGSP beyond the scope of this pilot study.