Committee: Computational Thinking for Everyone: A Workshop Series

Committee Membership Information


Project Title:	Computational Thinking for Everyone: A Workshop Series
PIN:	CSTB-L-08-01-A
Major Unit:	Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences
Sub Unit:	DBASSE Board on Science Education DEPS Computer Science & Telecommuncations Board
RSO:	Lin, Herb
Subject/Focus Area:

Committee Membership

Date Posted: 09/08/2008

Dr. Alfred V. Aho
Columbia University

Alfred V. Aho (NAE) is the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science and vice-chair of undergraduate education for the computer science department at Columbia University. Previously, he conducted research at Bell Labs from 1963 to 1991, and again from 1997 to 2002 as Vice President of the Computing Sciences Research Center. Dr. Aho's current research interests include quantum computing, programming languages, compilers, and algorithms. He is part of the Language and Compilers research group at Columbia. He is widely known for his development of the AWK programming language with Peter J. Weinberger and Brian Kernighan (the 'A' stands for "Aho"), and his co-authorship of Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (the "Dragon book") with Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey Ullman. He wrote the initial versions of the Unix tools egrep and fgrep. He is also a co-author (along with Ullman and John Hopcroft) of a number of widely used textbooks on several areas of computer science, including algorithms and data structures, and the foundations of computer science. He is a past president of ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computability Theory. Dr. Aho has chaired the Advisory Committee for the Computer and Information Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He has received many prestigious honors, including the IEEE's John von Neumann Medal and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Aho was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999 for contributions to the fields of algorithms and programming tools. Dr. Aho earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University.

Dr. Robert L. Constable
Cornell University

Robert Constable is the dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science. Formerly he was the chairman of the Computer Science Department for six years. He also heads a research group in automated reasoning and formal methods in the Computer Science Department where he is a professor.
Robert Constable is a graduate of Princeton University where he worked with Alonzo Church, one of the pioneers of computer science. He did his PhD at Wisconsin with Stephen Cole Kleene, a PhD student of Church and another pioneer of computer science. Church traces his mathematical lineage back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the first logicians interested in mechanical computation and the digitization of human knowledge. Professor Constable joined the Cornell faculty in 1968. He has supervised over forty three PhD students in computer science. He is known for his work connecting programs and mathematical proofs which has led to new ways of automating the production of reliable software. This work is known by the slogan “proofs as programs,” and it is embodied in the Nuprl (“new pearl”) theorem prover. He has written three books on this topic as well as numerous research articles. Since 1980 he has headed a project that uses Nuprl to design and verify software systems, instances of which are still operational in industry and science. Currently he is working on extending this programming method to concurrent processes, realizing the notion of “proofs as processes.” In 1999 he became the first dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science, a unit which includes the Computer Science Department, the Department of Statistical Science, the Information Science Program, and the Program in Computer Graphics. It also sponsors the undergraduate major and graduate field in Computational Biology.

Dr. Yasmin B. Kafai
University of Pennsylvania

Yasmin B. Kafai is professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she spent over a decade on faculty at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies As a learning scientist, she has researched and developed media-rich software tools and environments, most recently Scratch, together with researchers at the MIT Media Lab, that support youth in schools and community centers in becoming designers of games, simulations, and virtual worlds. As part of her policy initiatives, she wrote "Under the Microscope: A Decade of Gender Equity Interventions in the Sciences" (2004) and participated in the national commission that produced the report "Tech-Savvy Girls: Educating Girls in the Computer Age" (2000) for the American Association of University Women. She also briefed the Telecommunication and Computer Science Board for "Being Fluent with Information Technology (National Academy of Sciences, 1999). While conducting research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, she received her Ed.D. in human development and psychology from Harvard University.

Dr. Marcia C. Linn - (Chair)
University of California, Berkeley

Marcia C. Linn is a professor specializing in education in mathematics, science, and technology in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She directs the NSF-funded Technology-enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) center. She is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. Board service includes the American Association for the Advancement of Science board, the Graduate Record Examination Board of the Educational Testing Service, the McDonnell Foundation Cognitive Studies in Education Practice board, and the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Dr. Linn earned a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University.

Dr. M. Brian Blake
Georgetown University

M. Brian Blake is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. Dr. Blake’s expertise resides in information technology, computer science and engineering. His research interests include the investigation of automated approaches to sharing information and software capabilities across organization boundaries, sometimes referred to as enterprise integration. His investigations cover the spectrum of software engineering: design, specification, proof of correctness, implementation/experimentation, performance evaluation, and application. Dr. Blake’s long-term vision is the creation of adaptable software entities or software agents that can be deployed on the Internet and, using existing resources, manage the creation of new processes, sometimes referred to as inter-organizational workflow. He has several on-going projects that make incremental progress towards this long-term vision. In addition, he conducts experimentation in the areas of software engineering education and software process and improvement to determine the most effective methods for training students and professionals to develop module systems that are distributed by nature. Dr. Blake has consulted for such companies as General Electric, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and The MITRE Corporation. He has published over 80 refereed journal papers and conference proceedings in the areas of service-oriented computing, agents and workflow, enterprise integration, component-based software engineering, distributed data management, and software engineering education. Dr. Blake’s work has been funded by the Federal Aviation Administration, the MITRE Corporation, National Science Foundation, DARPA, Air Force Research Lab, SAIC, and the National Institute of Health. He earned his doctorate in information technology and computer science from George Mason University.

Dr. Janet L. Kolodner
Georgia Institute of Technology

Janet L. Kolodner is a Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research, for the past 30 years, has addressed a wide variety of issues in learning, memory, and problem solving, both in computers and in people. During the 1980’s, she pioneered the computer method called case-based reasoning, which allows a computer to reason and learn from its experiences. The first case-based design aids (CBDA’S) came from her lab. Archie-2, for example, helped architecture students with conceptual design. During the early 1990’s, she used the cognitive model implied by case-based reasoning to address issues in creative design. JULIA planned meals, Creative JULIA figured out what to do with leftover rice, IMPROVISOR did simple mechanical design, and ALEC simulated Alexander Graham Bell in his invention of the telephone. Later in the 1990’s, she used the cognitive model in case-based reasoning to guide design of science curriculum for middle school. Learning by Design™ is a design-based learning approach and an inquiry-oriented project-based approach to science learning that has children learn science from their design experiences. The sequencing of activities in the classroom encourages students to reflect on their design and science experiences in ways that CBR says are appropriate for integrating them well into memory. LBD curriculum units and the sequencing structures in LBD are being integrated into a full 3-year middle-school science curriculum called Project-Based Inquiry Science (PBIS), to be published in time for use in the 2008-2009 academic year. Most recently, Dr. Kolodner’s research uses what she learned in designing LBD to create informal learning environments to help middle schoolers come to think of themselves as competent scientific reasoners. In Kitchen Science Investigators, fifth and sixth graders learn science in the context of cooking. In Hovering Around, they learn about motion and forces, about airflow, and how to explain in the context of designing hovercraft. Dr. Kolodner is founding Editor in Chief of the Journal of the Learning Sciences and a founder and first Executive Officer of the International Society for the Learning Sciences. She has headed up the Cognitive Science Program at Georgia Tech and headed an organization called EduTech in the mid-90’s whose mission was to use what we know about cognition to design educational software and integrate it appropriately into educational environments. She has a B.S. from Brandeis University in math and computer science and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University.

Dr. Lawrence Snyder
University of Washington

Lawrence Snyder is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. Snyder's research has focused on parallel computation, including architecture, algorithms and languages. He has served on the faculties of Yale and Purdue, and has had visiting appointments at UW, Harvard, MIT, Sydney University, The Swiss Technological University (ETH), The University of Auckland and Kyoto University. In 1980 he invented programmable interconnect, a method to dynamically configure on-chip components, and a technology used today for FPGAs. In 1990 he was co-designer of Chaos Router, a randomizing adaptive packet router. He was principle investigator of the ZPL language design project, the first high-level parallel language to achieve "performance portability" across all parallel computer platforms. Snyder is author of Fluency with Information Technology: Skills, Concepts and Capabilities, a textbook for non-techie college freshmen that teaches fundamental computing concepts; the book is in its third edition. With former PhD student Calvin Lin (UT Austin), he has written Principles of Parallel Programming, published in 2008. Snyder was a three-term member of the Computer Research Association Board of Directors, developing a series of best practices white papers. He chaired the NSF CISE Advisory Board as well as several CISE directorate oversight panels and numerous review panels. He has chaired two National Research Council studies, producing influential reports -- Academic Careers for Experimental Computer Scientists and Engineers and Being Fluent with Information Technology; he served three terms on NRC's Army Research Lab Technical Advisory Board. He serves on ACM's Education Board, has been general chair or program committee chair of several ACM and IEEE conferences. He is a fellow of both the ACM and IEEE. He received a BA from the University of Iowa in Mathematics and Economics, and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University as a student of A. Nico Habermann.

Dr. Uri Wilensky
Northwestern University

Uri Wilensky is an associate professor of Learning Sciences and Computer Science at Northwestern University and holds appointments in the cognitive science and linguistics programs. He is a mathematician, educator, computer scientist and learning technologist, and the founder and current director of the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling at Northwestern University. He is also a founder and member of the governing board of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). His most recent projects focus on developing tools that enable users (both researchers and learners) to simulate, explore and make sense of complex systems. His NetLogo agent-based modeling software is in widespread use worldwide. Prior to coming to Northwestern, he taught at Tufts University and MIT and was a research scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation. Dr. Wilensky is a founder and an executive editor of the International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning. His research interests include computer-based modeling & agent-based modeling, STEM education, mathematics in the context of computation, and complex systems. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Career Award as well as the Spencer Foundation’s Post-Doctoral Award. He has directed numerous NSF research projects focused on developing computer-based modeling tools. Among these tools are multi-agent modeling languages, such as StarLogoT and NetLogo, Model-based curricula such as GasLab, ProbLab, NIELS and BEAGLE evolution and Participatory Simulation Toolkits such as Calc-HubNet and Computer-HubNet. The tools enable learners to explore and create simulations of complex phenomena across many domains of natural and social science and, through creating and exploring such simulations, deepening their understanding of core scientific concepts. Many of these tools are also in use by researchers across a wide variety of domains including the natural sciences, social sciences, business and medicine. By providing a “low threshold” language for exploring and constructing models, Wilensky hopes to promote modeling literacy -- the sharing and critiquing of models in the scientific community, in education and in the public at large. Dr. Wilensky received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics, philosophy and computer science and received his Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Committee Membership Roster Comments

Effective October 2008, the committee membership changed with the resignation of Dr. Wm. A. Wulf.

Effective November 2008, the committee membership was updated with the addition of Lawrence Snyder.