Education Task Force
Chair: Debra Richardson
Debra Richardson
University of California – Irvine
Debra Richardson Website
Debra J. Richardson is founding Ted and Janice Smith Dean of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California—Irvine. She joined the UCI faculty in 1987, and became chair of the ICS department in July 2000. Under her leadership, the department was promoted to the first computing-focused school in the UC system in December 2002, and she was appointed the founding dean. She was instrumental in securing a transformational six-figure endowment for the school, resulting in naming the school after philanthropist Donald Bren. She served as dean through June 2010.
Richardson is a Professor of Informatics. She pioneered research in “specification-based testing” and recently shifted her attention to adapting software engineering techniques to socially relevant domains, specifically focusing on sustainability. Her research has been recognized by designation as a Fellow of Automated Software Engineering, and also with two retrospective impact awards from ACM SIGSoft.
A long-time advocate of increasing the participation of women and other underrepresented minorities in computing, she has served on the leadership team of the National Center for Women and Information Technology since its inception and leads UCI’s NCWIT PaceSetter team. She chairs the Alliance for California Computing Education for Students and Schools, focusing on equitable access to K-16 computing education. She chairs the Advisory Council for ACM’s Computer Science Teachers Association, chaired CSEdWeek during its second and third years, and serves on the ACM Education Board.
Richardson received her B.A. in Mathematics from the University of California—San Diego, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst.
Daniel Lopresti
University of California – Irvine
Daniel Lopresti Website
Daniel Lopresti received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton in 1987. After completing his doctorate, he joined the Department of Computer Science at Brown and taught courses ranging from VLSI design to computational aspects of molecular biology and conducted research in parallel computing and VLSI CAD. He went on to help found the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory in Princeton, and later also served on the research staff at Bell Labs where his work turned to document analysis, handwriting recognition, and biometric security.
In 2003, Dr. Lopresti joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh where his research examines fundamental algorithmic and systems-related questions in pattern recognition, bioinformatics, and security. Dr. Lopresti is director of the Lehigh Pattern Recognition Research (PatRec) Lab. On July 1, 2009, he became Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Effective July 1, 2014, he assumed the role of Interim Dean of the P. C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science at Lehigh.
Education is a National Priority. We need to determine what the CCC / CS research community can and should be doing to work in this area, while realizing that it is a crowded and difficult space since education is a “local issue.”
Education Research Whitepaper
The task force has produced a whitepaper for the computing research and policy community on The Importance of Computing Education Research.
Computer-Aided Personalized Education
On November 12-13, the CCC with be holding the Computer-Aided Personalized Education (CAPE) Workshop in Washington, DC. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers developing educational tools based on technologies such as logical reasoning and machine learning with researchers in education, human-computer interaction, and psychology to articulate a long-term research agenda. The focus will be on college-level courses in computer science, mathematics, and physics. The workshop is expected to foster new collaborations among participants from diverse disciplines, suggest new research directions in computer-aided education, inspire other researchers to work on these problems, and ultimately result in technology for effective and personalized learning.
Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education Workshop
February 11-12, 2013 in Washington, DC, the CCC held the Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education Workshop (MROE). Participants explored computer science and multidisciplinary research agendas designed to improve formal and informal education. The workshop built on CCC’s earlier visioning activities on Global Resources for Online Education (GROE), addressing education-relevant research in areas such as intelligent student modeling through data mining, mobile computing for data logging, social networking, serious games, intelligent learning environments, HCI to facilitate educational interactions, computer-supported collaborative learning, interactive visualizations and simulations, and many other areas, to include research at the interface of computing and the social/behavioral sciences.
This CCC visioning workshop addressed these and related questions on computing-relevant multidisciplinary research, looking 5-10 years out, for online education. Importantly, the workshop did not address shorter-term concerns such as credentialing and business models for online education ventures, except as these inform the workshop’s focus on longer-term research agendas.
Read the Workshop Report here.
See Related Resources Below
Related Resources
