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Lynn Andrea Stein
Professor
Department of Computer Science
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
February 11 at 12:30pm
130 Woodward
Abstract:
Communication is a key skill for engineers and scientists, and visual communication is an important part of an engineer or scientist's communications toolkit, but little training in these areas (beyond CAD) is generally included in STEM education. This talk presents an empirical investigation into whether and how STEM students use visual representations in their (written/drawn) explanation. Our preliminary findings suggest that explicit instruction in visual communication can change students' conceptualization of the task of "explaining" and that this effect may transfer and persist beyond the context of instruction.
Bio:
Dr. Stein joined Olin College from MIT, where she was an Associate Professor of Computer Science. She has a bachelor's degree, cum laude, in computer science from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and master's and doctorate degrees in computer science from Brown University.
Dr. Stein has pioneered the development of a new and innovative approach to the teaching of computer science. Computer scientists have typically viewed computation as the step-by-step process of producing a result. Modern computational systems (such as the World Wide Web) require an alternative conceptualization of computation in terms of interactive architectures. Interactive architectures can be used to better model not only the Web, but also other complex systems such as those in robotics, information management, and software design. Dr. Stein has developed innovative robotics laboratories for students to learn and demonstrate the power of her new approach.
In robotics, her research has focused on designing, building, and understanding the architectures that underlie cognition in biological and artificial systems. The robotic systems her research group has built involve bridging the gap between the low-level behavior traditionally associated with robotics and higher levels of cognition that more closely approximate thinking.
Dr. Stein has won numerous awards and honors, including the General Electric Foundation Faculty for the Future Award and the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. She was named Institute Fellow, KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, and received the Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award. She has also served as a Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellow.
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