significant achievements include the...

Annual Report for Academic Affairs Units Revised: 8/15/11 July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2011

Unit: Institute of Technology Prepared by: Orland Baiocchi, Larry Wear, and Zaide Chavez Date: July 11, 2011

1. Executive Summary: Provide an overall assessment of the state of the unit. Identify major successes, challenges, significant contextual factors that affected the program in this year (1 page maximum). The student enrollment at the Institute of Technology continues to grow despite the limitations in place, particularly in the Information Technology & Systems Program. The attached graphic shows the number of FTEs along the years.

SIGNIFICANT ACHIEVEMENTS INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING: ‐ Successful visit by ABET for the Computer Engineering and Systems program, with

full accreditation expected by September of this year.

‐ Change the name of the BS, BA and MS programs from Computing Software and Systems to Computer Science and Systems Program.

‐ Graduation of the first cohort of the new Information Technology and Systems program.

‐ Implementation of assessment in the CSS core courses (the CES had done that for

ABET)

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‐ Establishment of Curriculum Committees for all three undergraduate programs. ‐ Continued success in placing our graduates with the industry. ‐ Curricular changes in all programs, in particular in the CSS Core. ‐ Continuing success in faculty publications in refereed journals and conferences.

‐ Record number of submittal and funding research proposals.

‐ Significant renovation of laboratory equipment and computers.

‐ Expansion of collaboration with other units at UWT, UW Seattle and UW Bothell. ‐ Collaboration with industry, particularly in the health sector, as well as interchange

with international partners in Belgium, Brazil, Korea, Australia, UK and Denmark. ‐ Success in hiring three staff members (two replacements), two full time lecturers,

several part-time lecturers and one full-time tenure-track ITS faculty starting in January of 2012.

‐ Hiring of a new Director, starting August 15, 2011.

CHALLENGES: - Increase in the recruitment and enrollment in the CES and Graduate program. ‐ Retention of existing faculty and recover of lost CSS faculty lines.

‐ Preservation of the vision and mission for the Institute that were set by the Legislature

‐ Recover the budget losses using all possible means and resources. ‐ Re-structuring of the MSL program. ‐ Stabilization of the ITS program, including curriculum definitions and assessment.

CONTEXTUAL FACTORS THAT AFFECTED THE PROGRAM(S):

‐ Incoming leadership changes at all levels.

‐ Legal actions taken against the Institute and the University.

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‐ Budget shortage and uncertainty.

THREE MAJOR GOALS FOR THE 2010-11 ACADEMIC YEAR:

GOAL #1: CONTINUOUSLY DEVELOP, ASSESS AND IMPROVE OUR PROGRAM OFFERINGS - Extend the assessment procedures to the CSS and ITS programs. Alignment with which UWT goal: Goals I and II

Alignment with which Academic Affairs goal: Goal IV RESULTS:

For the CSS undergraduate core courses: - We have defined student learning outcomes (SLOs) for all core courses. - We have modified the master syllabi for all courses to include SLOs - We have assessed outcomes b) and e)

For the CSS graduate core courses: - We have defined student learning outcomes (SLOs) for all core courses. - We have modified the master syllabi for all courses to include SLOs - We have assessed outcomes e)

For the ITS undergraduate core courses:

- We have defined SLOs for some of the core ITS courses.

TO BE DONE: ‐ Complete the assessment of all outcomes in the CSS programs. ‐ To fully implement the process in the ITS program. GOAL #2: EXTEND OUR REACH AND INCREASE SUPPORT WITHIN THE COMMUNITY ‐ Find new sources of institutional funding for the MSL program ‐ Re-structure the Advisory Board and expand our community contacts and outreach.

Alignment with which UWT goal: Goals III and IV

Alignment with which Academic Affairs goal: Goals III and V

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RESULTS:

Institute of Technology Advisory Board

After a successful term, Bill Eklow has turned over the reins as Chairman to Bruce Kendall, CEO of the Pierce County Economic Development Board. Two female members have joined the advisory board. We have strengthened our ties with Intel Corporation, Dupont by welcoming our newest advisory board member, former alumni of our graduate program Dr. Matthew Tolentino.

TO BE DONE:

‐ Find other sources of funding for the MSL Program.

Goal 3: ESTABLISH A UNIQUE LOCAL, STATE, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL IDENTITY ‐ Define niches of research that are realistic and appropriate to the region.

o Mobile Robotic system Dr. Chung, Dr. Sheng and Dr. Bai have made significant contributions in this area. Five master’s projects related to this field have been initiated this year.

o Data Streams Dr. Teredesai and several of his students have seven ongoing projects in the data streams and data mining areas.

o Smart Grid

Dr. Baiocchi and Dr. Sheng are exploring participation in the statewide effort on the Smart Grid, with particular interest in the area of Power Line Communications.

‐ Increase visibility of the Institute at all levels.

Alignment with which UWT goal: Goals III and IV Alignment with which Academic Affairs goal: Goals III and IV RESULTS: ‐ Continued success of the Grey Hat Group. They came in 2nd at annual Pacific Rim

Cybersecurity Collegiate Challenge. Their second place finish was to the team that went on to win the national event.

‐ More courses are being developed in the area of information technology, energy, and

cyber-security.

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‐ South Sound Technology Conference 2011

o Good press coverage at this year’s South Sound Technology Conference. The conference was featured in the Tacoma News Tribune.

o The number of participants this year grew.

‐ Continued presence on the Washington Technology Industry Association. Addition as member of the Economic Development Board of Pierce County.

‐ Guest lecturers from both the South Sound and the State gave presentations to our students and campus community.

‐ Visits from several international scholars.

‐ Work in establishment agreements of international cooperation.

‐ Interaction with the private industry, Workforce Central, Innovate Washington and others to fund proposals of interest to the manufacturing industry, including $10M in submitted and in preparation proposals.

TO BE DONE: ‐ Continue the current efforts of outreach, research and innovation. Work on proposals that will benefit the military, including spouses and veterans.

2. Unit accomplishments for the year: a. Program accomplishments (e.g., awards, curriculum change, program review, accreditation)

This was addressed in the Executive Summary. b. Faculty Accomplishments (e.g., publications, grants, awards)

PROFESSORS Orlando Baiocchi

TEACHING: I volunteered again to teach a class last autumn, as I did last academic year. The class was CES 310 Linear Systems and Transforms, which is a required course for Computer Engineering and Systems. This is a difficult and critical course for electrical and computer engineering students across the country and a pre‐requisite to several subsequent courses in those programs. I also replaced Dr. Larry Wear in the TCES 102 course (Introduction to Engineering) during his sick leave in the spring. Materials for those courses are available on Moodle. I have proposed a new course for the CES program (Transmission Lines for Digital Applications) that has been approved at unit level and will be further developed next autumn as part of my teaching release. I was part of the curriculum committees of both CES and ITS programs.

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RESEARCH: Very limited as in the last few years due to the multiple administrative activities related to Director’s position. However, I have continued pursuing opportunities in the areas of the Smart Grid that relates to my previous work on Transient on Power Lines. I have also been in contact with the University of Campinas, Brazil and the Department of Applied Mathematics at UW Seattle in the area of Pulse Propagation, as a preparation for my sabbatical leave next academic year. In addition, I have been co‐author on the following conference papers: • Tenure: Observations and Consequences, with D. A. Rogers, Proceedings of the 2010 ASEE North Midwest Sectional Conference, Mankato, MN, November 2010. • Teaching Electrromagnetic Phenomena for Computer Engineers, with D.A. Rogers and L.L. Wear, 2011 Pacific Northwest ASEE Conference, Gonzaga University, March 2011. • Electrical and Computer Engineering Programs in Two Countries: A new Paradigm for Cooperation, with D. A. Rogers and M. Costa, to be presented, 2011 ASEE Annual Conference, Vancouver BC, June 2011 SERVICE: The following are external activities that are NOT part of my administrative responsibilities: • ABET Program Evaluator for Electrical Engineering programs, University of Alaska • Reviewer for IEEE Education Transaction • Reviewer for the 2011 ASEE Conference • Member of the Board of Directors of PCCC (Pierce County Careers Connection) • Participated in the Pierce County Workforce activities FUNDING: • Proposal for the NIST‐MEP program, co‐PI, submitted for $5.5 million • Proposal for the Department of Labor, PI, in preparation, for $5 million • Exploration of opportunities for funding in the Smart Grid • Exploration of opportunities in the military (Veterans, Displaced Spouses, etc.) IMPORTANT NOTE: This report does not include activities related to the position of Director of the Institute of Technology. Those activities are described in the Institute of Technology

2010‐11 Annual Report.

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Larry Wear Teaching Fall, 2010 TCES 101 Introduction to Engineering I This was the third time the course has been taught and some of the adjustments in the course made to address issues raised in previous reviews had positive affects on student evaluation scores. We devoted quite a bit of time to individual and group advising. This was done to address the problem that students receive very poor advising for the advising office when they enter as freshmen or sophomores. Several of the classes were devoted to making robots using the Lego Mindstorm kits. Nearly all the students enjoyed this part of the course and had fun with the robot competitions. We gave T‐shirts to the winners of the competition. In the last class of the quarter the freshmen were introduced to the seniors who were completing their controls and devices course. The seniors demonstrated the class project they built for the course. My feeling was that the class was quite successful and the freshmen enjoyed it. The student evaluation scores were all in the 4.0 to 4.8 range. TCSS 598 Masters Seminar in CSS This was the first time the seminar class has been split over three quarters. The students seemed to enjoy hearing about the research interests of all the faculty and several started dialogs with faculty to identify possible thesis and project topics. The student evaluation scores were all in the 4.1 to 4.8 range except on score of 3.9 for “Interest level of class sessions:” Winter, 2009 TCES 102 Introduction to Engineering II Because of knee replacement surgery in January, I was only back for the final two weeks of the quarter. I provided mush of the materials used in the course, but the delivery was done by Dr. Baiocchi. TCSS 598 Masters Seminar in CSS Because of knee replacement surgery in January, I was only back for the final two weeks of the quarter. I provided much of the materials used in the course, but the delivery was done by Dr. Teredesai. Spring, 2009 TCES 103 Introduction to Engineering III During this quarter the interns helped the construct and test their projects. Although the class is not over yet and there are no evaluations available, this class seems to be going well. A couple of the interns have made notable contributions to their projects and most seem to be enjoying the experience.

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TCSS 598 Masters Seminar in CSS In the third quarter of this sequence students are expected to develop a thesis proposal, a project proposal or a survey paper on a topic of current interest in the field. Our hope was that they would be able to get most of this done early in the quarter but that has not been the case. Many students have commented/complained about the heavy workload place on them by other instructors. They say that this has prevented them from making more progress on their papers. Until I see the final papers and hear the final presentations, I won’t know for sure whether or not this new approach has worked. This class is being used to assess: • A recognition of the need for and an ability to engage in self‐directed learning and continuing professional development; • An ability to communicate effectively in both oral and written forms; The assessment data has not been collected yet but will be before the end of the quarter. TCSS 497 Internship in CSS I was responsible for three directed readings during the current academic year. They were all completed satisfactorily. TCSS 498 Directed Readings in CSS I was responsible for two internships during the current academic year. They were all completed satisfactorily. TCSS 600 Independent Study in CSS I was responsible for one independent study during the current academic year. It will be completed this quarter. TCSS/TCES/TINFI 390 Undergraduate Seminars Coordination Starting this year, the 390 seminars for all three undergraduate degree programs was coordinated by one person. For the Autumn and Spring, this was my responsibility. In the past a faculty member from each program coordinated the seminars in his or her program. This was inefficient and made scheduling more difficult. Although there were some rough spots in the beginning, the new coordination process is working well now. As the coordinator, I meet with the facilitators the week before classes start and explain the program to them. Fortunately, most of the facilitators have taken 390 classes themselves and have a good idea what is needed. Prior to the start of the quarter I set up Moodle pages for each of the classes and migrate data from the previous quarter so that the facilitators have some examples from which to start. I give each facilitator “teacher” access to the Moodle page so that he or she can customize it as appropriate. Requiring that the facilitators use Moodle also has the advantage that over time we will collect a broad range of worksheets from which facilitators can work. I also visit the classes to observe how the facilitators are doing and after I visit, I send an email to the students in the classes asking for suggestion on how the facilitators might improve the classes. I try to make this visit in the third week of the quarter so that I can get feedback to the facilitators early enough that they can make adjustments, if needed. In the past, student evaluation scores have ranges from very good to very poor in these seminar classes. It will be interesting to see if the new coordination approach and class visits help improve average scores.

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Scholarship “Computer Engineering and Systems Capstone Design Course at UW Tacoma,” Capstone Design Conference, June 7‐9, Boulder, CO, Jei Sheng, Larry Wear and Orlando Baiocchi “Teaching Electromagnetic Phenomena in Computer Engineering,” ASEE Northwest Regional Conference, March 31‐April 2, 2011, Orlando Baiocchi, David Rogers, and Larry Wear. Service Program Hiring Committees: I have been on three hiring committees this year. The first was for the open Graduate Advisor position. I believe that committee did an excellent job by finding Kim Mucke and encouraging She is doing a great job. The second committee was tasked with identifying candidates for the ITS tenure track faculty position. This committee’s deliberations were quite contentious but we did manage to recommend two qualified candidates and the faculty agreed with the recommendations. Unfortunately, because of the delaying tactics some committee members used, our offer to our top candidate was delivered one day too late and he accepted a position at another school. An offer has been extended to the second candidate. The third committee did a search for an office assistant position. That search was successful and we hired Cathy Adgar‐Beal. She is also off to a good start. CES Undergraduate curriculum committee chair: The CES curriculum committee has had a great deal of work to do this year because of the ABET visit. Hopefully, the workload will diminish this coming year. Responsible for scheduling classes for all Institute classes: This job has become more complicated with the inclusion of the ITS and the necessity to hire so many full and part time lecturers. Mentor to junior faculty: As Jenny Sheng’s advisor this year I helped her prepare for her 3rd year review. That effort culminated in a vote by the tenured faculty to extend her contract for three more years. I have been working with Dan Zimmerman on the narrative for his tenure and promotion application. Working with Dan, I have identified four faculty members who will serve on his review committee. I have started the process of identifying external reviewers and have a set of 12 names. Graduate Program Coordinator: I do the initial screening of all applications and evaluate transcripts. I work with the GPA to arrange recruiting events. I advise all new grad students on which courses to take and which options might better suit their plans. I meet with most of the applicants during the application process to explain our program, the requirements for admission, and the graduation requirements. Undergraduate Assessment: The Institute requested that ABET visit the campus in Autumn quarter of 2010 and assess the Computer Engineering & Systems program for possible accreditation. As part of the accreditation visit and assessment process, the program is required to produce a self‐study document that documents how the program

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meets the ABET criteria for accreditation. I started preparing our self‐study document almost two years ago. Since this was the first such document prepared at UWT a great deal of effort was needed not just to write the document but to get the faculty and Industrial Advisory Board to buy in to the process and help produce documentation to verify that the program should be accredited. After getting agreement on the program objectives and student learning outcomes, we mapped the outcomes to individual courses. Then we developed rubrics to help objectively measure the student’s ability to satisfy the individual outcomes. I was responsible for creating most of the rubrics and helped the faculty apply them to their courses. After the outcomes had been assessed, I led several meeting where the data from the assessments was reviewed to determine what if any course changes were needed. I adapted an action plan model developed by the School of Business for use in our program. When all the data had been collected and analyzed, I put it together with help from other faculty into the self study that was submitted in June of 2010. Shortly after our self‐study was submitted, I attended an ABET meeting in Washington DC where I met the team leader of our accreditation team. And we began making plans for the October visit. The October visit was very successful and we received many complements on our selfstudy. During the exit interview, the review team pointed out two areas that they felt were weaknesses. One was in the area of addressing realistic design constraints in Criteria c) and the other was in the area of maintenance of laboratory facilities. We submitted a plan for addressing the issues raised by raised by the team in our preliminary response, sent in May. We are implementing that plan now and will submit revised assessment data shortly after school is out. The UW is currently engaged in its own accreditation process and since we are part of the UW, all of our program must start moving toward an assessment model similar to the ABET model. I have served as the Institute’s representative on the UWT Assessment have also been involved in the assessment activities for the CSS and ITS programs. Unfortunately, there hasn’t be a great deal of progress made in the ITS program. This is due in part to the fact that Sam Chung, one of the “founders” of the program has been on sabbatical all year. I have worked with a couple ITS faculty, Seth and Yan and got them to specify learning outcomes for their courses. UWT Member of Faculty Assembly Executive Committee. Helped draft proposal relating to shared governance and the budget process. Member of UWT Assessment Committee External ABET Program Evaluator‐ no visit this year. American Council on Education (ACE)‐ this organization evaluates educational programs offered by private companies and the military to determine if post‐secondary credit should be awarded for courses taught by these organizations. I participated in three

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reviews the year: navy career training was evaluated at San Diego, CA; army communications courses were evaluated in Washington, DC. As a result of these evaluations service men and women will be able to get college credits for their training in the military.

Campus representative for American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE)

Josh Tenenberg I Teaching I.1 Courses

All materials related to my courses can be found at the directory tree rooted at: http://faculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg/courses/

The following table summarizes my teaching responsibilities for this academic year and last spring, along with summary student evaluations. I had one course release in spring for co‐editing the ACM Transactions on Computing Education. The “evals” column is the combined items 1‐4 score on the Form B that is used for anonymous end‐of‐term student evaluations. Quarter Number Title Enrollment evals S10 TGH 303 Global Challenges 14 4.8 F10 TCSS 325 Computers, Ethics, & Society 16 4.7 F10 TCSS 360 Software Development & QA 30 3.4 W11 TCSS 360 Software Development & QA 26 4.3 W11 TCSS 452 Human‐Computer Interaction 22 4.9 S11 TCSS 360 Software Development & QA 22 NA During this year, I am responsible for the assessment of the CSS degree student learning outcome b: “an ability to analyze a problem, identify and define the computing requirements appropriate to its solution” using data from teaching the TCSS 360 course. I will discuss the course, the data, my inferences from this data, and the changes to the course resulting from this data. The master syllabus for the course can be found at the url: https://repos.insttech.washington.edu/trac/_faculty/wiki/ModelFormat. This includes the catalog description, preconditions, student learning goals, CSS and UWT student learning outcomes that the course contributes to, and the sequence of topics. The main assignment that students work on is the construction of a term‐length software project that they develop in teams. I use a waterfall lifecycle model to structure both their activities on this assignment and the sequencing of topics in the course as a whole. I divide the term roughly into thirds: requirements gathering and documentation during the first third, designing the class structure to meet the requirements and representing this using UML in the second third, and coding and testing the design in the final third. Students turn in a project “deliverable” associated with each of these three phases: a requirements document,

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a design document, and code and tests. A one‐page, week‐by‐week schedule of autumn term can be found here: http://faculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg/courses/360/f10/docs/schedule.pdf. The requirements phase of the project (roughly the first 3 weeks) is when the main instruction occurs related to outcome b. The main elements of the instructional design are 1) the discussions and exercises that I ask students to undertake during class , 2) weekly readings related to requirements gathering, 3) a requirements homework that is done individually based on the first class session and due the second class 1) session, and 3) work by student groups on their requirements document, and presentation of this document to the whole class from comment and critique prior to official hand‐in. At the start of the term, I give students the scenario that they are on a software project team tasked with writing a new piece of software. I ask them “where do you start?” and have them brainstorm a list of possibilities. After a brief discussion about the importance of determining just what it is the software will do, I simulate a requirements elicitation session by giving them a one sentence description of the software they will develop, taking on the role of the client, and having them ask the client questions so as to elicit the requirements. During autumn, the one sentence software description was “You will build a system that helps manage the conference paper review process for academic conferences.” Students are given the assignment due at the start of the next class session of constructing a table that lists the users of the software, and the set of tasks that the software will allow each user to carry out. Over the next several weeks, I continue to “play” the client, reserving 15 ‐ 30 minutes in most class sessions for additional discussions with the client. In addition, I have set up a Catalyst Discussion Board where students can ask questions of the client outside of class. Having the discussion board (rather than, say, using email) creates a level playing field, in that all questions and answers are archived and available to all project groups. Over the next several weeks, the class sessions involve discussion of working in groups, requirements elicitation (i.e. what are effective and ineffective ways to talk with clients), requirements documentation (and the range of ways to do so), constructing use cases, eliciting and documenting business rules, nonfunctional requirements, and paper prototpyes. Outlines of what occurs during each class session during the autumn 2010 term can be found here: https://docs.google.com/View?id=dhh699c_32g3rgcmht. I devote much of one class session to the writing of use cases, since we use them to drive the design, coding, and testing phases. I provide students with a template for use cases (adapted from one of the readings), and students develop one in class in their project groups, post this work online, and I critique one or two of these for the entire class. I devote the bulk of another class to the development of paper prototypes using a similar method: students prepare with a reading, develop a paper prototype for one of the use cases in groups, and receive public critique. Another significant activity that students undertake (and that provides feedback to me about their learning) is what I call a project “check‐in.” A check‐in is ungraded (but required), and is a subset of the current deliverable that groups are currently working on that is presented for critique from other students and the instructor. I introduced these into this course after working with an industry fellow, since the industry fellow’s expertise is generally expressed when publicly critiquing student work. For the requirements document (due at the start of week 4), the check‐ins occur at the start of weeks 2 and 3. For the first check‐in, students present the list

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https://docs.google.com/View?id=dhh699c_32g3rgcmht


of users and the tasks that each user is to carry out. And for the second check‐in, students present a use case. The assessment data that I use is from the autumn 2010 and the winter 2011 offerings of this course, with 30 and 26 students enrolled respectively. The data are the numerical scores that individuals received on the first deliverable. This individual score is the score that their group received on the deliverable multiplied by their “individual multiplier.” This multiplier is determined by their contribution to the group as evaluated by self‐ and peer‐evaluations, as well as evaluations of the weekly reports that each group submits on their activities. Each deliverable is graded on a discrete scale of 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4. Here is a description of roughly what each numeric score means: • 4: All main concepts and skills mastered and all questions answered (or problems solved), with at most minor misconceptions or errors. • 3: Minor misconceptions/errors or incompleteness, minor problems with written organization or grammar, competent application of the ideas discussed in class and in reading. • 2: One or more of the main concepts has not been mastered or one or more of the questions or relevant issues missing. Problems with written organization and grammar, spotty application of course ideas. • 1: Significant misconceptions and/or incompleteness. Significant problems with grammar or organization. • 0: Didn’t hand in, or little evidence that any of the main concepts and skills have been attempted, let alone mastered. For autumn 2010, 10 students scored “3”, 6 scored “3.6”, and 14 scored 4, for a mean of 3.6. For winter 2011, 14 students scored “3” and 12 students scored “4”, for a mean score of 3.5. In examining the critiques that I sent to each group on their deliverable, the main problems that students had were in 1) not adopting the client perspective and client language, 2) ambiguity in describing requirements, and 3) inconsistencies among the different parts of the document, especially between the tasks described on the user/task list and the use cases. Based on student performance, and also critiques that students provided me with during a session in which we debriefed the course, I made the following changes to the course between fall and spring: • I need to underscore–in print and in every class session–the importance of adopting the client perspective and client language. And when I am the client, I need to feign ignorance when they use “geekspeak.” • Using concrete examples, I need to demonstrate how to maintain consistency between their task lists and their use cases. • We need to spend more time in class (probably during their check‐ins) identifying and eliminating ambiguity in their requirements. • Since I did not get “A” work from half the groups, and they appear eager to provide me with what I want, I need to make my specifications more explicit for exactly the sections that I would like to see in their requirements document. • Since the fully dressed use cases that I have been requiring (so called by Cockburn because of their level of detail and formality) are so rigid, and a mismatch for the lightweight nature of the rest of the requirements document, I will use casual use cases. Since Cockburn hardly touches on these, I will develop and disseminate a template for the casual use case that students should use.

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I.2 Other teaching activities During spring 2011, I supervised the honor’s thesis for Judy Jones, a Global Honors student. She is studying the relationship between a community’s cultural values and how this shapes and constrains the governance policies that they develop for groundwater. She is using the institutional‐analytic framework that she learned while in my TGH 303 Global Challenges: Governing the Commons course in Spring, 2010. II Research II.1 Publications/Presentations Youn‐kyung Lim, Erik Stolterman, Josh Tenenberg, “The Anatomy of Prototypes as a Framework for Specifying Fundamental Characteristics of Prototypes” (extended abstract based on 2009 TOCHI paper). Asian Conference on Design & Digital Engineering. Jeju, Korea, August 25‐28, 2010. Jonas Boustedt, Robert McCartney, Josh Tenenberg, Stephen Cooper, Daniel Garcia, Michelle Hutton, Nick Parlante, Brad Richards. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” In SIGCSE ’11: Proceedings of the 41st SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Dallas, TX, USA, March 2011. Tenenberg, J. and McCartney, R. “Entry Points for Computing Education Research.” Transactions on Computing Educaction 11(1), 2011. I have had three main research activities during this academic year. First, I have served as Co‐Editor‐in‐ Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computing Education. This involves 5‐10 hours per week throughout the calendar year. The main activities are collaborating with my Co‐EIC (Robert McCartney of the University of Connecticut), appointing an editorial board, assigning papers to reviewers and associate editors, preparing meta‐reviews, making publication decisions, soliciting and choosing special issue guest editors, determining which papers are to be published in which issues. Although demanding, I find this work important and satisfying. Second, as part of the Disciplinary Commons project that I developed for which I have an NSF/CCLI grant (in year 3 of 3), I worked with a leader of a Disciplinary Commons group in Southern Illinois. During the current academic year, my Co‐PI on the NSF grant, Dennis Bouvier (at Southeastern Illinois University), finished an instantiation of the Disciplinary Commons in the subject area of Software Engineering. My role has been to help Dennis carry out his leadership role in running this year’s Commons. I have also helped plan, develop, and oversee the evaluation of Dennis’s Commons, working closely with the UW Office of Educational Assessment. In addition, Sally Fincher (the co‐developer of the Disciplinary Commons) and I have been authoring training materials for other Commons leaders, including a leader’s manual and website, and have been working on publications related to this project. Finally, I was co‐PI on a $4,000,000 collaborative proposal ($2M to UW) to NSF (the Computing Education for the 21st Century solicitation) to adapt and extend the Disciplinary Commons nationwide for high school teachers teaching Advanced Placement Computer Science. And third, I continued to develop, publish, and disseminate my Industry Fellows project. The Industry Fellows project involves a practicing college or university faculty member and practicing industry professional (the industry fellow) in the joint curriculum review, planning and delivery of a course related to the professional’s domain of expertise. Working together exploits what

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each does best. The faculty member retains full responsibility for all academic aspects of the course: planning and writing the syllabus, developing the assignments and examinations, and assigning grades. The professional joins the faculty member in the classroom on a regular basis as a co‐lecturer (though not necessarily every class session), interacts directly with the students, and evaluates a sample of the student work on an advisory basis. Targeted courses are those tied closely to professional practice using tangible representations of work, such as prototypes, storyboards, UML diagrams, and flow diagrams. I will be presenting a paper at the ASEE annual conference on this project during June 2011. II.2 Future research goals and plans My goals for the upcoming year are to continue my research with the Disciplinary Commons, the Industry Fellows, and as Co‐EIC of ACM/TOCE. III Service III.1 Institute of Technology Undergraduate CSS Committee: I served as chair of this committee throughout the academic year. I spearheaded the effort to update the syllabi for the Core courses, as well as oversaw this year’s assessment efforts of our student learning outcomes. Undergraduate ITS Committee: I was a member of this committee. Graduate Review Data Committee: I chaired this committee. We developed, administered, analysed, and reported on a survey based on issues pointed out during our last review and requested to be included in our next self‐study report. UWT/CTC liaison: In this position, I co‐developed the agendas for the quarterly UWT/CTC meetings, served as an organizer and facilitator for these meetings, and worked with Michael Panitz and Tina Ostrander on planning the agenda for these meetings. Mentor: I served as mentor for Yan Bai, Matthew Alden, Alan Fowler, Seth Syberg, and Joe McCarthy, making sure to meet with them at least once per quarter. I met with Seth and Joe weekly during the winter quarter. ITS Faculty Search: I served on the faculty search for the ITS position. III.2 Campus and University Institute Director Search: I served on the Institute Director Search. III.3 Community and Profession ICER Program Committee: I served on the Program Committee of the 7th annual International Computing Education Research workshops. This is the main computing education research conference that takes place in the world. Serving on the program committee involves reviewing approximately 8 papers. Australasion Computing Education (ACE) Program Committee: This is the main computing educationconference in Australasia. Serving on the program committee involves reviewing 4 ‐ 8 papers. ACM Education Council: I was appointed to this council during last academic year. The Council’s aim “is to promote ACM’s educational mission to as wide a range of constituencies as possible:

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universities, community colleges, high schools, corporations, and the US government.” The responsibility involves email interactions and attendance at 2‐3 meetings per year. Consultant I serve as an external consultant on Sally Fincher’s project “To see ourselves as others see us: sharing and representing disciplinary classroom practice”, funded by the UK National Teaching Fellowship Scheme. This has involved approximately 3 days per year in emails. Advisory Board member: I serve on the advisory board of the NSF‐funded grant “Rigorous Research in Engineering Education”, led by Karl Smith and Ruth Streveler at Purdue. This involves review of reports, and travel to and attendance in a one‐day meeting. I am also on the advisory board of the NSF‐funded project “Reconceptualizing Computer Science Education: Integrating Students Prior Knowledge into Pedagogy”, led by Michael Clancy and Andrea DiSessa, with similar responsibilities. NSF Review Panel: I served as a reviewer on the July panel session for the TUES funding solicitation of the Division of Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSORS

Donald Chinn

Executive Summary This past year, I have engaged in a wide range of activities, especially in the area of service. I have continued to develop in my teaching, and I have continued to pursue scholarly activity with my Australian colleagues and in other projects. TEACHING Summary I have continued to teach and reflect upon TCSS courses I have taught before. I taught a UWT freshman core class on logic and science. What follows are some brief reflective comments on each of the courses since Spring 2010. Spring 2010 TCSS 440/540 (Theory of Computation). I have taught this course many times before, and I did not change the way I taught it. Fortunately, the students who take the course tended to be highly motivated and have enough mathematical background to grasp the fairly abstract concepts in this course. Autumn 2010 TCSS 343 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) and TCSS 543 (Advanced Algorithms). Having taught these courses before, I presented the material in the same way as before. This quarter, the students in TCSS 543 seemed to have less than usual preparation from their undergraduate algorithms course. I believe that we need consider our admission requirements into the graduate program and implement a process that increases the likelihood that students who enter the program are prepared for the mathematical rigor of 543.

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In TCSS 343, I made one change to the way I organized the peer assessment activities. Rather than having individual students solve problems and critiquing the solutions as individuals, I had them work on both the solutions to the problems and the critiques in groups of three or four. The rationale is that by having them do these exercises in groups, they would be talking to each other more and therefore practicing using the language of the discipline. The idea is that by being asked to communicate with each other about the ideas/concepts, students would have to agree on a common way to talk about them. It was also a mechanism to reduce the amount of grading I needed to do for this activity. There seemed to be unanticipated positive side effects: (1) the quality of the solutions seemed to be better (presumably because more eyeballs and brains were at work in solving the problem), and (2) the quality of the critiques were better. Winter 2011 TCSS 343. See Autumn 2011 for changes in structure. The group of students for this particular quarter seemed to be less motivated and less prepared than previous groups. They seemed more concerned about grades, interpreting instructions literally, etc. than learning the material. However, overall, I think the class made progress in their education, both technically and in their attitude towards learning. Spring 2011 TCSS 343. I followed the same structure as previous quarters this academic year. This quarter’s group of students seem much stronger than in Winter quarter, both technically and in their attitude towards learning. TCORE 122A (Logic, Argument, Science, and Truth). I taught this 5‐unit freshman core course, and it followed the same structure I used last year (Winter 2010). Since the class was held in Spring quarter (rather than Winter), I thought that perhaps the class would be

more mature in terms of study skills and behaviors. However, I found that this particular group was one of the more challenged in terms of study skills. More than previous freshman classes I have taught, students came to class not having read the assigned readings, they were less willing to participate in discussions, and they had weaker writing skills. This greatly affected how quickly I could discuss the material and influenced the choice of readings later in the quarter. It is clear that some of the students in the class have the intellectual capacity to learn the material in the class, but their study habits seems to be preventing them from achieving their potential.

Other 1. I worked with Cumi Ikeda on a presentation in IAS’s Teaching Forum on January 7, 2011, entitled “What Movies Can Teach Us About Teaching.” Graduate Student Supervised Brent Lessley (thesis, chair, with Matthew Alden, Daniel Bryan, and Ehsan Feroz), “Application of Multi‐Objective Estimation of Distribution Algorithm to Financial Fraud Classification,” Spring 2011 (anticipated).

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Independent Study Doug Sherbon (directed readings, 2 credits). “Readings in Heuristic Techniques with Applications to the Traveling Salesman and Satisfiability Problems,” Winter 2011. (Final report on readings attached.) SCHOLARSHIP

Summary and Future Plans Despite a difficult academic year within the Institute and UWT (Director search, ITS tenure‐track faculty search, Institute lecturer hirings, Chancellor search, and other campus‐wide discussions), I was able to make progress on some of the scholarly projects I was working on last year. During my visit to Australia in January, 2011, I was able to continue the projects that my colleagues and I began during my sabbatical and continued to work on in 2010. We have made plans to continue our work on developing an exam classification system and to understand student study habits in CS 1. I am also planning to resume work on projects that have been put on hold for much of this academic year. My work with Laura Feuerborn in Education will continue in the summer, and I also want to resume work on the book project I began in 2009 (a problem solving guide for computer science majors). Papers Published/Submitted Sheard, J., Carbone, A., Chinn, D., and Laakso, M.‐J., Sheard, J. Exam Taxonomy Workshop: What is the nature of introductory programming exam papers? Workshop at the Thirteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference. Perth, Australia, January, 2011. Sheard, J., Simon, Carbone, A., Chinn, D., Laakso, M.‐J., Clear, T., de Raadt, M., D’Souza, D., Harland, J., Lister, R., and Philpott, A., Warburton, G. Exploring programming assessment instruments: a classification scheme for examination questions. Submitted to the International Computing Education Research Workshop (ICER). Conferences Attended SIGCSE 2011 (Dallas, TX), March 10‐13, 2011. (Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education) ACE (Perth, Australia), January 17‐20, 2011. (Australasian Computing Education Conference) SERVICE Summary I have continued with service activities at all levels. Most of my activities complement my teaching and research interests. This year, there were an unusually large number of issues at the program and campus levels that needed to be addressed. This affected the time available for me to focus attention on teaching and research.

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External 1. This year, I reviewed papers for the conferences CCSC‐NW, SIGCSE, ITiCSE, and ICER, and the journals TOCE (Transactions on Computer Education, formerly JERIC), Computer Science Education, and Educational Assessment. 2. (Something I did not mention in my annual report in 2010.) In summer 2009, I served as an external reviewer on a tenure case at another university. UWT & UW 1. I am the chair of the UWT Faculty Affairs Committee of Faculty Assembly (which, under the new faculty governance structure, means that I am also a member of the Faculty Assembly Executive Council). The main issues that Faculty Affairs has addressed are related to equity issues and productivity: faculty workload, research support at UWT, and day care at UWT. For the first time, the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs approved for this past academic year one course for each chair of the standing committees of Faculty Assembly. The course release greatly helped in allowing me to have the time to do the work as chair. 2. Executive Council duties included being involved in a series of meetings with campus leadership to develop campus principles/priorities. (Autumn 2010) 3. I participated in meetings regarding the design and implementation of the freshman core courses. (ongoing) 4. I am on the TLC faculty advisory board. The board has not met this academic year. 5. Served on the hiring committee for a tenure‐track faculty hire in mathematics (John Banks, chair) 6. On the third‐year review committee for Peter Selkin (IAS) (Sian Davies‐Vollum, chair). Institute 1. CSS committee, CES committee. One of the important tasks that the CSS committee accomplished this year was to revise the “master syllabi” for all CSS core courses. 2. Led the development of Faculty Workload Guidelines for the Institute that the Institute faculty adopted (February 25, 2011). 3. Served on a committee to hire lecturers for academic year 2010‐11 (Summer 2010) (Larry Wear, chair). 4. Served as chair of a committee to hire part‐time lecturers for Winter and Spring 2011 (November 2010). (Membership on the committee was the same as the summer committee.) 5. “Life After Graduation” workshop (ongoing, with Andrew Fry). February 8, 2011 and May 18, 2011. 6. This past summer (2010), we continued to incorporate CS Unplugged activities into MSL (Math, Science, and Leadership) in the Institute. I helped train the MSL teachers to understand and adapt some of the exercises for use in MSL. The activities were wildly popular with the students. 7. New student orientation. I presented a faculty perspective of the CSS program to incoming students with tips for how to study and approach school. (Sept. 2010) 8. Faculty adviser of the WiCS (Women in Computer Science) student organization. The WiCS group is an active student group, with regular visits to local companies to help members understand their career opportunities.

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9. Collegial evaluation of teaching: on the two‐person committees to evaluate Yan Bai (with Seth Syberg) and George Mobus (with John Mayer). Workload Considerations Teaching: Autumn 2010: TCSS 343, 543 Winter 2011: TCSS 343 Spring 2011: TCSS 343, TCORE 122A Course release for being chair of the Faculty Affairs committee of Faculty Assembly. Directed readings: Doug Sherbon (2 credits) Masters thesis: Brent Lessley (chair)

Sam Chung On Sabbatical George Mobus

Summary

This year a good deal of time and effort, as well as frustration, have centered on the campus administration issues. As a member of the Executive Council, I have been actively engaged in the search for the new chancellor in an advisory role. I served on the search committee for the Director of the Institute. The issues that came before the APC, of which I am chair, were extensive compared with previous years (when I served as a member). The work environment at UWT has become very traumatic. Aside from the budget crises the kinds of decisions and judgments being made by upper administrators continues to be a source of discouragement. And I feel I have suffered a great loss of any kind of productivity as a result. I estimate that well over half of the time I have spent working at UWT has been directed toward these kinds of issues with no real product to show For example, as a member of the EC I participated in a series of special meetings regarding the “principles” that we would adopt regarding program evaluations in light of budget cutbacks. I consider these to have been essentially a waste of time as they did not end with a clear understanding of what these principles should be. Indeed I found out that a parallel committee (administrators) was working on the same ideas but with a different perspective. So much for good communications and shared governance. In spite of these frustrations and aggravations, I have tried to keep up with the normal work of my station. This generally meant spending most weekends in the office to keep up with grading and such. Below are the details of those “normal” activities.

Teaching

Courses and other teaching activities

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Fall, 2010 TCSS 371 – Computer Architecture This course was developed to better serve the CES students as well as provide a more rigorous version for the CSS students. This year I have been conducting an experiment in supporting a cohort model for this course, 372, and 422 with large class sizes. We admitted over 50 students in this first course. The intent was to determine if we could successfully run larger class sizes while not sacrificing quality. I also sought to increase the level of C programming that had been intended for this course but had not been strongly emphasized in prior quarters. While there were several logistical problems involved in the course I think I generally achieved what I set out to do. The students were not particularly thrilled about the C programming but warmed up to it as the quarter developed. I did have to offer a number of off‐time tutorial sections to help some students who were actually still weak in Java. I will be writing up a full report on the whole experiment later this quarter. The course materials can be found on Moodle. TCSS 437/590B – Robotics This year I insisted that everyone write their robotic programs using NXC a subset of C. I admitted some graduate students who were looking for electives. These students did an extra research project and wrote reports in addition to the regular curriculum. http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Academics/TCSS437/ Winter, 2011 TCSS 465/590C – Embedded Systems This course followed the same syllabus and project schedule as the prior year. I admitted some graduate students to take the class. Three of the five needed to do different projects than the normal curriculum due to not having had operating systems or having had it so long ago that they were unsure of their memories of key aspects of multi‐tasking. We found interesting problems for them to work on that did not require as much detailed knowledge of system kernel programming and were related to energy system controls. One grad student had expertise in porting programming languages to other platforms and he actually was able to get a full C implementation running on the NXT platform. This will be very useful for future robotics classes. See: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Academics/TCSS465/ for details. TCSS 372/572 – Machine Organization The follow‐on to 371, this course only had about 30 of the original 50 cohort due in part to a glitch in the prerequisite of 342. This was unfortunate in that it reduced the cohort size which had an impact on evaluation of the large class size management effectiveness due to a cohort model being followed. In addition there were a number of other students who had not yet taken 372 that came into this group and changed the dynamic considerably. Most of them had not done much, if any, C programming nor understood the abstract data type design method I had

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http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Academics/TCSS437/



taught in 371. Once again I held additional workshops to bring these students up to speed. I paired the teams between people who had been in my 371 and these new students so that the latter could learn from the former re: C and ADT design. This actually worked pretty well. The course materials can be found on Moodle. Spring, 2011 TCSS 422 – Operating Systems We are just past the halfway point in the course that continues the experiment in large class size and cohort model. Once again there were a large number of students who came into the course with little or no C programming. I have offered the workshops during the time I would have been teaching the TINST401 class. But these have not been well attended. Course materials are available on Moodle. The course site is: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Academics/TCSS422/ Course Development Experiment with 371/372/422 Cohort Sequence and Large Class Size As mentioned above, I have been conducting an experiment to see if we can accommodate larger class sizes. I had supposed that adopting a cohort model and a contiguous sequencing of the courses would allow us to manage a class of 50 or more students without sacrificing quality. Unfortunately due to scheduling problems and a problem with the prerequisite structure, we were not able to keep a large cohort throughout the sequence. I will be writing up a full report of my experiences later this quarter.

Scholarship

Mobus, George E. (2010). Energy and the Economic Outlook: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Invited talk, The Institute for the Future – Ten‐year Forecast Retreat, April 26‐27, 2010, Sausalito CA. Mobus, George E. (2011 – in publication). The Sapient Brain: The Evolution of Wisdom, book chapter in: Science, Wisdom, and the Future (forthcoming), The Collins Foundation Press. [Forthcoming book chapter developed from the above talk. This chapter was accepted last year (and reported then) but due to an illness of one of the editors it was held up to this year. The hold up, however, allowed me to make additional edits and add some new material.] Mobus, George E. (2011). “Net Energy and the Economy: A Tutorial”, The Third International Biophysical Economics Meeting, April 2011, SUNY‐ESF, Syracuse New York. [A workshop on the role of net energy in the economy given the evening before the conference, http://web.mac.com/biophysicalecon/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html.]

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http://web.mac.com/biophysicalecon/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html


Mobus, George E. (2010). “Work, Exergy, the Economy, Money, and Wealth”, The Oil Drum. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7016. Mobus, George E. (2010). “Can we solve two problems at once ‐ unemployment and preparing for power down?”, The Oil Drum. http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/6877 Mobus, George E. (2010). “Peak Oil: How Supply Crunch Can Lead to Lower Prices (for a while!)”, The Oil Drum. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6814 Mobus, George E. (2010). “The Future of Capitalism ‐ Profits and Growth”, The Oil Drum. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6374 Mobus, George E. (2009). “Bottleneck by William Catton ‐ A Review”, The Oil Drum. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5954 Note that all of the above Oil Drum papers were also picked up by various other energy sites, such as The Energy Bulletin, http://www.energybulletin.net/ In addition to these formal papers, I have made a number of informal presentations on campus, to the Pierce County Sustainability council, and to a graduate class in sustainability at Evergreen College. I was a featured speaker at the second Pacific Science Center, Science Café in Tacoma, Dec. 2010. Energy and the Economy George Mobus (Univeristy of Washington) talks about the relationship between energy and the global economy. http://kcts9.org/education/science‐cafe Recorded by KCTS, Channel 9. http://kcts9.org/education/science‐cafe/energy‐economy Work in Progress Mobus, G.E. & Hall, C.A.S. (in progress). The Dynamics of an Abstract Economic System: Part I, Energetics – A Model of Finite Energy Resource Extraction and the Energy Costs Entailed [The first of two papers detailing the computer model of an abstract economy based on the flow of energy from a finite (non‐renewable) source. This work has undergone some extensive changes and is still in progress.] Mobus, G.E. & Hall, C.A.S. (in progress). The Dynamics of an Abstract Economic System: Part II, The Fate of Assets – Wealth Generation in a Declining Energy Scenario [The second paper detailing the implications of post‐peak energy decline and its impact on wealth creation. Same state.] Mobus, George, Kalton, Michael, & Wakeland, Wayne (book in progress). An Introduction to the Fundamentals of Systems Science, Springer, NY (estimated publication in 2011). [Chapters 1 through 5 are drafted.]

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http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7016

http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/6877




http://www.energybulletin.net/

http://kcts9.org/education/science-cafe

http://kcts9.org/education/science-cafe/energy-economy


Service

External Continuing my work with the North West Energy Transition Organization, Seattle WA. Continuing: The Biophysical Economics Workgroup: An organizer for the group and the conference (http://web.mac.com/biophysicalecon/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html ). From this work I have been recognized as an energy researcher at the University of Washington, http://www.washington.edu/research/energy/researcher/george‐e‐mobus Question Everything Blog. For the past several years I have been maintaining a personal blog called “Question Everything” (http://questioneverything.typepad.com/ ) that is intended to be a public educational effort. While not represented as a scholarly publication, I have published many posts that cover some of my scholarly activities such as in energy, biophysical economics, and neuropsychology, along with some social commentary on the impacts of these areas of research. UWT Academic Policy Committee chair Executive Council member Program Graduate Committee Director Search Committee

Ankur Teredesai

1. Teaching

1.1 Courses

List the courses you taught since the last evaluation:

Table 1: List of courses taught since last evaluation

# Quarter Taught Course Number

Course Title # of students enrolled G‐Graduate, U‐Undergraduate

1 Spring 2011 TCSS 590 Social Network Analysis G(17)

2 Spring 2011 TCSS 590 Ad‐Auctions G(8)

3 Spring 2011 TCSS 700 Master’s Thesis in CSS G(2)

4 Spring 2011 TCSS 600 Research in CSS G(1)

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5 Winter 2011 TCSS 700 Master’s Thesis in CSS G(3)

6 Winter 2011 TCSS 600 Research in CSS G(1)

7 Winter 2011 TCSS 590 Web and Data Science G(16)

8 Winter 2011 TCSS 555 Data Mining G(30)

9 Winter 2011 TCSS 598 Master’s Seminar G(17)

10 Winter 2011 TCSS Undergraduate U(1)

499 Research in CSS

11 Winter 2011 TINFO 499 Undergraduate Research in ITS U(1)

12 Autumn 2010 TCSS 700 Master’s Thesis in CSS G(3)

13 Autumn 2010 TCSS 590 Data Streams G(6)

14 Autumn 2010 TCSS 490 Special Topics U(2)

15 Summer 2010 TCSS 600 Research in CSS G(1)

Courses co‐taught with others at UWT: This includes short courses taught together and co‐advising directed studies and projects/thesis where I invested significant time.

# Quarter Taught Course Number

Course Title # of students enrolled G‐Graduate, U‐Undergraduate

Co‐taught with

16 Spring 2010 TCSS 602 Research in CSS G(1) Martine

17 Spring 2010 TCSS 600/498

Hands on Algorithms

G(2) U(6) Zimmerman & Stiber (UWB)

18 Winter 2011 TCSS 598 Master’s Seminar G(17) Wear

Teaching summary:

Overall, I taught 3 regular ‐ 2 of which were new preps and 2 short‐courses‐ both of which were new preps (equivalent to 1 regular course). I supervised 4 graduate students on their Master’s Thesis, supervised 3 graduate students on Independent Studies, and supervised 1 undergrad ITS student, and 3 undergraduate CSS students in directed research/readings. This year I had 2 course buyouts from grants.

1) In addition to the above table provide: a) Reflective statement on the strengths and weaknesses of two different listed courses and plans for improvement. b) Copies or links to syllabi and all course material for the two courses discussed just above.

1.1.1 Course1‐ Reflective Statement and copy/link to syllabi:

TCSS 555 Data Mining

Teaching Materials including syllabus are located at https://moodle.insttech.washington.edu/

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I taught data mining after a hiatus of two years. I need to provide some context on the research in the field of data mining which has rapidly evolved. I’ve been quite involved in this community for several years and these days I serve on the program committees of three of the flagship data mining conferences: ACM SIGKDD ‐ Knowledge Discovery in Databases, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), and WWW – the world wide web conference. Acceptance rates are below 20% in each and almost down to 12% in the last couple of years. The submissions have gone up to almost 500 papers in each venue. Keeping up with all the advancements is thus proving increasingly difficult and challenging. Providing our students with the best practices and state‐of‐the‐art knowledge also is therefore becoming challenging.

I decided to switch gears in this course and changed the syllabus completely from the last time I taught the course. Instead of giving a term‐project, I designed 4 ‘two week sprint’ projects which helped students sample some of the burning issues in the field including, model evaluation, social network mining, web mining and clustering.

The classes and lecture material was also redesigned. I decided to collaborate with Prof. Zaki from RPI in helping him edit and improve a new textbook he is writing on the topic. His text is much more statistical in its foundation compared to the earlier one I was using which had a more database centric material. Our students had significant problem in handling this material and the linear algebra needed to understand some of the concepts. I will review my choice of the textbook next year when I teach the course again and may opt to go back to the Han and Kamber text. I had to frequently have additional recitations on Friday morning to help weaker students get up to speed on the mathematics.

I also started giving weekly quizzes in class to test if the students were reading the material from the text and understanding the covered material in class. This significantly added to the grading load. In addition to this you may notice that there were 30 (yes 30) graduate students enrolled in the course.

When I teach this course again next year, I will reduce the coverage of topics and spend the first two weeks on preparing the students for the math they will encounter. I’ll also likely reduce the number of projects to 3 from 4.

I reviewed my teaching evaluations and even though I got a score of just below 4 for the class, I’m quite happy with the class’s challenge index. I’m also quite satisfied that the written comments are noteworthy and so many of the students enjoyed the course and gained tremendously from it. It helped many of them get internships for the summer. Out of the 30 students in class almost 15 have expressed additional interest in the area and though I do not have the bandwidth to support that many research

projects/thesis, I will try to help them as best as I can. What is more important to note is that the knowledge of statistical analysis and data cleaning and mining is now widely applicable in CS research and these students are well prepared to work with many other faculty members in our department in a variety of areas.

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1.2 Discussion of additional teaching‐related activities:

Please provide a discussion of additional teaching‐related activities, which might include: students mentored and advised for research, internships, and projects; teaching awards; grants relevant to teaching, and any teaching‐related workshop or conference attendance.

List of such activities:

a) Started a weekly seminar meeting in the Web and Data Science Lab. The seminars are open to anyone and we discuss one paper/area each week or have invited speakers. b) Developed and taught two short courses including Ad‐Auctions (included Matthew Alden and Martine DeCock as co‐teachers) c) I now regularly attend the CSE DB group reading seminars 590‐Q at UW Seattle. This is helping me teach the DB related classes better at UWT. I also often take a couple of our grad students with me when topics are of common interest to their thesis/project work. d) Supported multiple internships/senior project requests for ITS and CSS students. Supporting them again through the summer.

1.3 Discussion of the faculty member's teaching‐related goals and plans until the next collegial evaluation:

I plan to continue to teach at both the graduate and undergraduate levels and in the CSS and in the ITS program next year. I would like to try to teach one course online next year. I’ve taught online before at RIT and want to give it a try at UWT.

Autumn Winter Spring

TCSS 445 – Database Systems Design (TTH 10:20‐12:25)

TINFO 310 – Foundations of Information Management (TTH 10:30‐12:25)

TINFO 490 – Data Analysis (TTh 10:20‐12:25) OR Course Buyout if I get the OSPI grant

Course buyout

Might Co‐teach with Mohamed Ali if he teaches Advanced Database Systems

TCSS 555 – Data Mining (TTH 1:30‐ 3:35)

TCSS 557 – Social Network Analysis (online)

I would like to get credit next year for teaching the independent studies, research seminars, and guiding the MS thesis and project students.

2. Research

2.1 Summary of research activities for past year

This year was a highly successful year for my research goals. 3 funded projects, 9 papers, exciting new collaborations and several graduate students completing their projects were the highlights.

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Funded projects since last spring (Total – $ 404,784.00):

1. OSPI Data Analysis Co‐PI – Phase I: $ 55,299.92

2. OSPI Data Analysis Co‐PI – Phase II: $ 298,555.00

2. DDRS‐ NIH funded project with UW Seattle and Fred Hutch – $35,930.00

3. DDRS –NIH funded project with UW Seattle and Fred Hutch ‐ $15,000.00

Pending proposals:

1. OSPI Data Analysis – Phase III – $394,480.00

2. Life Sciences Discovery Fund – Accepted for second round review – $150,000.00

New collaborations and co‐authors this year:

1. Alex Mamishev, EE @ UW Seattle

2. Alan Kristal, Fred Hutchinson

3. T. Fayruzov, Microsoft

3. Graduate Students: Michael Munsey, Jonathan Veilleux, Sindhura Bikkani, R. Nagmoti, Junqing Shang , Kishore Sundara‐Rajan , Levi Lindsey , Eric Johnson , Jeremiah Miller, Miles Raymond, Josh Archer, Seid Adem, Leo Hansel, Sushma Konda, Malik Luti, Yao Zhao.

I worked on several papers this academic year. Published 8 of them. Details:

Journal:

1. Trust‐ and Distrust‐Based Recommendations for Controversial ReviewsP. Victor, C. Cornelis, M. De Cock, A. TeredesaiIEEE Intelligent Systems 26(1), pp. 48‐55, 2011

Book Chapter:

2. Forward by A. Teredesai, Trust Networks for Recommender Systems. by P. Victor, C. Cornelis, M. De Cock, Amsterdam‐Paris, Atlantis Press, 2011.

Conference:

1. An Extensibility Approach for Spatio‐temporal Stream Processing using Microsoft StreamInsight, Jeremiah Miller, Miles Raymond, Josh Archer, Seid Adem, Leo Hansel, Sushma Konda, Malik Luti, Yao Zhao, Ankur Teredesai and Mohamed Ali, Demo Track at 10th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases 2011, Minneapolis, August 2011.

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http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/s/Shang:Junqing.html

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/s/Sundara=Rajan:Kishore.html

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/l/Lindsey:Levi.html

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/j/Johnson:Eric.html


2. A Pervasive Dietary Data Recording System, Junqing Shang , Kishore Sundara‐Rajan , Levi Lindsey , Alexander V. Mamishev , Eric Johnson , Ankur Teredesai, Alan Kristal , IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing, PerCom Demo 2011 , March 2011 3. Born to Trade: a Genetically Evolved Keyword Bidder for Sponsored Search, Michael Munsey, Jonathan Veilleux, Sindhura Bikkani, Ankur Teredesai, and Martine De Cock, Congress for Evolutionary Computing 2010 (CEC 2010), Barcelona, Spain, July, 2010. (acceptance rate 23%) 4. Ranking in Microblog Search, Rinkesh Nagmoti, Ankur Teredesai and Martine De Cock, 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI‐10) August 31 ‐ September 3, 2010, York University, Toronto, Canada. (acceptance rate – 21%) 5. Augmenting Microblog Search with Social Authority Ranking, R. Nagmoti, A. Teredesai, M. De Cock in: ISNA2010 (30th International Sunbelt Social Network Conference), 2010 (extended abstract) (acceptance rate 40%) 6. A RapidMiner Framework for Protein Interaction Extraction,T. Fayruzov, G. Dittmar, N. Spence, M. De Cock, A. Teredesaiin: Proceedings of RCOMM2010 (RapidMiner Community Meeting), p.58‐63, 2010

3. Service

3.1 Summary of service activities for past year

EDITORIAL BOARD

• INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PERVASIVE COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATIONS

CONFERENCE/WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION (SERVICE AS CHAIR):

ϖ Chair: IEEE PerCom 2010 Demo track ϖ Nominated – Program Committee chair for COMPSAC 2012 (This is a significant time commitment – I declined due to lack of time/compensation for this activity at the Institute)

CONFERENCE/WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION (SERVICE AS PROGRAM/ORGANIZING COMMITTEE MEMBER):

• WWW conference 2011 • The Fourth International Workshop on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising (ADKDD'10). • The 7th IET International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE 2010). • COMPSAC 2011 • GeoStreaming Workshop at ACM SIGSpatial 2010 • European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation 2010

• Social Network Analysis workshop at KDD 2010 SERVICE AS REVIEWER: Journals

• VLDB • Information Sciences • Information Systems • Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE) Journal

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http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/m/Mamishev:Alexander_V=.html

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/j/Johnson:Eric.html

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/%7Eley/db/indices/a-tree/k/Kristal:Alan.html

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/percom/percomw2011.html#ShangSLMJTK11


UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE, INSTITUTE LEVEL SERVICE

Academic Promotion and Tenure Committee ‐ Member UWT2010‐2011 ITS Faculty Search Committee ‐ Chair UWT 2010‐2011

DEPARTMENTAL SERVICE

Information Technology and Systems Program ‐ Curriculum Member UWT 2010‐2011

ACM Faculty Advisor ‐ Co‐Advisor UWT 2010‐2011

Graduate Committee Member & Chair (Winter 2011) UWT 2010‐2011

COMMUNITY AND NON‐PROFIT VOLUNTEERING SERVICE

• Child Rights and You (CRY) – Seattle Region • Asha Seattle Chapter

INVITED VISITS AND OUTREACH SERVICE

• Deloitte Consulting, Panelist on the Social Media Challenges Panel Discussion, Seattle, April 2011

ASSISTANT PROFESSORS

Yan Bai

1. Teaching 1.1 Courses taught at UWT

Quarter Number Title Enrollment evals S11 TINFO 340 Foundations of

Information Assurance

23 NA

TINFO 445 Digital Forensics 27 NA F10 TINFO 330 Foundations of

Web Design and Programming

35 4.7

TINFO 441 Network Security

24 4.8

S10 TINFO 340 Foundations of Information Assurance

29 4.6

TCSS 590A Network Security and Privacy

13 3.8

Capstone Project W11 TCSS 702 Topic: E‐health

Security 1 NA

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TCSS 702 Topic: Filtering spam images in social networks

1 NA

F10 TCSS 702 Topic: E‐health Security

1 NA

TCSS 702 Topic: Filtering spam images in social networks

1 NA

Independent Study/Internship S11 TCSS 600 Topic: Secure

Message Transportation in HL7‐based Healthcare Systems Using MPEG‐21

1 NA

TINFO 499 Topic: Enhancing Privacy Protection for eHealth 2.0

2 NA

TINFO 499 Topic: Medical sensor networks

1 NA

TINFO 499 Topic: Social Network Forensics

1 NA

TINFO 498 Topic: Anonymity and Accessibility in Social Networking Sites for Utilization in eHealth 2.0

2 NA

W11 TINFO 499 Design and Implementation of Tag‐Based Privacy Control for an eHealth 2.0 System

4 NA

F10 TCSS 600 Topic: Privacy Issues in eHealth 2.0

1 NA

Su10 TCSS 499/498 Topic: Advanced malware analysis and bot‐net tracking

2 NA

TCSS 499 PEN Project 2 NA

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TCSS 497 Study of Software Engineering Certification at Boeing

1 NA

TINFO 498 Topic: Hands‐on Information Security Labs

1 NA

TINFO 497 ITS Internship at Mantech, Avanade and Highline School District

4 NA

S10 TCSS 499/498 Topic: Malware Analysis

2 NA

Jenny (Jie) Sheng

In this annual activity report, I will summarize my activities during this review period on teaching, research and service, respectively.

1 Teaching

Here is a list of the courses I taught during this review period.

Quarter Courses taught or workshops facilitated “combined items 1‐4” average

evaluation score

Spring 2010

TCES482 Senior Project II 4.6

TCSS142 Introduction to Object‐Oriented Programming 4.0

Autumn 2010

TCES430 Microprocessor System Design 3.0

TINST 310 Computational Problem Solving 4.0

Winter 2011

TCES230 Introduction to Logic Design 3.6

TCES481 Senior Project I 3.7

In the following, I will tell my story of teaching above courses. I will explain why I did things the way I did, show how I put the ideas into practice, and how my teaching has evolved (especially for TCES230, TCES430 and TCES481/482). I will also indicate some plans to improve my teaching.

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1.1 Spring 2010

1.1.1 TCES482 – Senior Project II

General Description

As a two‐quarter course, Senior Project is offered according to ABET requirements for Computer Engineering and Systems program. In this capstone project course, students apply what they have learned from the program to develop an engineering product which is an integration of hardware and software.

Senior Project was mainly designed by Prof. Larry Wear according to his industry and higher education experience. Winter course TCES481 teaches how to prepare plans for the senior project; and Spring course TCES482 organizes students to work on tasks associated with the later phases of the product development life‐cycle.

One thing special about the Senior Project is that we required CES senior students take on a project leader’s role and work together with students who were taking the course Introduction to Engineering led by Prof. Larry Wear (except Winter 2011). The purpose of this collaboration is to motivate CES freshmen “interns”, help them build a sense of teamwork, and help them clarify questions regarding teaching and learning goals and outcomes of our program. Meanwhile, CES seniors were given the opportunities to develop leadership and their project management skills.

Before joined UWT, I have supervised computer engineering capstone projects for two years at DigiPen Institute of Technology. Teaching TCES481/482 at UWT is a totally different experience though. I developed teaching materials based on what Prof. Larry Wear provided me, including the course syllabus template, project documentation templates, project document inspection checklists, as well as scoring rubrics for ABET outcome assessment.

In year 2009, the “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for TCES481 and TCES482 was 3.3/5 and 3.4/5, respectively. The course enrollment was 7.

• For TCES481, I prepared seven lectures when seniors met on Tuesdays. Instead of technical details, these lectures gave necessary instruction for seniors to complete their individual design projects. Lecture topics include engineering product design process, project concept generation and evaluation, teamwork, project requirements and design, testing, reliability, engineering ethics, etc. To motivate the seniors, I provided relevant articles for students as reading materials, e.g., “HP9111A Graphics Tablet Service Documentation” to illustrate how to write the project design document. To broaden students’ perspectives on engineering project, I introduced the book “Design for Electrical and Computer Engineers: Theory, Concept and Practice”; part of the slides from this book on project management, testing, and reliability were used in our class discussion. Students could access all the course materials via Moodle. I used the remaining three classes for one‐to‐one meeting when I checked their project progress, helped with their problems, and discussed with them their assignments. When TCES481 class met with TCES102 class on Thursdays, students worked in teams. Activities included the invited guest lectures by Jim L. Borgford‐Parnell who is the Assistant Director of CELT (Center for Engineering Teaching and Learning) at Seattle campus; project documents inspection, which is the structured peer viewing process for seniors’ project documents; and oral report by groups.

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• In TCES482, seniors worked on tasks associated with the later phases of the product development life‐cycle. Every Tuesday, seniors worked by their own. Although most of the work in TCES 482 was done in the labs, two guests with industry background were invited giving lectures on engineering issues ‐ one about the PCB design and the other about test plan writing. Every Thursday, TCES103 students joined as interns; each senior managed 1 or 2 interns and assigned them project relevant tasks such as testing, reading prove, documents writing.

In year 2010, the “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for TCES481 and TCES482 was 3.7/5 and 4.6/5, respectively. The course enrollment was 9. Compared to year 2009, I think the improvement is noticeable, and I believe it was those changes I have ever made that worked:

• To efficiently use the time, starting from year 2010, the interns only met with the seniors for five weeks in the Winter quarter; during another five weeks, they were required to learn MATLAB in the lab and given brief introductions to logic design and circuit design. By year 2009’s experience, we realized that without any training for freshman “interns”, both sides will not feel happy. Among the five meetings, three were attending seniors’ project status reports, so the interns could get the idea what each senior design project was and further figured out which project they preferred to join; the other two were attending guest lectures by Dr. Jim L. Borgford‐Parnell. Different from that in 2009, trainings on the team work to both seniors and freshmen were given before they officially started.

• To help students well prepared for the design and implementation, guest lectures on PCB layout and construction were advanced to the Winter quarter TCES481 class; before the topic was touched in TCES482 class. By doing this, senior students could order boards earlier, if they were ready.

• To motivate students learning and broaden their perspectives, one invited guest lecture on image processing was added in W10 TCES481, for students who were interested in the relevant area. The lecturer Dr. Rania Hussein was my previous colleague at DigiPen and currently works at Disney Interactive Media Group in Seattle.

• To help students develop social responsibility as well as engineering leadership, I applied the CLSR curriculum enhancement grant for 2010. Supported by this grant in 2010, TCES481/482 have exposed the students to various academic activities such as guest lectures, DVD shows, group discussions and debates. Seniors developed a deeper and further understanding of engineers’ social responsibility through the case study of GE Rotary Compressor Refrigerator, and reading of books – The Mythical Man‐Month by Frederick Brooks, and Design for Electrical and Computer Engineers: Theory Concepts and Practice by Ralph Ford and Chris Coulston. Engineering ethics was discussed and highlighted through DVD playing of Modern Marvels: Engineering Disasters, and the study of IEEE code of ethics, as well as ACM code of ethics and professional conduct.

In year 2011, the “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for TCES481 was 3.7/5. The course enrollment was 15. Compared with TCES481 in 2009 and 2010,

• To make the student responsibilities and requirement clear, social responsibility and engineering leadership were not emphasized in course syllabus like we did in year 2010, although they were still considered and discussed in teaching.

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• To make efficient use of class time and fit students’ interests, guest lectures on PCB layout and construction were removed, since the topic has been well covered and practiced in TCES455 in Autumn 2010. Guest lecture on image processing was cancelled due to Dr. Rania Hussein’s time conflict.

• To create an active learning atmosphere for senior students and motivate the learning, five in‐class discussion and assignments were scheduled. Accepting suggestions from previous two years on more interactive teaching, I arranged more reading and discussion sessions in class. Materials include the story of GE Rotary Compressor Refrigerators, NASA SW Formal Inspections Guidebook, IEEE Guide for Developing System Requirements Specifications, the white paper of how to write better test cases, and the Code of ethics for ACM and IEEE.

• To get more feedback on my teaching so I can improve, I have asked help from Jim Borgford‐Parnell, who is our guest lecturer of Senior Project course since Jan. 2009, Jim knows about most of the story about my teaching at UWT. In the middle (week 5) of W11 TCES481, he helped me set up the online catalyst survey. The survey simply contained two questions “What aspects of this course are helping you to learn? Please provide examples” and “What could be improved in this course that would help you to learn better? Please provide suggestions”. He finally got 4 (out of 15) responses. I delivered my thanks to the unknown four in front of the class, and clearly specified the changes I was going to make in the remaining weeks according to the feedback. Although it would be more effective if more students could take the survey, I believe Jim’s help already made big difference. According to students’ suggestion, I added more in‐class discussion and exercise after the mid quarter; few students expressed concerns on this aspect in the W11 TCES481 course evaluation, instead, they overwhelmingly suggested more guest lectures.

What has worked:

• Giving the students opportunities to do individual project has intellectually stimulated them in independent learning. They enjoyed the opportunity of solving project problems by their own, and getting instructors’ help beyond the class time.

• To form the project groups, we asked seniors give three oral reports to interns on their project concepts, design and test plans, midterm project status, as well as end‐of‐quarter project status. We arranged two‐side interviews between interns and seniors and ask them write down their favorites (projects for the former and interns for the later) listed in priority order. We finally determined the groups by matching their interests. This has worked great in all the TCES481 classes.

• Active teaching instead of conventional lectures works great! In all the three TCES481 classes, the structured inspection of project documents was regarded quite helpful. Students liked the idea being peer reviewed and inspecting others’ work. It was the chance for them to help each other, talk open and freely, and share information generously. In year 2010, supported by CLSR curriculum enhancement grant, teaching social responsibility and leadership was a success. In one of the surveys conducted at the end of the 2‐quarter sequence on social responsibility, all the seniors expressed their commitment to a better world/society where he/she lives in, in their future career and life. In another survey on engineers’ leadership, seniors overwhelmingly (89%, 8 out of 9) stated that the project experience has greatly improved their leadership skills. In year 2011, although the social responsibility and

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leadership no longer the teaching focus, five in‐class discussion and assignments relevant to the engineering project design has helped a lot in student learning.

• Clear communication, fair in grading, honest and open in all matters are part of the aspects of my teaching philosophy. In Senior Project course, we provided templates and guidelines for students to write required project documents, and I graded them by strictly following the rubric. As a result, students were satisfied with their final grades.

• It has never been a surprise that guest lectures were overwhelmingly welcomed by students. We will keep inviting guests from both industrial and academic world, as well as Seattle campus to talk about any senior project relevant topics.

• It is never a mistake asking CES seniors do demonstration and presentation of their projects at the Institute’s end‐of‐quarter colloquium. They were proud of their team work and most importantly, their challenging and cool projects. Each year, we will record their live presentation and use them as examples for later senior project students.

What has NOT worked:

• It is not surprising that each year, we hear voices such as “it is a waste of time teaching interns”. Not every senior likes the idea managing interns; it was regarded as kind of distraction. I have insisted that this experience – managing interns and teaching them stuffs will enhance their leadership skills as well as their understanding on engineering topics. I wish in the future we can bring back our CES graduates who by then have been working successfully in industry, to talk about how they benefited from this teamwork experience.

• The Senior Project course at UWT has required students keep working on several documents through the whole project development cycle. I have used certain industrial examples (including the testing document provided by one of our guest lecturers from Microsoft) and relevant paper work to show the students how important and necessary these documents are, and used examples of different complexity for illustration. However, there always exist 1 to 2 students each year doubting the necessity of writing documents. Again, I think these students would be greatly convinced if we can, sometime in the near future, invite CES graduates who by then have been in industry for years, to talk about how they think of and benefited from their TCES481/482 experience at UWT.

1.1.2 TCSS142 Introduction to Object‐Oriented Programming

General Description

TCSS142 is the required course for both CSS and CES programs freshmen. It aims to introduce the design, implementation, modification, and verification of computer programs by using JAVA – a modern structured, object‐oriented language. Topics include basic JAVA syntax and semantics; variables, data types, expressions, and assignment; procedural decomposition of problems; methods passing parameters and returning values; conditional and iterative control structures; file processing; one‐dimensional arrays ; use of standard library objects; user‐defined classes; and object‐oriented programming.

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I was informed to teach TCSS 142 on March 8, 2010, 20 days earlier than the Spring quarter started. First time teaching a programming language course, I did the preparation mainly based on previous years’ materials, and decided to use the same textbook as before, i.e., Building Java Programs by Stuart Reges and Marty Stepp. TCSS142 was a well developed course at the institute; thanks to Jonh Mayer (instructor of S09, F09 and W10 TCSS142), he sent me all his teaching materials (course syllabus, lecture slides, assignments, quizzes, exams) as well as those from Alan Fowler (instructor of F08, W09 TCSS142). So the course organization, course objectives as well as weekly schedule of my teaching were almost the same as before.

Keeping the students busy, there were eight (weekly) programming assignments worth 35 of the final course grade, eight labs out of which students were only required to submit any five and worth 5 of the final course grade, two un‐announced quizzes (each worth 10 of the final grade), one midterm exam (worth 25 of the final grade), and one final exam (worth 25 of the final grade). As a programming language course, both quizzes and exams had two parts: part I – writing part checking primary concepts, and part II – programming part checking students’ programming skills.

The course enrollment was 28, and my “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for TCSS142 in Spring 2010 was 4.0/5. First time teaching TCSS142, I think the score a quite reasonable sign showing both my efforts and weakness.

What has worked

• Most students commented that the course was intellectually stimulating and had stretched their thinking. They thought weekly homework and lab work, as well as the interaction in the lab had helped a lot in their learning. They also thought the textbook and the reading assignment contributed to their learning.

• Teaching object‐oriented programming language like JAVA was new to me. But TCSS142 focuses more on basic programming concepts like procedural decomposition of problems. As I indicated in my teaching philosophy, I always bring what I love to the class and share my story with the students. InTCSS142 class, I talked about my experience in different programming language like FORTRAN, C, and the students loved that. I think this is the main reason for the score 4.3 about student confidence in instructor’s knowledge; the score 4.3 about Instructor’s enthusiasm; the score 4.2 regarding instructor’s ability to present alternative explanation when needed; and the score 4.1 about instructor’s interests in whether students learned.

• As a well developed course, TCSS142 has quite clear teaching goals and student learning outcomes. The assignments, labs, quiz and exam questions were well designed and developed. According to student evaluation, the score on Relevance and usefulness of course content was 4.0; score on Evaluative and grading techniques (tests, papers, etc) was 4.1; score on Reasonableness of assigned work was 4.0; and score on Clarity of student responsibilities and requirements was 4.0.

What has NOT worked

• Being conservative and lack of experience, I adopted a conventional, lecture style approach to TCSS142 classes. Too much detailed oriented, I spent lots of class time talking about concepts using publisher provided slides instead of helpful examples, which made the

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students feel kind of boring and not stimulating. Both Prof. Larry Wear and Daniel Zimmerman who observed my TCSS142 teaching reported that students sitting back of the classroom paid no attention to the lecture slides; instead, they surfed the internet checking emails or stayed busy in facebook. Not motivated enough, several students felt they didn’t learn a lot in the course; the score on question “the amount you learned in the course” was 3.6. To keep students highly involved, I should have more active interaction with students. Possible solutions in my mind include: reducing the time presenting PowerPoint slides, posing more interesting questions and leading open‐minded discussion; encouraging participation with questions and answers.

• Being short of time preparing and lack of experience, I used examples from the required textbook. I thought the instructor should help students make as much use of the required textbook as possible. The students, however, looked forward to more practical, stimulating examples. I think this is the main reason for the score 3.6 regarding question “Instructor’s use of examples and illustrations”. I should have collected more small illustration examples beyond the textbook to help students understand relevant topics.

• Two students pointed out in the yellow sheets that my voice was not loud enough. The class room was PNK104, big enough to fit 28 students. However, if I kept standing in front of the classroom, those sitting back could not hear me clearly. I should have noticed this and keep moving in the classroom, or use a microphone.

1.2 Autumn 2010

1.2.1 TCES430 – Microprocessor System Design

General Description

TCES 430 is a CES core course introducing hardware and software design techniques for microprocessor‐based systems. It gives students experience using state‐of‐the‐art development systems and procedures, and thus gets them ready for the senior project.

The TCES430 objectives are to teach students to (1) become proficient at designing, building, testing and debugging of microprocessor‐based systems; (2) understand how assembly language and C language program components can be integrated; (3) understand advanced concepts and hardware/software techniques of exception processing, A/D conversion, and serial and parallel interfaces; and (5) appreciate the use of timers.

Upon successful completion of the course, students shall be able to: (1) design and implement interrupt generation and acknowledgement circuits and interrupt subroutines in microprocessor systems; (2) design and implement a microprocessor‐based system interface to analog signals; and (3) design and implement serial and parallel data interface to a microprocessor system.

Donald Haueisen taught this course in Autumn 2008, when we decided the textbook “Microprocessors: From Assembly Language to C Using the PICI8FXX2” by Robert B. Reese, and the lab device – the Microchip PICDEM 2 Plus board with 16‐bit microcontroller PIC18F4520 sitting on.

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In year 2009, my “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for F09 TCES430 was 4.0/5. The course enrollment was 12. First time teaching this course at UWT, I regarded this score a recognition of my efforts, and an indication of needs to improve.

• I adopted a conventional, lecture style approach in teaching TCES430. I used the same textbook and microcontroller, and referred to most of the course materials (including course syllabus, homework assignments, and lab assignments) that have been used by Donald Haueisen. Meanwhile, http://www.reesemicro.com/microprocessors‐‐from‐assembly‐to‐c‐with‐the‐pic, which is the accompanying website of the textbook, containing teaching slides, practice assignments, exams, and labs, provides a very helpful recourse for both instructors and students. I used the slides provided by the author in my weekly lectures, and some of the practice problems in my midterm and final exams.

• The 5 credits class has two 2‐hour lectures and one 2‐hour lab each week. To assess students’ performance, there were six homework assignments, five lab assignments, one midterm exam, and one final exam. All of my teaching materials were accessible through Institute Moodle.

In year 2010, the course enrollment was 17, and my “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for TCES430 was 3.0/5. I was so shocked when seeing the result since I have spent lots of time in improving the teaching, including:

• To motivate students’ participation and learning, I replaced the midterm exam with weekly in‐class exercises and unannounced quizzes, each worth 15 of the final course grade (note that in Year 2009, the assessment was based on six assignments, five labs, one midterm exam, and one final exam, worth 20, 30, 30 and 30 of the final course grade, respectively). In addition, one more homework assignment and one more lab assignment were added for learning assessment purpose, i.e., there were seven assignments and seven labs worth 20 and 30 of the final grade, respectively, in year 2010. The weighting of the final exam varied too. It was worth 20% of the final course grade in year 2010, 10% lower than that in year 2009.

• To assess if the students are learning, I have tried interactive lecture in year 2010 by introducing weekly in‐class exercises. Given the worksheet (mostly at the end of the whole lecture, sometimes in the middle) and 15‐20 minutes, all of the students attended the class were required to work on an assigned problem and submit the answer soon after the class. They were allowed to have open discussion, but could only submit answers of their own version. During the process, I would walk around the classroom and provide any help they needed. The contents being examined could either be what they have learned earlier, or what they learned on that lecture. I would then spend 5‐10 minutes, either right after the exercise, or on the following lecture, talking about the answers and pointed out any misunderstanding shown in their submission.

• To make the lecture contents clearly relevant to the course objectives, I have made my own PowerPoint lecture slides in year 2010; some of the slides were referring to the textbook’s accompanying website, some were from my previous teaching experience, and some were from my research. I did this to ensure the teaching objectives and learning outcomes be achieved. Meanwhile, I didn’t recommend mandatory textbook in year 2010; instead, I listed the textbook by Robert B. Reese used in year 2009 as one of the supplementary materials. As

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• To provide more hands on experience, I have designed a new lab and a new homework in 2010 to investigate the demo board. This is also my adoption of a student’s suggestion in 2009 that “use the demo board earlier and do more work on that”.

• To encourage learning, I formed small groups in the lab session. We only had limited number of MPLAB ICD 2 Evaluation Kit (contains Microchip PICDEM 2 Plus board) for this course and they were not enough for the Autumn 2010 class. The company was by chance encouraging the customer to try their new in‐circuit debugger ICD3 in summer 2010 and offered very good price for the evaluation kit using ICD3. After discussion among the CES faculties, we bought 10 new kits so we could explore what advantages ICD3 could bring to us. The students were divided into groups with two members each – one used ICD2 and the other used ICD3. They worked individually to finish the required lab work, and submitted their own reports; but they were required to share their experiences in using different versions of ICD, and help each other to achieve the same goal.

• To strive a balance between too demanding and too easy, I provided and explained C codes for illustrative examples used in lectures. The students could use these as templates in developing their solutions to most of the programming homework and lab assignments. They were challenged, however, in Lab 7 on which they were allowed just limited time; they were expected to generate their own codes and make the codes work on the demonstration board. This was designed to examine their ability in applying both the hardware and software knowledge to solve practical problems; meanwhile, if the students had fully understood previous labs and the provided codes, she/he should have no problem in complete this lab assignment.

What has worked:

• Both 2009 and 2010 classes agreed that the class was intellectually stimulating. From the following quotations “learned a lot!” “Many new and exciting materials” “new techniques and applications of what we have already learned”, it is clear that students were happy to get the chance working on PIC microcontroller which was new to them. They liked labs and assignments relevant to the hardware, and in particular, they thought solving practical problems by referring to the product manuals was a good practice for them. Opposite opinion “uninspired lecture” exists, too; but the student noted that “not stimulating possibly because of the teaching style was not very stimulating”.

• Both 2009 and 2010 classes regarded homework and lab assignments contributed the most to their learning. They enjoyed the process of writing assembly and C codes, looking for answers by referring to product manuals, debugging and finally seeing things work. Although there were different voices, some students thought the lecture slides the same important as homework and lab assignments in their learning.

• I believe in and tried things transparent and traceable, as well as open communication. I carefully prepared lecture topics; made them relevant to the teaching objectives and learning

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outcomes. I also carefully designed homework and lab assignments; indicated clearly requirements and student responsibility. Both 2009 and 2010 thought relevance and usefulness of course content were very good (2009 score 4.1, and 2010 score 3.7). They also had consensus on the clarity of student responsibility and requirements (2009 score 4.0, and 2010 score 3.5).

• A recognition of the efforts I made in improving teaching (as previously described), students in 2010 gave a higher (compared with other scores in 2010) score 3.6 in “course organization”, as well as “sequential presentation of concepts”, which were quite lower in 2009.


• Although tried interactive lecture in year 2010 by introducing weekly in‐class exercises (as previously described), I still need to adjust my teaching style to be more motivating and interactive. In 2009, the students’ feedback on “use of class time” and “Instructor’s interest in whether students learned” were relatively lower (3.5, and 3.6, respectively). And they suggested “more activities in class”, “a more interactive presentation of course lectures”, “in class assignments”. I have considered these comments in preparing 2010’s class; however, I was conservative in taking changes. On 2010’s students’ feedback, scores for “Interest level of class sessions” and “Instructor’s enhancement of student interest in the material” were 2.8 and 3.0. One student commented that “it is uninspired lecture; not stimulating possibly because of the teaching style was not very stimulating”. All these indicated that big improvement in teaching style is urgent. A student suggested in the yellow sheet to introduce “a small group discussion or group project”, which I think is worth to try.

• In 2010, quite lower scores were given on “instructor’s ability to present alternative explanations when needed” (2.3) and “explanations by instructor” (2.7). Analyzing the statistics on the evaluation sheet, I found almost a third of the class was not giving me the credits. But the score on “Student confidence in instructor’s knowledge” was much higher (3.4). I think there are mainly three reasons. First, 2010 class had an enrollment of 17 instead of 12 in 2009. The class was a mix of students at different levels from beginner to more advanced ones. Assembly and C programming were challenging for those with little experience, but nothing new for those programming lovers. I was challenged by the latter quite often and I had to admit I couldn’t help them much (due to my engineering background) with complex computer programming questions. On the other hand, it was difficult to explain basic Assembly and C programming concepts to those beginners, especially if their understanding of programming has been tightly tied up with object‐oriented language like JAVA. I have noticed these problems at the beginning of the quarter. For the beginners, I provided as much as possible resources to help, such as office hour, supplementary materials, group lab work; for the advanced ones, I tried being open‐minded, transparent and honest. I would share my relevant experience if I thought it helped in answering their questions, and admit when I didn’t know an answer. Although I was confident with what I brought to the class and I have been keeping learning, I didn’t guarantee different level students got satisfactory answers for their random questions. To handle a class with different levels of students, I will try certain methods. For example, giving a quiz at the beginning of quarter, I will persuade those showing weak background to take the course next year. Otherwise, it would be their responsibility to work hard and catch up; I will try my best to help of course. In

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doing this, I aim at clarifying student responsibilities and requirements. Second, limited by my background and experience, I might interpret and communicate the idea in a different terminology as they already got used to, or received from other instructors and classes; although we finally understood each other and came to the consensus, students felt that my ability to present alternative explanations when needed was weak. Third, the debugger ICD3 used in labs was a new device. Although I have explored a lot during the summer on it, and prepared all the illustrative examples, lab and homework assignments using it, unexpected things still happened. It would take me sometime to figure out the problem and give students answers; some of them understood this, while others might not happy without immediate explanations.

• Several students have put “lack of a textbook” as the aspects detracted from their learning, and put “have a textbook” as the suggestion for improving the class. This was quite out of my expectation. As described before, I didn’t recommend mandatory textbook in year 2010; instead, I listed the textbook by Robert B. Reese used in year 2009 as one of the supplementary materials. I believe in real‐world examples, and always bring what I love to the classroom. I thought the book a good reference but could not cover all the information or knowledge I want to deliver to the class. Instead, plenty of online resources can be referred to and I have introduced them to the class, more specifically, putting them on the Institute Moodle. I thought the students who requested a textbook might be the type relying on textbook rather than looking for answers by research. Instead of simply listing the book as the required textbook as we did before (2008, 2009), I would give students hints on what resources they might get idea and generate the answer; I would also encourage open discussion and information exchanging among the class. Meanwhile, I will keep searching for a good textbook which can cover most of the topics we’d like to see and discuss in TCES430.

• I will introduce methods such as midterm online Catalyst survey, or, SGID (Collecting Student Feedback Using the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis), in the middle of TCES430 class next year so that I can realize my teaching problem immediately and do the adjustment accordingly.

1.2.2 TINST310 – Computational Problem Solving

General Description

TINST courses are designed and offered to non‐computer science majors. The idea behind the TINST310 course is to give students an idea about what computer science is. As described in the course catalog, it covers the fundamental framework for developing computational solutions to a variety of problems encountered in the world; explores methods of analyzing and characterizing problems, and of developing a computational solution; introduces computer programming; and explores and compares various types of programming methods. The course was designed to introduce relevant concepts rather than to try to teach any particular skills such as a programming language. However, part of the course should be an effort to give the students some idea about what programming is, which previous instructors have tried different methods. Lou Ann tried some programming in Python at first but that turned out to be too hard. Later she tried very basic programming in Java with a similar result. She had better luck by using macro programming in excel spreadsheets and a bit of visual basic code, which Alan Fowler used also in year 2009. Interesting ideas about programming language also include HTML, or Alice, or Scratch.

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I was informed to teach TINST310 F10 in the middle of August, 2010. After checking with Alan Fowler, reviewing the textbook used before, and considering my background as well as preparation time, I decided to use the same textbook in a higher version though, i.e., Invitation to Computer Science 5th Edition by G. Michael Schneider and Judith L. Gersting. I adopted the idea by Alan of introducing digital logic and circuits and requiring basic circuit constructing work. As to the programming language, I decided in using Java. I prepared course syllabus, in‐class exercise, homework, and exams by referring to Alan’s teaching materials in 2009.

On the syllabus, the first three weeks were scheduled to introduce basic concepts on computational problem solving, in particular, how software gives specific instructions to the hardware. Topics include what computing is, the history of computing, what algorithms are, and how to write algorithms. The following three weeks were scheduled to explore how algorithms can be implemented physically, i.e., basic computer hardware knowledge, such as binary number, Boolean logic and gates, and computer systems organization. After the midterm exam, two weeks were scheduled to talk about system software, operating system, and a brief overview of high‐level language programming. The last three weeks were contributed to introducing the Java programming in illustrating how a computational solution can be developed by coding.

To motivate and stimulate students learning, weekly class exercises were arranged which in total worth 40 of the final course grade. Other student learning assessment included three assignments each worth 10 of the final grade; one midterm exam worth 15 of the final grade checking students’ knowledge on algorithms developing as well as binary numbers and digital circuits; and one final exam worth 15 of the final grade mainly checking students’ knowledge about Java programming language.

The course enrollment was 24, and my “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for TINST310 in Autumn 2010 was 4.0/5. First time teaching TINST310, I think the score a quite positive sign for my teaching.

What has worked:

• Students agreed that the course was intellectually stimulating and had stretched their thinking. Exposed to new concepts like algorithms, circuits, and Java programming language, these non‐computer science major students thought the amount they learned in the course was very good (score 4.0), the assigned work was reasonable (score 4.1), Although Lou Ann tried teaching Java and it turned out too hard for students, it was surprising to see that most students this year liked Java programming. Several of them expressed their interests and commented in the yellow sheets that “now I may change my major”, “I plan on taking Java”, which is really encouraging.

• The teaching has been effective. According to the yellow sheets, students benefited a lot from weekly in‐class exercises, hands‐on lab time, and practice problems for midterm exam. One out of 24 students failed the course though; she has been on a personal trip to her country for THREE weeks and couldn’t catch up after she returned.

• Back to my teaching philosophy, I have done well in clear communication, and strived to be fair, honest, and open in all matters relating to my teaching. Students thought the clarity of course objective was very good (score 4.0), so was the clarity of student responsibilities and requirements (score 4.0), as well as the evaluation and grading techniques (score 4.0). Students felt my enthusiasm (score 4.0), and were confident in my knowledge (score 4.2).

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• Lack of experience, I partially changed the original weekly schedule after week 6. I didn’t expect that half of the class were not familiar with binary numbers, so I spent the whole 2 hours (instead of 20 minutes as scheduled) to explain the concept. Students had a hard time in making their circuits work due to their background, so I slowed down the pace and spent two classes (instead of one class as scheduled) helping them in the lab. I had to squeeze the topics of Computer Organization, System Software and Virtual Machines, High level Language Programming into one lecture (supposed to be three lectures). Due to snow weather, class time on the Java programming language was shortened. I have rushed to the end of quarter which made students blame little time on understanding the Java topic, and that my teaching goal and objectives were not clear. I think this is the main reason for the score 3.7 regarding the course organization.

• Fun and challenging but not realistic, the hardware implementation assignment for students turned out to be too hard. Students enjoyed the topic of binary numbers and digital circuits; they were excited when they followed the given guidance building simple circuits and seeing them work. However, they quickly got frustrated when they had to finish the relevant assignment by themselves. Although there were warm‐up exercises, and the assignment required group work, few group had the patience sitting there debugging the circuits. Some students thought the hardware topic was not valuable in advancing their education. Some suggested that it would be better to just draw a few extra circuits to demonstrate their understanding than to spend hours trying to find one unclogged place to plug a wire or gate in. Since TINST students are non‐computer science students, they should not be expected the same as our CES students. Instead of a challenging hardware implementation assignment, a conventional theoretical problem sounds more reasonable (with hardware implementation as extra bonus).

1.3 Winter 2011

1.3.1 TCES481 – Senior Project I

I have combined the story of teaching TCES481 and TCES482 together in Section 1.1.1.

1.3.2 TCES230 – Introduction to Logic Design

General Description

TCES230 discusses Boolean algebra and logic simplification; design of combined logic for decoders and multiplexers; design of sequential devices including registers, and counters; analysis of devices for logic networks including, three‐state, CMOS, programmable logic devices; and introduction to state machines.

The objectives of this course are to: (1) teach number systems and Boolean algebra; (2) demonstrate the use of logic gates, truth tables, and combinational circuits; (3) teach how to design, simplify, and build combinational circuits; (4) show how to implement circuits using MSI components (multiplexers, decoders, comparators, full adder, parity checker); (5) explain the use of sequential logic, flip‐flops, registers, counters, and state sequence generators; (6) show how to implement digital systems design

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with programmable logic devices; and (7) demonstrate the use f software tools to simulate digital circuits and systems.

A student who successfully completes this course shall be able to: (1) apply principles of Boolean algebra to minimize logic functions; (2) minimize Boolean functions using Karnaugh maps; and (3) analyze, design, simulate and test the following: combinational circuits; circuit design; a multiplexer, de‐multiplexer, encoder, and decoder; a flip‐flop; parallel input/parallel output, parallel input/serial output, serial input/parallel output, and serial input/serial output registers using logic gates; synchronous binary counter; and a state machine to generate an arbitrary sequence using flip‐flops and logic gates.

Daniel Zimmerman taught this course in Winter 2009 when it was decided to adopt “Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Verilog Design” (2nd Edition) by Stephen Brown and Zvonko Vranesic as the textbook; and digital logic simulator – LogicWorks by Capilano Computing as the lab tool. The lab also uses a reference book, “LogicWorks 5: Interactive Circuit Design Software” by Capilano Computing.

In Winter 2010, my “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for TCES230 was 4.1/5. The course enrollment was 23. First time teaching this course, I was highly encouraged by the results.

• Thanks to Daniel’s well prepared teaching materials, I stuck to the same textbook and lab tool, and referred to most of the PowerPoint slides that have been used by Daniel. The 5 credits class has two 2‐hour lectures and one 2‐hour lab each week. To assess students’ performance, there were weekly assignments, weekly labs, 2 midterms, and one final exam, worth 15%, 25%, 15% each, and 30% of the final course grade, respectively. All of my teaching materials were accessible through Institute Moodle.

• I adopted the conventional, lecture mainly approach in teaching. I was inspired so much by Daniel’s lecture slides; although I made my own version by adding some pages containing new contents/examples and removing some pages that I didn’t cover, all my slides were with copyright noted to Daniel.

• Students in class were at different levels: some have taken classes before covering similar topics; some were totally new to the topics. Each homework thus contained three types of problems: “suggested problems”, which were problems that students were recommended to do, to help enhance their understanding of the material, but that were not required to turn in; “required problems”, which were problems all students should attempt and turn it; and “bonus problems”, which were problems used to challenge advanced students.

In Winter 2011, my “combined items 1‐4” average evaluation score for TCES230 was 3.6/5. The course enrollment was 22. Second time teaching this course with efforts in improvement, I was expecting a higher evaluation score; the story was different though. Compared to 2010,

• To improve the teaching effectiveness, I have skipped in lecture slides some contents which I assigned as reading, but not discussed in class. I shortened the time in giving conventional lectures; instead, I put more time on examples.

• To help student learn and achieve the learning goal, I still gave three types of problems in the homework assignments, i.e., suggested problems, required problems, and bonus problems, in order to meet interests and requirement of students at different levels. I gave students

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sample midterms and sample final exam and went through all the problems with them. The students got the idea regarding what types of problems would be in exam, and how difficult the problems would be. They all agreed that sample exams helped a lot.

• To broaden students’ perspective and motivate their learning, I brought more up‐to‐sate technical/research news relevant to logic design to the class. I showed my videotaped JAUS project to the class, and encouraged students join my research. I assigned weekly reading assignment for students so that they made full use of the required textbook; but I would introduce the concepts in a different way from the textbook presents. In doing so, I avoided repeating the textbook, and the students got something new. All these efforts aimed at exposing the class to in‐depth topics and motivating those advanced students. The students appreciated this and one of them commented in yellow sheet that “Great teacher and very knowledgeable” has contributed to his/her learning.

What has worked:

• Both 2010 and 2011 classes agreed that the class was intellectually stimulating. From the following quotations “fascinating” “everything was new” “very different from other classes. You have to think logically” “lots of concepts new and interesting to use”, it is clear that students were excited to know things behind a working computer. Opposite answer “not stimulating” exists, too; but the reason was that “because I have taken more advanced courses that cover these topics”.

• Both 2010 and 2011 classes regarded textbook, as well as homework and lab assignments contributed the most to their learning. From students’ feedback on yellow sheet, more students in year 2011 gave credits to lecture slides, which were the compressed version of 2010, and class examples in motivating their learning. There is still room to improve though. Both year students feedback indicated that more in‐class examples, more in‐depth examples, and examples more relevant to their homework assignments would be welcome.

• I believed in and tried things transparent and traceable, as well as open communication. I carefully prepared lecture topics; made them relevant to the teaching objectives and learning goals. I also carefully designed homework and lab assignments; indicated clearly requirements and student responsibility. I believe in real‐world examples; and have tried more and different ways doing this in 2011. From 2010 to 2011, student confidence in instructor’s knowledge got increased (2010 score 3.8, and 2011 score 4.3). They also had consensus on the instructor’s enthusiasm (2010 score 4.1, and 2011 score 4.0).


• I have adjusted the teaching style a little bit into a mixture of lecturing and examples discussion. However, there were still several students complained examples not enough, or examples too simple to help their homework assignments.

• Lack of experience, I didn’t realize the classroom a big distraction for students’ learning, and I didn’t ask for changing of the room. I have ever taught Senior Project course in ADMC WCG 116 before, but it was for a small class. Teaching 22 students in that noisy room needs to shout, as one student commented “the instructor is quiet, needs a microphone”. Meanwhile, the room is with limited white board space. I had to either squeeze things at the side of the

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board, or pull up/down the projection screen now and then, which affected my teaching and student learning. Several students suggested “a better classroom” in the yellow sheets.

• Lab in the early morning raised issues. In 2010, lectures were every Tuesday and Thursday from 13:30 to15:35; labs were every Thursday from 16:15 to 18:20, right after the class. In 2011, the lab started 8:00am on every Thursday morning; and the lectures were every Tuesday and Thursday from 16:15 to18:20. The schedule had made some students sleepy at the late afternoon class; and some students got trouble in attending labs on time. There were always 2 or 3 students missing the labs. These students would then blame for not getting enough help in the lab, although I allocated time in lectures giving pre‐lab introduction and explanation, not even to mention I walked around answering questions all the two hours during the lab time.

• Labs in group work raised issues in 2011. One student suggested in the yellow sheet that “No lab team work. Keep lab groups to 2 maximum, make everyone submit individual lab reports, monitor lab report contribution of each individual”. Due to the limited equipment in the lab and encouraging students share their learning experience, group work is no doubt a good idea; however, the instructor should be clear about each member’s contribution, which I should pay more attention to in the future teaching.

• It is interesting to see from the student evaluation that the higher score (4.0) was accompanied with a class median 3.5 in 2010; and lower score (3.6) with a class median 3.0 in 2011. Although more hardworking (10.1 hours/week in 2011 compared to 9.8 hours/week in 2010) and regarding more valuable in advancing their education (7.3 in 2011 compared to 7.0 in 2010), several students in 2011 were struggling with the learning. I have noticed this and tried my best to help, but they might not feel happy on my teaching and gave me quite negative score in the course evaluation. I will try different ways dealing with this kind of situation. For example, giving a quiz at the beginning of quarter, I will persuade those showing weak background to take the course next year. Otherwise, it would be their responsibility to work hard and catch up; I will try my best to help of course. In doing this, I aim at clarifying student responsibilities and requirements.

1.4 Spring 2011

I am currently in the teaching release quarter.

1.5 Efforts and Plans to Improve

In addition to the efforts I made for different courses as described in previous sections, I have taken a number of steps to improve my teaching.

First, I have tried and will keep trying all the available resources inside the Institute to help.

• As always, I seriously took suggestion from students including in‐person feedback, and course evaluation comments on yellow sheets.

• I also thanked the Institute for its annual teaching evaluation process. On the one side, having colleagues especially senior faculties observe my class, evaluate my teaching materials and effectiveness, I have gradually adjusted my teaching style according to what peers suggested in

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this process (mainly, in a more interactive way). On the other side, observing how colleagues teach has forced me to think about what my teaching strength and weakness are, and how I could improve. Released from teaching in Spring quarter 2011, I have get the permission and audited the classes of Alan Fowler, Prof. Josh Tenenberg, and Prof. Donald Chinn. Their teaching has greatly enhanced my understanding of “interactive” teaching, and convinced me that a mixture of using both slides and whiteboard works better than using PowerPoint only. If possible, I’d like to audit all colleagues’ classes as the process of learning and improving.

• Beyond the teaching evaluation system, I also benefited from attending quarterly CTC meetings. Meeting with faculty and staffs from Pudge Sound area community and technical colleges has helped me in understanding more about the Institute’s mission, vision and goals; about our students’ background, and further, what kind of teaching could be more effective.

Second, I have tried and will keep trying all the possible resources available on UWT campus to help.

• I applied and was awarded the Curriculum Enhancement Grants by UWT's Center for Leadership and Social Responsibility, with the project titled as “Broaden students’ perspectives of engineers’ social responsibility”. I was able to introduce various activities including group discussion, guest lectures, and DVD shows into the 2010 Senior Project class and achieved the goal of enhancing students’ understanding of engineers’ social responsibility.

• I have been participating as many as possible faculty development workshops/teaching forums held on UWT, including the “Campus‐Wide Teaching Forum”, “Creating an Interactive Classroom” (on‐line) and “What Movies Can Teach Us About Teaching”. I missed the session in 2009 on “Collecting Student Feedback Using the Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID)”, which I really wanted to learn and employ; I registered for the session in 2010 on SGID, but it was cancelled. I will ask help for implementing SGID in my classes next quarter, and keep attending relevant workshops to improve my teaching.

Third, I have tried and will keep trying all the possible resources available at UW system to help.

• I attended one of the Faculty Workshops on Teaching and Learning titled as “Understanding and Using Your Student Ratings” and organized by Center for Teaching and Learning at Seattle campus, on Feb 16th, 2011. I was provided an overview of the UW student ratings system, and was presented principles for interpreting student responses. I brought my own student ratings, and got help in how to use student ratings and comments to make course improvements.

• I attended the 7th annual University of Washington Teaching and Learning Forum held on Seattle campus, on April 19, 2011. Talking about our CES Senior Project teaching experience at the poster session, I shared ideas on teaching and ways to improve with people from different areas. It was really fun and I will try again next year if time allows.

• To improve my teaching, I have been in touch with Jim Borgford‐Parnell, who is the Assistant Director & Instructional Consultant of the Center for Engineering Learning & Teaching at UW Seattle. Jim has been the guest lecturer of Senior Project course since Jan. 2009, and he knows about most of the story about my teaching at UWT. In addition to spending time collecting for F10 TCES430 students’ feedback, analyzing the data and talking with me over the phone for hours generating plans for next time teaching, he helped me set up an online catalyst survey in the middle (week 5) of W11 TCES481. The survey simply contained two questions “What aspects of

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this course are helping you to learn? Please provide examples” and “What could be improved in this course that would help you to learn better? Please provide suggestions”. He finally got 4 (out of 15) responses. I delivered my thanks to the unknown four in front of the class, and clearly specified the changes I was going to make in the remaining weeks according to the feedback. Although it would be more effective if more students could take the survey, I believe Jim’s help already made big difference. According to students’ suggestion, I added more in‐class discussion and exercise after the mid quarter; few students expressed concerns on this aspect in the W11 TCES481 course evaluation, instead, they overwhelmingly suggested more guest lectures.

• By attending Faculty Workshop on Teaching and Learning, and the 7th annual Teaching and Learning Forum, I have known Karen Freisem, who is the Senior Consultant at the Center for Instructional Development and Research. I have got lots of help from her in improving teaching. We have met three times since March 24, 2011. She has learned about all my teaching stories at UWT, and recommended me lots of reading regarding interactive teaching, teaching effectiveness, etc. She has finished data analyzing on both F09 TCES430 and F10 TCES430, and we are going to write down the plan list in teaching F11 TCES430. After finishing this course, we will go through TCES230, TCES142, and the Senior Project course TCES481/482.

2 Research

My current research interests include Control Systems and Signal Processing, Robotics and Applications, Development of Embedded Systems, and Computer Engineering Education. In addition to my previous partners with research focus on DSP, I have been actively collaborated with current colleagues and students at UWT. A summary is given below.

2.1 Collaboration

I am continuing doing research and publishing papers in the areas of control systems and signal processing. My research partners include Prof. Y. Shi at the University of Victoria, Canada, and Prof. R. Ding at JiangNan University, China. Both of them were my colleagues at UofA. During this review period, we have collaborated successfully on the following published papers.

• B. Bao, Y. Xu, J. Sheng, R. Ding (2011), Least squares based iterative parameter estimation algorithm for multivariable controlled ARMA system modeling with finite measurement data, Mathematical and Computer Modeling, vol. 53, pp. 1664‐1669.

• Y. Liu, J. Sheng, and R. Ding (2010), Convergence of stochastic gradient estimation algorithm for multivariable ARX‐like systems, Computers and Mathematics with Applications, vol. 59, pp. 2615‐2627.

• H. Zhang, A. S. Mehr, Y. Shi, and J. Sheng (2010), New Results on Robust L2 − L∞ Filtering for Uncertain Linear Discrete‐Time Systems, Proc. 2010 American Control Conference, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 30 ‐ July 2, pp. 1380‐1385.

Sharing my expertise on hardware engineering side, I am currently working with Prof. Sam Chung on the research topic “OpenJAUS compliant systems”. The Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) is a DoD‐mandated standard to promote interoperability of unmanned systems. My target of this research is to design a tele‐operation method and get it implemented on a physical system. As the first step, I proposed a research project “Using open source software to develop a test‐bed for

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unmanned vehicle systems with smartphone as communication media”, which was funded by the UWT Chancellor’s Fund for Research and Scholarship 2010, and attracted the CSS master student Joel Morrah join the team (the CES undergraduate student Ho‐Kyeong Ra also contributed a lot to the project). The funding ended in Dec. 2010, and the project has successfully achieved its stated objectives. The outcomes include a working test‐bed with basic functionalities and schemes implemented, more specifically, an Lego NXT robot controlled via smartphones with JAUS‐compliant messages, as well as one conference paper which has been accepted, and two journal papers in preparation summarizing the research results.

In the next stage of the research, we plan to add a manipulator to the Lego NXT robot and test more JAUS messages on the test‐bed. We will do basic tele‐operation with a throttle and steering command. On the software side, performance and security of JAUS compliant systems are the main two issues waiting to be investigated.

During this review period, we have had the following papers either accepted or published.

• J. Morrah, H.K. Ra, J. Sheng, and S. Chung (2011), A JAUS‐Compliant Test‐Bed for Unmanned Vehicle Systems with Smartphone as Communication Media, to appear on the Proc. of the 16th IASTED International Conference on Robotics and Applications (RA 2011), June 1 – 3, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

• H.K. Ra, S. Chung, and J. Sheng (2010), Teaching the Way of Using Computers with Autonomous Robots for Junior‐High Students, Proc. of the 7th International Conference on Cybernetics and Information Technologies, Systems and Applications (CITSA 2010), June 29th ‐ July 2nd, Orlando, Florida, USA.

The CES program at the Institute of Technology is new and challenging; it has undergone a positive ABET accreditation visit in Oct. 2010. Regarding the computer engineering education, Prof. Orlando Baiocchi, Prof. Larry Wear and I have being collaborating in teaching TCES102/103 ‐ Introduction to Engineering and TCES481/482 ‐ CES capstone Senior Project since year 2009. We have learned a lot of lessons on teaching freshmen and senior engineering courses, both good and bad; some of them have been summarized and reported in the following publications, during the review period.

• J. Sheng, L.L. Wear, and O. R. Baiocchi (2011), Developing leadership and teamwork skills through the capstone design project, poster #29, 7th Annual UW Teaching and Learning Symposium, Kane Hall, April 19, University of Washington, Seattle.

• J. Sheng, L.L. Wear, and O. R. Baiocchi (2010), Computer Engineering and Systems Capstone Design Course at UW Tacoma, Proc. of National Capstone Conference 2010, June 7‐9, Boulder, Colorado.

I am currently in the teaching release quarter and concentrating on the proposed research project “Hardware Implementation of Multi‐rate Model Predictive Control”. My goal by the end of this quarter is to implement in FPGA a multi‐rate PID algorithm on a physical system, most possibly the water tank system used in TCSS 465 Embedded Real‐Time System Programming. Should the PID algorithm successfully implemented, I will go further to investigate the MPC implementation. I plan to present the research results to CES students next quarter, and motivate them to join my research on embedded systems design and development. Currently I have one paper published in the area of

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embedded systems design and development. With the research project smoothly going on, I hope more papers would be added to the list.

2.2 Research students (co‐supervised with Prof. Sam Chung)

The CES undergraduate student Ho‐Kyeong Ra has been quite active in doing research at the ADC lab. I am his co‐supervisor since autumn 2009. In addition to the two published conference papers as previously described , and two journal papers in preparation, he presented his research titled as “Is OpenJAUS really open to its unmanned systems development community?” at the Undergraduate Research Symposium, which was held on May 21 2010, Mary Gates Hall, University of Washington. The master student Joel Morrah was the main student contributor to the JAUS project. He has graduated in Winter 2011. We have co‐authored one conference paper as previously described, with another two journal papers in preparation. With the JAUS project getting more interesting and challenging, we have had 4 other master students get involved: Leo Hansel, Jeremiah D Miller, Devin M McBride and Quang H Pham.

Here is the list of students I have been supervising since Autumn 2009 (co‐supervised with Prof. Sam Chung)

• Ho‐Kyeong Ra (undergraduate student)

• Joel Morrah (master student, graduated Winter 2011) Capstone project: An Evaluation of the Performance of the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems in Comparison to Controller Area Network

• Leo Hansel (master student) Capstone project: A Model Driven Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) Framework and Its Implementation

• Jeremiah D Miller (master student)

• Devin M McBride (master student)

• Quang H Pham (master student)

2.3 Projects and grants

I have submitted, either by myself or together with colleague partners, four project/grant applications during this review period, two of them were funded or approved:

• Teaching release for research quarter Spring 2011, UWT (undergoing) Research project: Hardware Implementation of Multi‐rate Model Predictive Control

• Chancellor’s Fund for Research and Scholarship, University of Washington, Tacoma, 2010 (The funding ended in Dec. 2010, and the project has successfully achieved its stated objectives.) Research project: Using Open Source Software to Develop a Testbed for Unmanned Vehicle Systems with Smartphone as Communication Media.

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2.4 Papers in preparation

• L. Zhang, S. Xu, J. Sheng, T. Chen and B. Huang, Model predictive control for uncertain stochastic systems, to be submitted to Journal of Control Science and Engineering.

• J. Morrah, H.K. Ra, J. Sheng, and S. Chung, Implementation of JAUS Messages on a Lego MINDSTORM NXT Robot Controlled via Smart Phones, to be submitted to International Journal of Robotics and Automation.

• J. Morrah, H.K. Ra, J. Sheng, S. Chung, and SH Baeg, An Evaluation of the Performance of the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems in Comparison to Controller Area Network, to be submitted to Journal of Systems and Software.

3 Service

The following is a summary of my service contribution during this review period. I have been active at both the internal and external levels.

3.1 External

During this review period, I have served as reviewer for Journals including Computers and Mathematics with Applications, Engineering Computations, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, and Mathematical and Computer Modeling,

I also reviewed one paper for the 2010 National Capstone Design Conference (June 7‐9, 2010, Boulder, Colorado).

I have accepted the invitation serving on the program committee of IEEE ICMA 2011 (IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, Beijing, China, August 7‐10, 2011). I also served on the program committee of WCICA 2010 (The 8th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation, Jinan, Shandong, China, July 7‐9, 2010) and reviewed 11 papers.

3.2 Internal

Undergraduate Committee – I have served on the previous Undergraduate Committee until Autumn 2010. I have participated in discussion and decision‐making on issues such as student representatives on the undergraduate committee, creating new courses for short courses with variable credit, CSS courses assessment, undergrad course schedule for the 2010‐11 academic year, and replacing the “Undergraduate Committee” in the Institute with three committees, one for each major degree program (the CSS, CES, ITS).

CSS Undergraduate Committee – I have been serving on the CSS undergraduate committee since Winter 2011. During the last months, the committee has been discussing topics such as 2011‐12 course scheduling, personnel needs for 2011‐12, and TCSS 371/372/422 sequence. Most recently, we were discussing how to implement the UWT assessment plan for CSS; relevant to that, we have been working as the first step on drafting new master course syllabi for CSS core courses. My major contribution is on the master syllabus for TCSS142, which I taught in Spring 2010. After discussion with Alan Fowler, who has taught the same course several times, I proposed a draft of TCSS142 syllabus, which removed “graphical user interfaces, and event‐driven programming” as the course topics described in the catalog; specified the course preconditions, the topics covered, CSS degree student

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learning outcomes that this course contributes to, and the UWT student learning goals that this course contributes to.

CES ABET Accreditation Preparation/Undergraduate Committee – I have been serving on the CES undergraduate committee since Winter 2011, when it was formally founded. I have been attending all the meetings regarding CES program issues, such as ABET Accreditation reports; and drafted the proposal to set up the Best Senior Project Award. Before, from Autumn 2009 to Autumn 2010, I was a proud member of CES ABET Accreditation Preparation team led by Prof. Larry Wear. When the team was preparing materials for the ABET accreditation visit scheduled in Oct. 2010, I have been supportive in attending all meetings for course reviews and discussions; providing my resume, course syllabus and materials, assessment data for ABET outcomes B, E, G, and I; and drawing the prerequisite chart for the ABET self‐study binder (which I revised more than 3 times). During the ABET accreditation visit, I have contributed my time meeting and talking with ABET evaluators.

Institute Director Search Committee – I have served twice on the Institute Director search committee from Autumn 2009; I have brought both the perspectives of an assistant professor and computer engineering faculty. During the search time period, I have being attending regular meetings every two weeks (approximately), contributing to the preparation of the advertisement with an appropriate position description, reviewing applications, telephone interviewing candidates, deciding the finalist or on‐campus interview candidates, meeting with each candidate, collecting from junior Institute faculty members feedbacks on candidates, and deciding the final ranked list for the position.

CSS Master Program Volunteer – I have presented several times my research interests and projects for graduate students attending TCSS598 Masters Seminar, on April 28, 2009, April 13, 2010, and October 6, 2010, respectively. I was one of the faculties introducing our research interests and area and talking with curious students at the Graduate New Student Orientation session on Sep. 24, 2009, and Sep. 22, 2010, respectively.

As a summary, I have been contributing as much as I could to the development of the Institute, the campus, and the community. I am an excellent team player; I should be more vocal though. I was one of the faculties meeting with curious students at the Undergraduate New Student Orientation session on Sep. 21, 2010. I am passionate about teaching and appreciate chances knowing about and exchanging idea with local educators. I have attended most of the CTC meetings since Jan. 2009, when I joined the Institute. I love research and I attended as many as I could seminars in this review period. I presented to public audience my research “Optimal Filtering for Multi‐Rate Systems” at the Institute research seminar on June 2, 2010. Although not serving on the search committee, I have provided honest and fair feedback when the Institute was/is recruiting new lecturers/ ITS full‐time Assistant Professor.

Dan Zimmerman

1 Teaching Material for all courses described here (and all my prior courses) is available to all members of the faculty from the Institute of Technology Moodle, http://moodle.insttech.washington.edu/. Thus, I am not including the Moodle index pages or course syllabi as supplemental documentation with this activity report. If you are not able to access these course materials, please contact me and I will fix your access privileges.

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1.1 Courses Taught Summer 2010 None. Autumn 2010 I taught two sections of the core course TCSS305 (“Programming Practicum”), which finished with a total of 47 students. My “combined items 1–4” average evaluation scores were 4.5/5 for section A and 4.8/5 for section B. I also taught one section of the core course TCSS322 (“Discrete Structures II”), which finished with a total of 19 students. My “combined items 1–4” average evaluation score was 4.6/5. In addition, I served as the faculty adviser for undergraduate Michael Wascher, who interned at Google in Mountain View, CA. Winter 2011 I was not scheduled to teach any courses this quarter, having arranged my schedule with 3 courses in the autumn and 3 courses in the spring. However, in exchange for a course release in the spring, I assumed the administrative duties for the seven “390 workshops” (TCSS390A–D, TCES390A–B, TINFO390A) when Larry Wear took an unexpected medical leave. Spring 2011 I am teaching the core course TCSS305 (“Programming Practicum”), which started with 23 students and as of this writing has 20 students, and the graduate core course TCSS558 (“Applied Distributed Computing”), which as of this writing has 28 students (including one undergraduate). In addition, I am serving as the faculty adviser for undergraduate Cameron Neblett on a directed research project. 1.2 Spring 2011 TCSS305 In spring 2011, I am teaching TCSS 305 for the fourteenth time. In the 2007–08 academic year, I modified my approach to the course to put more emphasis on code quality and code style and to introduce the students to various high‐quality, useful software engineering tools, motivated by my work on verification‐centric software engineering and my observations of students in previous quarters. This was largely successful, as I described in that year’s annual report, and in autumn 2008 I added some additional software engineering tools. I also introduced takehome exams to the course, which was a success; students got the opportunity to actually write and manipulate code on the exams in addition to answering in‐class questions, which gave me a better idea of how much they had learned. In autumn 2007, I introduced three software engineering tools into the course in addition to the already‐used Eclipse IDE: CheckStyle (http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/), a customizable style checker for Java code; FindBugs (http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/), a static analysis tool for Java bytecode that can detect certain kinds of common programming errors; and Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/), a version control system. I introduced three more in autumn 2008: PMD (http://pmd.sourceforge.net/), a static analysis tool for Java source code that can detect certain kinds of common programming errors (dead code, suboptimal code, overcomplicated expressions such as the use of “a_boolean == false” instead of “!a_boolean”, and duplicate code); EclEmma (http://eclemma.org/), a code coverage tool that can be used to determine what lines of code are executed in a given run of a program (and therefore to analyze the percentage coverage of unit tests); and Metrics

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(http://metrics.sourceforge.net/), a tool that calculates various metrics (class count, method count, lines of code, etc.) on Eclipse projects. The purpose of introducing all these tools was to increase students’ exposure to good software engineering practices, and to thereby start transitioning them from “programming” to “software engineering”. In autumn 2009, I added another tool: AutoGradeMe (http://www.kindsoftware.com/ products/opensource/AutoGrader/; as discussed in section 2, it was named AutoGrader at the time of its introduction). AutoGradeMe is effectively an aggregation tool for the results of the static checking tools introduced previously. AutoGradeMe gives real‐time feedback to students as they write their code, so that before they even submit their assignment they know exactly what grade their code will earn with respect to code standard and complexity requirements. In addition to giving this immediate feedback to students, AutoGradeMe also saves significant grading time; instead of looking at every warning to see whether it is a “reasonable” one for the student to have ignored, I need only to look at the AutoGradeMe score to give a grade for code standard compliance. AutoGradeMe is still a relatively new tool, and its use in autumn 2009 was its first large‐scale use in a university class. In spring 2011 I am experimenting with a major change to the sequence of assignments in TCSS305, starting the final project earlier in the quarter and spreading its components across a total of 7 weeks instead of 4. Under this new schedule, the students begin implementing the model classes for the Tetris project while we are just introducing GUI concepts, before they have had an assignment with a GUI implementation; they continue implementing the model classes as a break between the extremely intensive parts 1 and 2 of the “PowerPaint” painting program assignment later in the quarter, and then implement the final Tetris GUI as the last two assignments of the quarter. I believe that this change has the potential to significantly improve the quality of student work on the project and the intensive assignments preceding it, both by giving them more time to refine their designs and by giving me more time to provide them with appropriate feedback on their submissions. At the time of this writing (the beginning of week 6 of spring quarter), of course, I have no concrete evidence for this claim. Overall, I believe the changes I have made to TCSS305 over the last several years have been successful. Students have typically done well (for the most part) on the assignments and exams, the tools have all performed their jobs admirably, and anecdotal reports from instructors of later courses in the program indicate that students are leaving my TCSS305 classes with the required programming skills; in addition, my evaluations for TCSS305 have been quite high the last several times I have taught the course. I attribute this success both to my own extreme familiarity with the material (going into the course in spring 2011, I had taught it 13 times) and to improvements in the tools and tool configurations. It appears that I will be teaching TCSS305 again in autumn 2011, and it seems this year as though OpenJML may be ready for use within Eclipse by autumn, allowing me to finally incorporate a Design by Contract tool into the TCSS305 workflow as I have wanted to since 2007. 1.3 Spring 2011 TCSS558 Also in spring 2011, I am teaching TCSS558 (“Applied Distributed Computing”) for the first time. TCSS558 is a course with an interesting, and somewhat conflicted, mandate: it has “applied” in the title but its description includes “techniques and concepts associated with constructing software that is distributed, reliable, efficient, and extensible,” implying a significant theoretical

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component. It is also the one place in the graduate curriculum where students’ ability to work in teams is assessed. When I was asked to teach TCSS558 I had previously taught a number of courses on distributed systems, including the distributed computing laboratory course at Caltech (twice) and the distributed algorithms course I taught my first quarter at UWT, and had also incorporated distributed systems concepts into my “Concurrency in Computation” graduate elective. However, I had not previously taught a course at the graduate level at UWT that involved either a programming or a group work component. I decided that the course would proceed along two basic “tracks”: first, I would present the essential concepts of distributed systems and distributed algorithm design, such as the idea of reasoning about distributed systems as nondeterministic transition systems and the algorithmic building blocks of tokens, logical clocks, and diffusing computations; second, I would expose the students to actual distributed systems programming, through lecture material and assignments that required them to design and build distributed systems in Java. I also wanted the students to learn about the evolution of the field over time by researching real‐world distributed systems past and present; thus, I decided to have groups of students present specific distributed systems technologies (chosen byme, ranging from SunRPC to Map/Reduce) in class, describing their capabilities, their impacts on future systems, etc. The assignments I gave the class as individual work were simple client‐server systems using UDP and TCP sockets, Java Remote Method Invocation, and threads and Java synchronization constructs for concurrency. After these individual assignments, I assigned groups to design and write distributed system simulators (to simulate the message‐passing, transition‐based distributed system model used in class for algorithm descriptions), first in a single Java virtual machine and then across multiple Java virtual machines. Thus, by the end of the quarter each student will have implemented multiple distributed systems of her own and participated in the implementation of a larger distributed system that can simulate large‐scale distributed algorithms. During the first few weeks of the quarter the lectures were fairly evenly split between theory and implementation; since we have now covered enough implementation detail in class for the students to be able to program their projects, the more recent lectures have focused primarily on distributed algorithm construction and analysis (dining philosophers, drinking

philosophers, committee coordination, Byzantine generals, etc.). I believe that this course will end up being successful, though there is still nearly half a quarter to go. There has been some difficulty with early assignments, where students have spent far too much time on programming projects (due either to unpreparedness for the programming projects or misunderstandings of the assignment requirements); despite this, the students seem to be engaged in class and interested in the course material, and no students have dropped the class as of the beginning of week 7. Scholarship My research area is applied formal methods: the use of mathematics to improve the reliability and security of software systems in practical and widely‐accessible ways. I have been involved in multiple collaborative projects in this area during this review period, as well as submitting multiple papers and grant proposals, which I summarize below.

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Collaborations During this review period, I continued working on collaborative projects with Dr. Joseph R. Kiniry of Information Technology University of Copenhagen, Denmark (ITU). I also co‐organized the Third JML Spec‐a‐Thon at ITU in November 2010, gathering important researchers from the JML community to work on formal specifications for Java core libraries. This workshop, like the Inaugural JML Spec‐a‐Thon I hosted at UWT in May 2009 and the Second JML Spec‐a‐thon in Dublin in November 2009, was funded by Formal Methods Europe. The attendees (in addition to Dr. Kiniry and myself, who organized the event) included David Cok (a chief technologist at Eastman Kodak’s research laboratories, who attended via teleconference) and several postdoctoral scholars and graduate students. All are involved in driving the development of the Java Modeling Language (JML), arguably the most widely‐used mainstream formal methods technology that exists today, and I am well‐positioned to be a co‐author and/or co‐PI on future work with them in this area. Moreover, now that we have run three of the events, Dr. Kiniry and I intend to write a paper about the Spec‐a‐Thons themselves for submission at some point in the next year or so. I have continued to work collaboratively on the projects described in the next section. I was in residence at ITU for the entirety of July 2010 working on research projects, and I intend to make a similar research visit to ITU for several weeks this summer for further collaborative efforts. Projects During this review period, I have been actively involved in the following research projects. All are ongoing except where otherwise noted. Theory of Interestingness The theory of interestingness, a collaborative project with Dr. Kiniry, is an attempt to develop a quantitative way to determine what values, methods, fields, etc. are important to test when writing test suites for object‐oriented software systems. It is also applicable to the testing of other systems that can be mechanically formalized (e.g. in a logical framework or first‐order theorem prover), such as implementations of programming languages and runtime systems, specification languages, and even virtual and physical machines. The goal is to enable more effective test generation and automation, and thus increase the overall quality of software systems (and other mechanically formalized systems). We have not made much headway on this project this year, mainly because of a lack of funding and other research priorities; however, I expect we will write up the initial theoretical contributions soon. JMLUnitNG I am leading this project, and have so far had assistance from two students here at UW Tacoma: a graduate student (Rinkesh Nagmoti) during the summer 2009 and autumn 2009 quarters, and an undergraduate (Jonathan Hogins) during the spring and summer 2010 quarters. The goal is to design and build a successor to the JMLUnit tool, a part of the Common JML tool suite that automatically generates unit tests for JML‐annotated Java systems; the new tool addresses several shortcomings of the existing tool (described in our paper “JMLUnit: The Next Generation”, see below). Mr. Nagmoti developed a functional proof of concept for the tool, based on my design and using the old JMLUnit source code, during the summer and autumn; after experiments showed the merit of the improvements over the old tool I developed a clean design and specification for a new version of the tool, which Mr. Hogins implemented an initial version of with my guidance. I made the first publicly‐released version of JMLUnitNG available in September 2010 on the UWT Applied Formal Methods Group website, and there have been three subsequent public releases. Since its initial public release JMLUnitNG has been

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used in software engineering classes at multiple universities, including ITU, Rose‐Hulman Institute of Technology, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany). I am continuing to develop the tool, improving its functionality and integrating more sophisticated test generation techniques based on the theory of interestingness and other external research. OpenJML This project, which involves many members of the JML community and is led by David Cok, has the goal of developing new JML tools that work with current versions of Java; it uses OpenJDK (the open‐source version of the Java platform) as its underlying platform. I have made various contributions to this project, including debugging and testing the entire build process for running it on Mac OS X machines, and I am currently using it as the basis for the JMLUnitNG tool. There is an OpenJML Eclipse plug‐in now, which unfortunately does not yet work on all platforms supported by Eclipse; my hope is that it will be usable cross‐platform in time for courses in the autumn quarter, and during the summer I will likely contribute to realizing this goal. Testing JML Specifications This project, which explores the use of high‐quality unit test suites to evaluate the correctness and utility of JML specifications, is collaborative with Dr. Kiniry and David Cok. The basic idea is that for systems like the Java class libraries, where extremely high‐quality sets of unit tests (in this case, the Java Conformance Kit) exist, we can “test” the formal specifications we develop for individual classes by seeing how well those specifications capture the classes’ behavior with respect to their unit tests. If we can statically prove that the unit tests pass, using only our specifications of the target classes (rather than the code of the target classes themselves), then our specifications capture enough of the behavior of the classes to be useful. We have used this idea for developing specifications for the Java class libraries at JML Spec‐a‐thons, and have run additional experiments; we submitted a paper about this project to TACAS 2011, but it was rejected, so we are doing more experiments and addressing the reviewer comments in preparation for a future submission. Verified Gaming ‐ This project, which explores the use of game projects for teaching verificationcentric software engineering to undergraduates and for demonstrating the utility of software verification tools, is collaborative with Dr. Kiniry. So far, I have supervised 3 UWT undergraduates in directed reading projects related to verification‐centric software engineering and gaming, and I hope to teach a verification‐centric software engineering course in the future that will have a game project as its centerpiece. This year, Dr. Kiniry and I published a position paper describing our verified gaming projects and class experiences (see below), and we hope to publish a longer, more descriptive paper in a suitable venue during the next review period. Refinement of Concurrent Models This is a collaborative project with Dr. Kiniry and Fintan Fairmichael, a Ph.D. student at University College Dublin; I became involved during my summer visit to ITU Copenhagen in July 2010. The research explores high‐level specifications of concurrency requirements and the refinement of such specifications to executable code and formal contracts, We developed new types of high‐level concurrency annotations for specifications written in the Business Object Notation (BON), as well as ways to mechanically refine theseto executable code that works with synchronization constructs such as locks and monitors. We wrote and submitted papers describing this work to two separate conferences (see below) but they were not accepted; however, we got some useful review comments and are currently revising the paper (including performing more case studies) for future submission. Distributed Unit Testing This project, which started in spring 2008, is a collaborative project

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with Dr. Kiniry and Dermot Cochran (a research programmer at University College Dublin). The goal is to be able to automatically distribute the load for unit testing across multiple networked machines, so that extremely large test suites (such as those that might be generated with tools like the unit testing framework described above) can be run more efficiently. I am actively involved in this effort with respect to both its actual design and implementation and the allocation of some computational resources here at UWT as part of a distributed unit testing network. 2.3 Publications and Grants Technically during the previous review period—but with a decision too late for my previous annual report—I submitted a paper on the JMLUnitNG tool, with Mr. Nagmoti, entitled “JMLUnit: The Next Generation” to the International Conference on Formal Verification of Object‐Oriented Software (FoVeOOS 2010), Paris, France, July 2010 (the paper was previously accepted to the 10th International Conference on Quality Software (QSIC 2010), but had to be withdrawn due to a lack of travel funding). FoVeOOS 2010 had two “tiers” of paper acceptance: acceptance for presentation at the conference, and acceptance for inclusion in the final published proceedings. “JMLUnit: The Next Generation” was accepted unconditionally for both presentation and inclusion in the published proceedings, one of only 2 papers out of 35 submissions to be unconditionally accepted (a 6% unconditional acceptance rate). I also received a travel grant from European COST action IC0701 (the large EU‐sponsored research project that supported the conference) to cover transportation and lodging for the conference, as well as the conference registration fee. During this review period, I also submitted four other conference and workshop papers. The first of these, “Refinement of Concurrent Models”, was co‐written with Dr. Kiniry and Fintan Fairmichael. We initially submitted it to the 16th ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP 2011); after it was rejected (primarily, as noted by the reviewers, for not quite fitting the conference’s focus on high‐performance parallel computing), we reworked it based on reviewer comments and submitted it to the 25th European Conference on Object‐Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2011). It was also rejected from this conference, with some useful reviewer comments that we are taking into account while revising the paper for submission to another venue. The second paper, “Testing Specifications by Verifying Tests”, was co‐written with Dr. Kiniry and submitted to Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS 2011), one of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software. It was rejected, and we are currently in the process of running more case studies in preparation for submission to another venue. The third paper, “Achieving Instant Gradeification”, is about the AutoGradeMe tool that I discussed above in the context of the TCSS305 course. It was co‐written with Dr. Kiniry and Mr. Fairmichael and initially submitted to the 42nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2011); the tool was still called “AutoGrader” at the time. The paper was rejected by SIGCSE, and it was clear from the one strongly negative review that the reviewer had (somewhat ineptly) attempted to deduce our identities, despite the double‐blind reviewing system, and determined—incorrectly—that we had previously published a paper about the same tool. It turned out that there was another, fairly obscure, Java‐based tool called “Auto‐ Grader” that had been previously published (it has absolutely nothing in common with our tool, other than working with Java code). As a result, we renamed our tool to “AutoGradeMe” and submitted the paper to another conference, the 24th

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IEEE‐CS Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T 2011). It was accepted as a short paper, so we shortened it and retitled it “Toward Instant Gradeification”; I will be presenting it at the CSEE&T 2011 conference in late May. We still intend to publish a full paper on the tool, when we have gathered more empirical data about its effectiveness. The fourth paper, “Verified Gaming”, is a position paper for the 1st Games and Software Engineering Workshop (GAS 2011) to be held at the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011) in May. It was co‐written with Dr. Kiniry, and was accepted to the workshop. I will be presenting it in late May. Also during this review period, Dr. Kiniry and I continued work on an expanded version of the “Verification‐centric Software Development in Java” paper. We have written a significant amount of material—some of which will not make it into the submitted paper, but will instead be in an even longer technical report and probably, at some future point, a textbook. Our current plan is to submit the paper to the Journal of Object Technology by early summer, and wrap up the technical report later in the year. With respect to funding, I submitted two applications to the Chancellor’s Fund for Travel program of the UWT Academic Affairs office this year. The first of these, for funding to attend the 3rd JML Spec‐a‐thon, was fully funded in the amount of $2,438; the second, for funding to attend the 2011 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), was denied because the committee elected to give only one award per applicant per academic year. During the coming year, I will continue to work on papers on verified gaming, the theory of interestingness, testing JML specifications, and refinement of concurrent models. These will likely be submitted to top‐tier conferences for late 2011 or (more likely) 2012. 2.4 Conferences Attended and Talks Given In June/July 2010, I presented the paper “JMLUnit: The Next Generation” at the International Conference on Formal Verification of Object‐Oriented Software (FoVeOOS 2010) in Paris. In November 2010, I attended and co‐organized the Third JML Spec‐a‐Thon (described above) at ITU Copenhagen. In January 2011, I gave an invited talk about the intersection of formal methods and unit testing at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. In May 2011, I will be presenting the paper “Verified Gaming” at the 1st Games and Software Engineering Workshop (GAS 2011), presenting the paper “Toward Instante Gradeification” at the 24th IEEE‐CS Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T 2011), and attending the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011); all are colocated in Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii. Due to the uncertainty surrounding travel funding, I am currently unsure of my plans for conference and workshop attendance during the next review period. It is unclear whether we will schedule a fourth Spec‐a‐thon for the next review period, as we have very limited funding remaining from Formal Methods Europe.

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3. Service The following is a summary of my service contributions for this review period. 3.1 External During this review period I co‐organized a workshop (described previously), the Third JML Spec‐a‐Thon, at ITU Copenhagen. This workshop, from 1–5 November 2010, brought together an international group of 9 researchers to work intensively on the development of formal specifications for modern Java core classes and to lay out a road map for JML development over the next several months. In my capacity as an independent financial examiner for Formal Methods Europe (FME), one of the professional societies of which I am a member, I examined information about FME’s financial activities to ensure that the annual report by FME’s treasurer was an accurate reflection of reality. My appointment as an independent financial examiner for FME ended in March 2011 with my report on the latest fiscal year. I have continued to participate in the development of modern JML tools (described previously), as well as designing and leading the development of the JMLUnitNG tool. These activities can be classified as both research and service given the public availability (current or eventual) of the tools being developed. As these tools will likely be used in my classroom when they reach maturity, this work also serves teaching. 3.2 Campus I have been a member of the campus technology committee since September 2006. My responsibility on that committee is to provide input on both campus technology‐related policies (e.g., revisions to the employee laptop policy) and plans for future improvements to university information systems (e.g., extension of the campus network to new buildings, equipment requirements for new smart classrooms). I am not currently serving on other campus‐level committees. 3.3 Program I have been the Institute’s mentor coordinator since September 2006; that position involves interviewing, hiring, and scheduling mentors and collecting information from them about the amount of “use” they are getting in the lab. I was also a member of the undergraduate curriculum committee from October 2006 until its dissolution in December 2010, and am currently a member of both the Computer Science and Systems and Computer Engineering and Systems undergraduate curriculum committees. In addition, I have been a co‐adviser (with Ankur Teredesai) for the student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) since autumn 2007, the adviser for our campus chapter of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) honor society since autumn 2007, and the adviser for the UWT Game Developers Club since winter 2010. I have also been the coach of the Institute’s ACM‐ICPC Programming Contest teams since 2008, and in November 2010 I brought 2 teams of 3 undergraduates each to the regional contest in Eugene, Oregon. Our teams did well, given their level of preparation, and my hope is to start the preparation earlier for the 2011 competition. I am the chair of the Institute’s facilities committee, which is responsible for prioritizing

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equipment purchases and supervising the use of Institute labs and other facilities. In addition, I have continued to maintain and administer the Institute of Technology Moodle installation that I created in September 2007. The Institute Moodle now hosts a total of 260 current and past courses, workshops, and research projects, including 31 courses and workshops for the Spring 2011 quarter. I use Moodle for every course I teach, and several other faculty members use it as well; its use is currently required for all courses in the Computer Engineering and Systems program. This year, I have also served on an ad‐hoc committee whose charge is to gather data to address the recommendations made in the previous graduate review. So far, we have come up with survey questions to be asked of Institute faculty and staff, which will happen in the autumn; we will then be able to incorporate the resulting data into the Institute’s materials for the next graduate review in early 2012. Finally, I have been helping the Institute’s administrative staff by proofreading the faculty meeting minutes before they come to the full faculty. This requires very little time, and plays a significant part in avoiding “nitpicky” discussions at faculty meetings. 4 Attachments I have attached a current Curriculum Vitae to this report. As mentioned previously, all my course material is accessible to all Institute faculty on the Institute Moodle. In addition, nearly all of my published work is available via my UW web page, http://faculty.washington. edu/dmzimm/. I can supply papers (such as current conference submissions) that have not yet been published via email or as printed copies.

c. Staff Accomplishments (e.g., honors, awards, professional development)

Distinguished Service Award Recipient Beth Jeffrey was awarded the 2011 Distinguished Service Award for excellence

d. Student Accomplishments (e.g., honors, awards, presentations, job placement rate) Pacific Rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition: 2011 The annual collegiate competition focused on computer and network security and administration was held at Highline Community College's facilities on March 19‐20, 2011, sponsored by various companies and educational institutions. Students from assorted Pacific Rim universities and community/technical colleges, including UW Tacoma's Institute of Technology, competed as teams under the banner of their respective educational institutions. These teams made valiant attempts to defend their fictitious company's computing assets from attackers (the "red" team of security professionals) while they performed system and network administration tasks assigned to them by equally fictitious company bosses. The scenario attempted to duplicate, in an intense, two‐day event, what computing professionals might encounter if hired into a poorly‐administered environment. The teams were judged (by the "white" team) on how well they performed the assigned tasks as well as how available their network services were. The UW Tacoma team took third place this year.

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The 2010 Pacific Northwest Regional ACM Programming Contest The contest was held on 13 Nov 2010, and the results are in. Our lone entrant into the competition this year was Team Awesome++, consisting of Jonathan Hogins, Cameron Neblett, and Michael Wascher. They finished 8th at our site (University of Oregon) out of 21 teams, and 30th in the region out of 76 teams. In doing so, they beat 1 of the 3 UW Seattle teams (Turing Complete), 1 of the 3 University of British Columbia teams (UBC+), 1 of the 3 University of Oregon teams (My Little Pwnies), 2 of the 3 WSU teams (Interlopers and Channel 4 News Team), all three PLU teams, and more; This year's questions were significantly more difficult than the previous two years'. Team Awesome++ did very well, and we should all be proud of their performance.

e. Other Accomplishments

4. Three major goals for the 2010‐11 academic year.

Addressed in the Executive Summary

Three major goals for the 2011‐12 academic year. Same as the 2010‐2011 academic year. See the “to be done” part of the above.

5. If your unit is accredited/approved by an external agency or board, please describe

recommendations addressed during the 2010‐11 academic year and recommendations you will address during the 2011‐12 academic year.

Agency: ABET Date of report: Interim report of April 2011 (copy sent to Academic Affairs) . Final report expected in the next 30 days.

6. What recommendation(s) did you address from any internal UW review process (e.g.,

Graduate School, Library) during the 2010‐11 academic year and which recommendations will you address during the 2011‐12 academic year?

Reviewing unit: N/A Date of report:

7. (Academic Units Only) For each of the majors/concentrations/degrees in your unit, what improvements have been made in terms of building an assessment system for your unit? a. Development of Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) and assessment procedures for

majors/concentrations/degrees: b. Assessment of the achievement of SLOs in majors/concentrations/degrees: c. Development of SLOs and assessment procedures for courses: d. Assessment of the achievement of SLOs in courses: Addressed in the Executive Summary.

8. Please list the following for UW data collection purposes: a. Number of undergraduate students involved in faculty research: 2010‐2011 AY – 11 undergraduate students b. Number of graduate students involved in faculty research: 2010‐2011 AY – 18 graduate students

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c. Number of undergraduate students who presented at a research day at UWS or UWT: N/A d. Number of graduate students who presented at a research day at UWS or UWT: N/A

e. Number of students involved in service learning opportunities through curriculum: 2010‐2011 AY ‐ 46 undergraduate students were enrolled in internships.

f. Number of joint student‐faculty papers published and/or presented: 10 (ten) estimate. 9. Please discuss evidence of director/dean’s initiating, facilitating, fostering, or supporting

interdisciplinary activities involving the unit with other units across the university. The director has supported faculty engagement in inter‐disciplinary and multi‐disciplinary

activities in particular the joint research activities with IAS, UWT Education, CSS Bothell, I‐School in Seattle and the Center for Cyber Security and Information Assurance.

10. Please discuss the unit’s contribution to General Education during the 2010‐11 academic year. Donald Chinn has worked closely with the General Education group. Alan Fowler will be

teaching in the CORE during the 2011/2012 Academic Year. 11. In what ways has the unit contributed to overall campus initiatives and priorities in 2010‐11

(e.g., interdisciplinary activities, general education, diversity initiatives, development of global citizenship)?

The Institute continues to excel in inter‐disciplinary and multi‐disciplinary activities. (Josh Tenenberg, George Mobus, Donald Chinn, Ankur Teredesai, and Yan Bai). Donald Chinn has participated actively in General Education. The composition of the faculty and students is highly diverse, and we continue to foster international collaboration in many ways. (Orlando Baiocchi, Sam Chung, Ankur Teredesai, Jenny Sheng, Yan Bai, Donald Chinn, Josh Tenenberg).

significant achievements include the...

Documents