Select a calendar:
Filter January Events by Event Type:
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January
-
Story Telling Alice: Presenting Programming as a Means to the End of Storytelling
Thu, Jan 11, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Caitlin KelleherPost-doctoral Researcher Carnegie Mellon UniversityAbstract:
The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) estimates that the number of incoming college students intending to major in computer science has dropped by 70% since 2000, despite the fact that the projected need for computer scientists continues to grow. Increasing the numbers of female students who pursue computer science has the potential both to help fill projected computing jobs and improve the technology we create by diversifying the viewpoints that influence technology design. Numerous studies have found that girls begin to turn away from math and science related disciplines, including computer science, during middle school. By the end of eighth grade, twice as many boys as girls are interested in pursuing science, engineering, or technology based careers.In this talk, I will describe the development of Storytelling Alice, a programming environment that gives middle school girls a positive first experience with computer programming. Rather than presenting programming as an end in itself, Storytelling Alice presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling, a motivating activity for a broad spectrum of middle school girls. More than 250 girls participated in the formative user testing of Storytelling Alice. To determine girls' storytelling needs, I observed girls interacting with successive versions of Storytelling Alice and analyzed their storyboards and the programs they developed. To enable and encourage middle school girls to create the kinds of stories they envision, Storytelling Alice includes high-level animations that enable users to program social interaction between characters, a gallery of 3D objects designed to spark story ideas, and a story-based tutorial presented using Stencils, a novel tutorial interaction technique.To determine the impact of the storytelling focus on girls' interest in and success at learning to program, I conducted a study comparing the experiences of girls introduced to programming using Storytelling Alice with those of girls introduced to programming using a version of Alice without storytelling features (Generic Alice). Participants who used Storytelling Alice and Generic Alice were equally successful at learning basic programming concepts. However, I found that users of Storytelling Alice show more evidence of engagement with programming. Storytelling Alice users spent 42% more time programming and were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to continue working on their programs (51% of Storytelling Alice users vs. 16% of Generic Alice users snuck extra time). I will conclude by discussing future directions for introducing programming through storytelling as well as other potential contexts for storytelling.Bio:
Caitlin Kelleher is currently a post-doctoral researcher in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University with Professor Randy Pausch. Caitlin was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
-
DNA Origami
Thu, Jan 18, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Paul W.K. RothemundSenior Research FellowCaltechAbstract:
A key goal for bottom-up nanofabrication has been to generate structures whose complexity matches that achieved by top-down methods. Towards this goal, DNA nanotechnology provides an attractive route. Here I describe a method for folding long single strands of DNA into arbitrary two dimensional target shapes using a raster fill technique. Self-assembled in a one-pot reaction from the 7 kilobase genome of phage M13mp18 and more than 200 synthetic oligodeoxynucleotides, the shapes are roughly 100 nm in diameter and nearly 5 megadaltons in mass. (For comparison the eukaroytic ribosome, one of nature's most complex molecular machines, is 4.2 megadaltons in mass.) Experimental shapes approximate target shapes, such as a 5-pointed star, with a resolution of 3.5 to 6 nm and may be decorated by arbitrary patterns at 6 nm resolution to form words or images.
Enabled by a program for laying out complicated designs and, utilizing inexpensive unpurified oligodeoxynucleotides, this method helps move DNA nanotechnology from the realm of research towards that of engineering.
The ability to create arbitrary shapes provides a new route to the bottom-up nanofabrication of complex nano-scale devices and instruments.
Physicists and materials scientists should be able to use DNA origami to arrange optical, electronic, and mechanical components into novel materials or even an integrated "nano-laboratory" of their choosing.
Biologists may be able to use these structures to position proteins and other biomolecules in precise arrangements to study their coupling. Indeed these structures may be thought of as a versatile "nanobreadboard", a simple platform for creating arbitrary nanostructures.Bio:
Paul W.K. Rothemund is a graduate of Caltech, where he dual majored in biology and computer science. His undergraduate project in information theory resulted in one of the first designs for a DNA computer---a DNA Turing machine---and became one of the first patents for DNA computation.
He has a long-standing interest in problems at the interface of biology, chemistry, and computer science: he would like to understand what parts of biology may be best viewed as computation and he would like to turn the process of chemical synthesis into an exercise in programming. After receiving his Ph.D. under Leonard Adleman at the University of Southern California, he was awarded a Beckman postdoctoral fellowship and returned to Caltech to work with professor Erik Winfree on algorithmic self-assembly of DNA. Dr. Rothemund currently continues this work as a senior research fellow at Caltech. In 2006 he was awarded the Foresight Institute's Feynman Prize for nanotechnology.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
-
Developing Tools that Enhance Interactive Experiences and Their Development Porcess
Thu, Jan 25, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Magy Seif El-NasrPenn State UniversityCollege of Information Sciences and TechnologyAbstract:
The game industry is becoming a multi-billion dollar industry with revenues overcoming those of the movie industry. Recently, thousands of people around the world camped out in front of stores for days to be the first to own a Play Station 3 and/or Nintendo Wii. As the game industry matures, the tools used by designers and developers to build such games also mature. These tools are gaining importance as they not only result in better, faster developed games, but find unforeseen and excited uses outside their "native" industry – in training, health therapy, and education. In education in particular, these tools can be used as an infrastructure for course projects, helping reinforce many computer science and math concepts through learning by design or by doing. Still, many of these tools are limited. For example, the current visual design tools used to develop these interactive experiences have several limitations: they are (1) time- and labor- intensive, (2) rigid, as they do not adapt well to changes in physical and dramatic configuration of scenes forcing designers to preset these variables, and (3) designed based on control of timing and pacing which are not static as they depend on users' actions. My research focuses on developing tools that address these problems. In this talk, I will focus the discussion on one of these tools, specifically, a lighting design tool, called ELE (Expressive Lighting Engine), that I developed based on cinematic and theatric lighting design theories. ELE addresses the aforementioned problems by adding: (i) a high-level authoring tool to cut down the content development time and (ii) a constraint optimization system built based on cinematic and theatric techniques to adapt the lighting, accounting for context, timing, and gameplay/interaction, thus presenting a better adaptable solution to a dynamic environment. Such a tool is useful for enhancing the design and development process as well as the quality of interactive experiences, which include interactive entertainment, training simulations, and health therapy environments. I have also utilized the power of such tools in my classes to emphasize learning by design. Bio:
Dr. Seif El-Nasr is an assistant Professor in College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University, where she directs the Real-time Aesthetic and Experience Lab. She earned her Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University in Computer Science and her master's degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. Dr. Seif El-Nasr received several grants and awards. The awards she received include 2nd best paper award at the International Conference of Virtual Storytelling 2003, student best paper award at the Autonomous Agents conference 1999, and Leadership Excellence Award from Texas A&M University. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Game Development, the International Journal of Intelligent Games and Simulation, and ACM Computers in Entertainment; she has chaired and organized several workshops including, American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interaction Entertainment, which has recently became its own conference AIIDE (Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment) and Design of Interactive Systems (DIS) Workshop called 'On the Process of Game Design'. She was a special theme editor for the Journal of Game Development special issue on Game Design Research. Her research work includes designing and developing tools that enhance the engagement of interactive environments used for training, education, and entertainment. She developed several classes, including Game Design and Development, Design of Immersive Environments, Interactive Narrative, and Software Engineering. In all her classes she promotes creativity and project-based learning through the use of the tools she built in her research augmented with game engines. URL: http://faculty.ist.psu.edu/SeifEl-Nasr/.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
-
CS Distinguished Lecture Series
Tue, Jan 30, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Danny Cohen
Distinguished Engineer
CTO, Sun MicrosystemsTitle: Internet 0 (i0)Abstract: The growing demand for networking embedded devices has been met by a proliferation of incompatible standards that are repeating many of the early mistakes of what became the Internet. What's needed are the original architectural insights of the Internet, rather than their current technological embodiments. This is being done in the Internet 0
(i0) initiative. Just as the Internet introduced internetworking by carrying an IP packet end-to-end, i0 introduces interdevice internetworking by carrying modulation end-to-end. This is done by representing an IP packet in time-domain impulses, self-consistently timed to allow the transient response to settle over the size of the network. i0 addresses the most important performance constraint on providing smart infrastructure for homes, buildings, and factories: the cost of complexity. By bringing IP to the leaf nodes of a network, over any available physical transport, and in a way that is independent of network topology, i0 extends the Internet to the scale required by the trillion-dollar-per-year construction industry. Like the Internet protocol itself, i0 is not optimal for anything but good enough for just about everything.Bio: Danny Cohen is a Distinguished Engineer working on the HPCS Program. Cohen received his PhD from Ivan Sutherland at Harvard University.
Cohen pioneered visual realtime interactive flight simulation on general purpose computers. Later, he lead projects that pioneered realtime interactive applications over the ARPAnet and the Internet, such as visual flight simulation, packet-voice (aka Voice over IP) and packet-video.
After being on the computer science faculty at Harvard (1969-1973) he joined USC/ISI (1973-1993) where he started many network related projects, including Packet-Voice, Packet-Video, Internet Concepts, MOSIS, FastXchange (e-Commerce), Digital Library, and ATOMIC which was the forerunner of Myrinet. In 1993 he started working on Distributed Interactive Simulation through several projects funded by DoD. In 1994 he cofounded Myricom (with Chuck Seitz et al) which commercialized Myrinet, a high-performance system area network. In 2001 he joined Sun and is working there on optical interconnection.
Cohen served on several panels and boards for DoD, NIH, and NRC, including 5 years on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Air Force. He is a bona fide member of the Flat Earth Society, and a commercial pilot with SEL/MEL/SES ratings.
Danny is still a student of Ivan.Hosted by Gerard MedioniSnacks to be served.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
