Russell Keynotes at Computer Science Education Research Conference

Ingrid Russell, professor of computer science, A&S, gave a keynote address at the Second Computer Science Education Research Conference (CSERC 2012). The conference was held in conjunction with the Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, Sept. 8-12, 2012 in Wroclaw, Poland.

CSERC 2012 was held in cooperation with the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. Russell’s talk, titled “Machine Learning as a Contextualized Approach for Improving Student Engagement and Learning,” discussed a collaborative project involving the development of a project-based framework for teaching core Artificial Intelligence topics through a unifying theme of machine learning.

Twenty-six machine learning curricular modules, including projects, code, and associated resources, have been developed.  Each project involves the development of a machine learning system in a specific application. The applications span a large area including network security, recommender systems, game playing, intelligent agents, computational chemistry, robotics, conversational systems, cryptography, web document classification, computer vision, data integration in databases, bioinformatics, pattern recognition, and data mining.

Over 30 institutions nationwide have used the machine learning modules. The project was funded by more than $400,000 from the National Science Foundation. An invited paper related to Russell’s talk will appear in the proceedings of the CSERC conference and will be included in the ACM Digital Library.