Computers

CU Boulder Computing: Punch Cards to AI

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 06:00:00 +0000

CU Boulder Computing: Punch Cards to AI Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/10/2023 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

When CU Boulder’s Department of Computer Science began more than 50 years ago, it had fewer than 10 faculty members, and all students were at the graduate level. They accessed computers on campus through terminals and punch cards. Results were slow.

“In the early days, computers were what businesses used for payrolls and data processing and what scientific organizations used to model scientific phenomena,” said Bobby Schnabel, computer science professor and external chair of the department who joined the faculty in 1977. In the mid-1980s, the department received its own computer, a VAX-11/750 from the computing company Digital Equipment Corporation, said Schnabel.

“These were the ubiquitous research computing machines,” he said. “We had to have our own computing staff for the first time.”

The department chose computer science professor Evi Nemeth as the inaugural staff member to run the computer, said Schnabel. In addition to her work building a new staff, her mentorship and teaching helped solidify the positive trajectory for the entire computer science department. “She is an absolute legend,” said Schnabel. “People can tell stories about Evi till the end of the Earth.”

Nemeth — a system administration expert — worked at CU Boulder for 21 years. Hundreds of students benefited directly from her guidance. She also helped establish a scholarship program with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (ElEngr ex’72; HonDocSci’89).

Nemeth was lost at sea with six others in 2013, more than a decade after her retirement in 2001. But the impact she had on CU students still shines.

Terri Hogan (CompSci’94), executive director of the Boulder-based National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), was inspired by Nemeth as a college student. She recalled an early memory from an evening after a computing conference where she saw Nemeth enthusiastically swinging a mallet to try to ring a bell at a local fair.

“I was a shy freshman, and seeing her fearlessly swing that mallet even though she was three times the age of everyone else was a testament to her zest for life,” said Hogan.

As computing faces a new age with the rise of artificial intelligence, the Department of Computer Science — now with about 2,000 students and 80 faculty members — will rely on its luminaries of past and present to forge ahead.

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Photo courtesy College of Engineering and Applied Science

How computer science started at CU.

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MOOC

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 18:53:00 +0000

MOOC Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 11:53

Eric Gershon

Whenever CU professor Robert Mazzeo offers “Exercise Physiology,” an upper-level undergraduate course popular with aspiring doctors, it fills quickly. So does the waiting list. He and a colleague each teach the class once a year to a combined total of about 230 students.

In June, Mazzeo, a member of the integrative physiology faculty and an avid tennis player, introduced an online version of the course called “The Science of Exercise” that also has proven popular — on a vastly greater scale and far beyond Boulder.

By early November, more than 35,000 people worldwide had at least sampled the course, a MOOC, or massive open online course. Nearly 800 were on track to finish it, many for fun and at no cost, others for a certificate of completion and a $49 fee. A new cohort of students enrolls every two weeks. There is no cap on enrollment.

“Based on the number of new students joining each week, ‘Science of Exercise’ is on track to be the most popular course in the history of CU,” said Cory Pavicich (Engl, Hum’04) of CU’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, which helps faculty design MOOCs.

MOOCs emerged about a decade ago. The 2012 debut of delivery platforms with ties to Stanford, Harvard and MIT led to a sustained burst of attention and a New York Times headline dubbing it “The Year of the MOOC.” The medium was hailed as a way to offer online learning to mass audiences at minimal or no cost, amid intensifying concerns about the high cost of traditional campus-based higher education.

The hype has died down, but MOOCs have shown they’re here to stay and that they can coexist with campus-based instruction while drawing huge numbers of additional off-campus learners. Coursera, one of the most prominent MOOC platforms, edX and Udacity now offer thousands of courses, commonly developed by professors at established universities, including CU Boulder.

After a modest start in MOOC development in 2013, when CU introduced its first four courses, including “Introduction to Power Electronics” and “Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” the university is rapidly growing its slate. As of November, nearly 25 MOOCs developed at CU Boulder were available on Coursera, the university’s main platform partner. By 2020, the electrical engineering department alone expects to add at least 50 more.

“MOOCs were once branded the death-knell of the university and then they were proclaimed dead, but, in reality, they remain a fascinating field of play,” said English professor William Kuskin, who as vice provost and associate vice chancellor for strategic initiatives oversees MOOC development. “It’s an arena that uniquely merges teaching and research in ways capable of reaching the entire globe.”

The hype has died down, but MOOCs are here to stay.

MOOCs are just one form of online education, and not the only one offered by CU Boulder. The School of Continuing Education offers a variety of paid online courses open to the public, for example, and the campus has eight fully online graduate degree programs, mostly in engineering. But MOOCs are proliferating fastest, largely because production requires only one professor and a small team, and most of the faculty work is up front rather than continuous.

Besides “Science of Exercise,” CU Boulder MOOCs include “Kinematics: Describing the Motions of Spacecraft,” “Graphic Design,” “Business Analytics for Decision Making” and “The Dynamics of Group Communication.” Others scheduled for debut are “Social and Emotional Learning and the Teacher,” “Roots and Shoots,” a collaboration with the Jane Goodall Institute, and “Active Optical Devices.”

“The mission of a university should be to provide educational opportunities to students and reach as many as possible,” said Juliet Gopinath, the electrical engineering professor who developed the optical devices MOOC. “The online forum allows us to reach non-traditional students and provide opportunities to those for whom it might be otherwise impossible. Personally, I also hope that it helps underrepresented groups as well as those in Third-World countries who struggle to find the time and opportunity to receive an education.”

As the name MOOC suggests, a MOOC ("massive open") is easy to join. Anyone with an internet connection can participate by visiting a provider website, such as coursera.org, registering, picking a course and clicking the first lesson. Learners can watch instructional videos and consume other course materials (readings, quizzes, projects) for free. To be evaluated and eligible for a certificate of completion, students pay a fee, typically less than $100 on Coursera.

Two years ago, Mazzeo hadn’t even heard of MOOCs. When he did, from Russell Moore, the university provost, Mazzeo seized on the potential for propagating the core message of his teaching and research — that “exercise is medicine” — at an exponentially greater rate than possible on campus.

All this means the campus and MOOC versions of Mazzeo’s course complement rather than compete with each other.

Working with a CU team of learning design experts, Mazzeo condensed and simplified the lectures from his semester-long campus course, shot a series of videos and developed new quizzes that could be scored by software or other students in the course. Within months, thousands of people around the world were enrolling in “Science of Exercise.”

“I’m reaching populations I never thought I’d reach in my career,” said Mazzeo, who marvels over students’ locations, which he surveys on an electronic dashboard on his office computer: Botswana, Qatar, Algeria, Nepal, Iraq, India and scores of others. At least two-thirds of all people enrolled in CU Boulder’s MOOCs live outside the U.S., according to Pavicich.

All this means the campus and MOOC versions of Mazzeo’s course complement rather than compete with each other.

“These are truly new students for the University of Colorado Boulder,” Pavicich said.

Mazzeo’s MOOC covers the same basic concepts as his in-the-flesh course, “Exercise Physiology.” But it’s not the same course, and isn’t intended to be.

The MOOC, which consists of four modules that can be completed at the student’s pace within a 180-day period, is shorter and less technical, for example. It involves fewer and less-detailed tests. And successful completion of the MOOC doesn’t confer CU academic credit.

Kuskin’s group believes MOOCs serve the university’s fundamental mission and key interests in several ways.

They fulfill the broad mandate of providing public education, and they amplify CU’s renown. At least one CU department has reported that its MOOCs have helped attract full-time, degree-seeking students to campus.

Teaching through new media also prompts professors to reevaluate how and what students ought to learn. This can lead them to modify and improve traditional classroom courses.

And MOOCs are a source of revenue, modestly so far for CU, but with potential for significant growth.

Many universities have raced ahead in online education, among them Arizona State and the University of Florida, which bring in tens of millions of dollars through their programs, including online degree programs. The University of California Berkeley offers an online master’s program in public health, and Georgia Tech offers online master’s programs in computer science and analytics. MIT offers a pair of online “MicroMasters” credentials that can lead to admission to an accelerated on-campus master’s degree.

In time, CU Boulder expects to increase its share of paid online certificates and degree programs, according to Pavicich. MOOCs offer a foundation for that effort while immediately serving a greater number and variety of learners than the university ever has, he said — both newcomers to higher education and people who simply want more of it.

“We are past the point where you can assume you’re done learning when you’re 22 or 23,” Pavicich said. “You should expect to learn throughout your life.”

Illustration by Harry Campbell

Online education gains steam at CU Boulder.

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No Piano? No Problem

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 20:02:00 +0000

No Piano? No Problem Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/01/2017 - 14:02

Christie Sounart

Kristof Klipfel (TAM’17) disappeared for a moment.

“Sorry, I get into this,” he said distractedly, absorbed in the blues beats he was making on the fly.

Satisfied with his rhythm, he looped the track on his laptop and began overlaying new notes in the key of A. Music boomed, though no instrument was in sight.

No traditional instrument, anyway — Klipfel was making music through the gloves on his hands, using an ordinary table as his keyboard.

He continued drumming his fingers, encased in a pair of black construction gloves covered in buttons, switches and wires connected to his laptop. The harder he pressed, the louder the sound of specific notes played. Flexing his fingers triggered a sensor that adjusted overall volume and sound distribution. By flicking a switch on the side of a finger, he could shift from piano to drums or saxophone.

Software on his laptop recorded it all.

“You’re always in the right key and the right scale,” said the inventor, a 22-year-old senior from Reno, Nev.

Klipfel calls his device MIDI motion gloves. MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface, which links electronic instruments and enables them to communicate.

Basically, he said of the gloves, “It’s a wearable electronic musical instrument.”

Klipfel is not the first person to develop musical gloves. But his are unique in their ability to generate any note in any key for major, minor, blues and pentatonic scales.

A musician since 6th grade, when he began playing saxophone, Klipfel eventually learned dozens of instruments, including the trombone, drums and piano. He started composing electronic music in high school.

Klipfel designed the gloves in spring 2016 for a course on wearable technologies in the ATLAS Institute, part of the College of Engineering & Applied Science.

“I got tired of playing piano, then jumping to the computer and back and forth,” he said.

He realized MIDI might offer a solution.

“The gloves as a whole are a MIDI controller,” he said. “They send specific signals to the music software, which then interprets the signal and triggers any sound I define within the program.”

The gloves were Klipfel’s first experience with circuitry and robotics, and he spent a lot of time on Google figuring out how to make everything work. The project cost him about $300.

“I advised Kristof to start with one sensor on his glove and go from there,” said Alicia Gibb, his instructor. “He came in the next class with five sensors working on one glove. From that point, I knew these gloves were going to be epic.”

In March, Klipfel took the gloves to Hiyoshi, Japan, for the Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interactions conference. There he showed them off for hundreds of people at a student design challenge — and walked away with the award for best project implementation.

As far as Klipfel is aware, none of the other music gloves on the market have as much flexibility in sound as his do. But for now, he has no plans to patent or commercialize his product.

“I’m just trying to graduate,” Klipfel said. “I wanted to do something off the wall and really cool. This ended up being that.”

Making the gloves introduced him to other interests and has inspired him to consider careers in virtual reality, robotics, web development or game development, he said.

Between now and graduation next fall, Klipfel will devote himself to the drone racing club he started at CU, hiking around Boulder and creating a video game with his brother. He’s also working on another ATLAS side project called Paper Mech, which aims to get children interested in mechanical engineering by using paper and household items to make things move.

“There’s always new stuff that I’m working on,” he said. “I know now I can complete something pretty complex from scratch.”

Photos by Patrick Campbell

All you need are Kristof Klipfel's musical gloves.

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Inquiry – Lucy Sanders

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 20:00:00 +0000

Inquiry – Lucy Sanders Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/01/2017 - 14:00

Eric Gershon

Computing Power

Women represent more than half of all new U.S. college graduates but receive fewer than 20 percent of computer and information science degrees. Former Bell Labs executive Lucy Sanders (MCompSci’78), leader of the CU Boulder-based National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), is trying to fix that.

There’s huge demand in our economy for workers with computing skills and growing interest among students. Why aren’t there more women in computing?

Several interrelated theories exist. First, society has associated computing with something men do — it has been gendered male. This means society harbors an unconscious bias about ‘who does tech,’ and it influences what we do: Who we encourage, who we hire, who we give
visible technical jobs to, who we promote.

Second, the popular media has portrayed technologists in less than flattering roles — remember the computing geek in Jurassic Park?

Finally, some argue the advent of the home PC led parents to encourage their sons more than their daughters not only to learn more about how to use a computer, but to explore how it works.

You served as R&D vice president and chief technology officer at Bell Labs. How’d you get into computing, and did you ever find yourself thinking, ‘Where are all the other women?’

My father ran a corporate computing data center and my older sister got an early computing B.S. degree. So it was part of our family conversation. I also had a high school math teacher who taught us how to program BASIC and FORTRAN — she encouraged curiosity in us.

Working at Bell Labs was an honor. Although women and other minority groups never achieved representative parity, we were pretty darn close and much better than what many organizations achieve today.

What’s NCWIT’s general strategy for drawing women into computing and helping them succeed?

NCWIT unites nearly 900 organizations across the computing ecosystem to significantly increase girls’ and women’s meaningful participation. NCWIT serves as a ‘personal trainer,’ providing advice, resources, tool kits and plug-and-play programs to help them achieve their diversity and inclusion goals. Both women and men are involved as leaders, essential to achieving lasting outcomes.

How is CU Boulder doing?

CU Boulder has been a long-time and active member of NCWIT. The College of Engineering and the computer science department track and analyze metrics, consider different approaches to recruiting, develop new curricular approaches and encourage student persistence. They also have amazing outreach efforts that help build the computing/engineering K-12 pipelines. Recently the College of Arts and Sciences introduced a new B.A. program that allows even more students to enroll in computing-related disciplines. CU understands this is a long-distance race.

What should industry be doing differently?

The cultures at many companies, large and small, have been justifiably criticized over the last few years. Often, members of historically marginalized groups are finding unwelcome, if not hostile, cultures and find it hard to contribute their ideas. It’s critical that technical products and services are created by diverse engineers — if many types of people are involved, we will solve problems differently and we will solve different problems.

It’s really not that hard to understand — homogenous cultures lead to group-think. Corporations need to look at diversity and inclusion as integral to their business practices, not as something optional.

Are any industries or prominent companies notably better at recruiting, retaining and promoting women in computing than others?

Some are starting to make progress and we are encouraged, but there is still a distance to go. We advocate public transparency and publication of technical diversity data as a first step.

What do young women interested in computing ask you most often?

I get a lot of questions about my early technical work. It’s pretty amazing that a high school student today cares about the history of the C programming language or the UNIX operating system. They want to know everything about ‘how it was then’ at Bell Labs. It’s a lot of fun to be around them. One of our students was funded by Mark Cuban on Shark Tank, others started a tech company that won a best of show award at SXSW. They are amazing.

Condensed and edited by Eric Gershon.

Photo by Christopher Carruth

Women represent more than half of all new U.S. college graduates but receive fewer than 20 percent of computer and information science degrees. Former Bell Labs executive Lucy Sanders is trying to fix that.

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Computers

CU Boulder Computing: Punch Cards to AI

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MOOC

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No Piano? No Problem

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Inquiry – Lucy Sanders

Computing Power

There’s huge demand in our economy for workers with computing skills and growing interest among students. Why aren’t there more women in computing?

You served as R&D vice president and chief technology officer at Bell Labs. How’d you get into computing, and did you ever find yourself thinking, ‘Where are all the other women?’

What’s NCWIT’s general strategy for drawing women into computing and helping them succeed?

How is CU Boulder doing?

What should industry be doing differently?

Are any industries or prominent companies notably better at recruiting, retaining and promoting women in computing than others?

What do young women interested in computing ask you most often?

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