UNCC College of Computing and Informatics

Graduate Seminar (2008 Spring)

Title: Computational Thinking, Abstraction and Programming: A Personal Perspective

Bryant W. York, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Computer Science

Portland State University

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~york/

January 18 at 3:00pm
106 Woodward

Abstract:

In an attempt to understand why computational thinking is so fundamentally important to science, I explore through a personal lens what computational thinking has meant to me over the past 44 years with the hope that significant self-reflection will lead to the discovery of important principles. My goal is for these principles to be used in guiding research on the evolution of computational thinking and ultimately applied to the development of new curriculum. In this talk I chronicle certain major events in the development of my computational thinking and the awakening of new abstraction capabilities. These events are placed in the context of the historical evolution of various abstraction mechanisms in programming languages dating back to the invention of FORTRAN. A number of concrete examples are provided from past works that illustrate the impact of this kind of thinking on problems from mathematics, science, engineering and learning sciences. I conclude with an outline for a program of research on enhancing computational thinking in grade school children.

Bio:

Research:

Dr. York has research publications in several areas of computers science, including computer vision, expert systems, software engineering, computer assistance for persons with disabilities, parallel computation, crystallographic computations, computational physics, computational algebra, and artificial neural networks. Most of this work relates to the development of algebraic and combinatorial computations on parallel machines. Recently he has begun to focus on computer games as means for understanding the development of early logical thinking skills in young children.

Education:

Dr. York's educational background includes the A.B. in mathematics from Brandeis University, the M.S. in management from MIT, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. He has held industrial research positions at the IBM Research Labs in San Jose, CA and at Digital Equipment Corporation's Artificial Intelligence Technology Center in Hudson, Massachusetts. He is currently professor in the Department of Computer Science at Portland State University; formerly associate professor and research director for the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University (1991 – 2001); and formerly associate professor of computer science at Boston University (1986 – 1990). During 1990-1991 he served as a program officer at NSF and as a guest researcher at the Center for Computing and Applied Mathematics at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Service:

Dr. York was (1992 – 1998, 2002 - 2006) a member of the Advisory Committee for the Computer Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation; a member (1991 – 1994) of the Advisory Panel for the Ethics, Values, and Society program within the Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate of the National Science Foundation; a member of several professional organizations including ACM, IEEE-CS, SIAM, AAAI, and AAAS. Dr. York has served on the ACM Education Board (1991 - 1996) and the ACM U. S. Public Policy Committee (1992 - 1998). He was the 1994 chair of the ACM committee on minorities and he organized the first NSF-sponsored workshop on increasing participation of minorities in the computing disciplines (May 1995). In 1997 he helped to co-found the African American Scholars for Citizenship and Community (AASCC) and in 2000 he co-founded the Institute for African American eCulture (IAAeC). He was chair (2006-2007) of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), jointly funded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers' Computer Society (IEEE-CS), as well as chair (2006-2007) of the Section T on Information, Computing and Communications of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has been twice appointed to the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA) (2002-2003, 2005-2006) and elected to a full three-year term (2006 – 2009).

Awards and Honors:

In 1998 He won the A. Nico Habermann Award for service to underrepresented minorities in computing and in 2001 he won the first Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Science. Dr. York has won the ADMI award for service to minority institutions twice (1991, 1997). In 2001 he was selected as one of the 50 most important Blacks in technology and in 2006 he was selected as one of the 100 most important Blacks in technology by the editors of US Black Engineer and Information Technology magazine. In January 2007 Dr. York was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his leadership over the years in broadening participation in computing. In July 2007 he received the first Footprints Award at the African American Researchers in Computer Science (AARCS) Conference for his years of service as a mentor and role model.

Recent Educational and International Activities:

For the past three years Professor York has been more heavily involved in educational and international activities. He has traveled to China nine times in order to develop working relationships with faculty at three institutions, Xiamen University, Fuzhou University, and Northwest Polytechnic University in Xi’An. Two of these universities are in Fujian province which is the sister state of Oregon. In addition to giving lectures on parallel scientific computing and running workshops on collaborative techniques and grant proposal development, he has spent a significant amount of time studying China’s minority cultures and learning Mandarin. Professor York was selected as a U.S. delegate to the NSF-funded First U.S. – China Computer Science Summit, held in Beijing in May 2006, and gave a presentation on differences and similarities between basic and applied research in the two countries. He will also help to organize the second U.S. – China Summit to be held in conjunction with the CRA Snowbird conference in Snowbird Utah, July 2008.

Dr. York was a participant in the NSF-funded ICER West Workshop on integrating computing research and education, held at Stanford University in 2006. He was invited but failed (due to illness) to attend the CRA Education Summit, held at Georgia Institute of Technology in January 2007; however, he submitted his slide presentation which was delivered by the workshop organizers. These slides included a study in Australia of cultural differences between native Australian professors and their Chinese Ph.D. students. Dr. York’s recently completed NSF grant on “New Approaches to Human Capital Development through Information Technology Research” studied aspects of culture-specific and culture-sensitive approaches to pedagogy and assessment with respect to African Americans within American culture. As co-PI on an NSF broadening participation demonstration project (BPC), he delivers an annual workshop on grant proposal development for new underrepresented faculty in computing. As co-PI on an NSF CPATH project he is working on the internationalization of computing educations with a collection of Pacific Rim institutions. He has recently collaborated with his daughter on a project to transform the intellectual culture of urban children through the generation and delivery of parent/child discourses which gradually evolve to contain greater STEM content.

Finally, Dr. York is a partner in the LIFE Center, an NSF-fund Sciences of Learning Center co-located at University of Washington, Stanford University, and Stanford Research Institute and he provides advice to the Microsoft Education group on educational activities and broadening participation in computing.

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