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Here are the University of WisconsinMadisons rankings in undergraduate programs and specialty areas, out of 437 public and private doctoral institutions, from the 2024 edition of U.S. News & World Reports Americas Best Colleges.

Related link: UWMadison was ranked 35th out of 437 public and private doctoral institutions, and 12th among public universities.

Overall: 35th, and 12th among public universities.

Engineering: 17th overall; 25th in biomedical; 14th in chemical; 21st in civil; 21st in computer; 24th in electrical/electronic/communications; 13th in industrial; 16th in materials; 20th in mechanical.

Business: 17th overall; 17th in accounting; 26th in finance; 2nd in insurance; 22nd in management; 9th in marketing; 1st in real estate.

Psychology: 11th overall.

Economics: 18th overall.

Computer Science: 22nd overall; 21st in artificial intelligence; 8th in computer systems; 16th in cybersecurity; 23rd in data analytics/science; 9th in programming languages; 19th in theory.

Nursing: 16th overall.

Institutions are nominated by Presidents/Chancellors, Provosts, and Enrollment Management/Admissions leaders in several student experience areas. UWMadison is ranked in the following areas:

First Year Experience: 51st overall, 9th among publics.

Study Abroad: 28th overall and 8thamong publics.

Undergraduate Research/Creative Projects: 41stoverall and 11th among publics.

Best Colleges for Veterans: 19th overall; 12th among publics.

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U.S. News & World Report 2024 undergraduate program rankings - University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kalamazoo College announced today that one faculty member and one staff member have earned two of the highest awards the College bestows on its employees. Rosemary K. Brown Professor of Computer Science Alyce Brady received the 202324 Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship for Excellence in Teaching, and Custodian Laura Weber was named the recipient of the W. Haydn Ambrose Prize for Extraordinary Service to Kalamazoo College.

Brady, a co-chair of the computer science department, has served K for nearly 30 years. She teaches a variety of courses from introductory classes to advanced classes on programming languages, data structure, dynamic Internet apps and software development in a global context. Her research interests have included the application of computer science to social justice while serving as the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Faculty Fellow from 20132015.

Over the past decade, Brady has supervised 72 Senior Integrated Projects and is currently guiding five more. She is also credited with championing student reflection through growth journals, applying a flipped-classroom format that started even before the pandemic, and receiving previous recognition through the Outstanding First-Year Advocate award.

A ceremony to confer the Lucasse Fellowship traditionally occurs in the spring term, wherethe honored faculty memberspeaksregardingtheirwork.

Nominators credited Weber, a 10-year staff member in Facilities Management, for volunteering at student events such as Monte Carlo and Cafsgiving. She also hosts international students and refers to her former visitors as her children, while former students refer to her as their mum. One nominator wrote, Her love language is inclusion. Another said, she treats everyone like family.

The Ambrose Prize is named after W. Haydn Ambrose, who served K for more than 20 years in a variety of roles, including assistant to the president for church relations, dean of admission and financial aid, and vice president for development. Ambrose was known for being thoughtful in the projects he addressed and treating people with respect. In addition to a financial award, Weber has earned a crystal award to commemorate the achievement and an invitation to sit on the Prizes selection committee for two years.

Congratulations to both of the honorees.

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Lucasse, Ambrose Prize Winners Announced at K - News and Events - Kalamazoo College

Amy Ko developed the computer programming language Wordplay to equalize the playing field for would-be coders.Credit: Doug Parry

I had many exciting plans for the end of my sabbatical year. Breaking my elbow wasnt among them. Suddenly, all of my work as a computing and information-science professor writing, and especially programming had to be done with one hand or by voice. It was a pain. At the same time, it provided a strong reminder of why I do what I do studying our individual and collective struggle to understand computing and harness it for play, power, equity and justice and accelerated my desire to develop a truly accessible programming language.

Computer programming has never been easy. The cryptic documentation, the obscure syntax and the confusing error messages are all things we just seem to tolerate. But being unable to use my dominant hand underlined the fact that programming caters mainly for non-disabled people. My temporary disability meant that my work could no longer keep up with my thoughts. Even speech-recognition software customized for coding was error prone and slow. My inability to type two-handed keyboard shortcuts meant I had to reconfigure numerous settings and memorize dozens of new shortcuts.

People with permanent disabilities know these challenges well at every turn, programming deters people with disabilities from participating fully, and therefore deters them from participating in science. Some of the most popular platforms for learning to code require a mouse, and so exclude people with motor disabilities. Most code-editing programs, including those used in science, assume users have sight, excluding anyone who is blind or visually impaired. And the Internet, which is an essential tool for finding documentation and help when programming, is broadly incompatible with screen readers, which are commonly used by people who are blind, visually impaired or dyslexic.

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The difficulties extend beyond physical abilities. Programming languages and tools are built around assumptions about natural-language skills in particular, that users can read and write in English. Programming-language keywords, documentation and online help are almost always written in English first, and are rarely translated into more than a few other common languages. As a result, anyone whose first language isnt English that is, the majority of people on the planet is at a strong disadvantage, even when learning the basics. And if they dont speak English, and rely on speech input or screen readers, they are much more likely to struggle, because these tools rarely support languages other than English.

Even before my injury, I had been giving these problems a lot of thought. I was using my sabbatical to develop a new programming language called Wordplay, which strives to avoid assumptions about ability or natural-language fluency. Others have tried this before, albeit in more focused efforts. The Japanese programming language Dolittle (in Japanese, doritoru), for instance, enables users to write code in that language directly, and the language Quorum caters specifically for people with visual impairments. Hedy, which is used to teach programming concepts to children, has been translated into 39 languages. But to my knowledge, none has tried to address ability and language fluency universally, striving for a kind of equitable design that serves everyone, regardless of their language or abilities.

Designing Wordplay required Ko to reimagine every part of the programming experience, she says.Credit: Amy J. Ko

Inventing a new language to meet these goals wasnt easy. It meant reimagining every part of the programming experience: removing all natural-language keywords (such as if and while); allowing programming identifiers (such as variable and function names) to have multiple, language-tagged names; and enabling both left-to-right and right-to-left characters to coexist in code, to support bilingual users. It required a programming editor that can automatically translate code between languages, while preserving the codes behaviour, to support multilingual teams and classrooms. It meant displaying code in a way that can be navigated, screen-read and edited using a mouse, keyboard and speech, as well as other accessible technologies. And it required the invention of new forms of interactive text-based program output that could be automatically translated into other languages and described by a screen reader, like a form of live captioning.

The changes have been about more than just broader support for different inputs, outputs and languages, however. Some of the most fundamental concepts in programming language design are deeply colonized. The ideas and the words true and false, for example, stem from the strict logic of the nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole and discrete mathematics. Ideas such as false dont always translate cleanly to other languages or cultures. Even choosing symbols to represent these concepts risks giving primacy to one culture over another. The selection of symbols with no widely recognized meaning ( and , from logic) seemed more inclusive, even at the expense of clarity in a particular language.

Although Wordplay is still in development, my preliminary work on it is promising. Ive been able to write programs with my one functional hand using speech input, even on my smartphone. I hope to release the new language this autumn, offering a vision and example of a more equitable future for code. With luck, some of these ideas will carry over into more widely used languages and tools, especially in science, and will therefore lower the barrier to entry for many would-be programmers.

If we want science that serves everyone, and we think representation is part of achieving this goal, we must begin creating tools that are accessible to everyone including those of us with broken elbows.

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.

The author declares no competing interests.

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How my broken elbow made the ableism of computer programming ... - Nature.com

Have you ever talked to someone who is into consciousness? How did that conversation go? Did they make a vague gesture in the air with both hands? Did they reference the Tao Te Ching or Jean-Paul Sartre? Did they say that, actually, theres nothing scientists can be sure about, and that reality is only as real as we make it out to be?

The fuzziness of consciousness, its imprecision, has made its study anathema in the natural sciences. At least until recently, the project was largely left to philosophers, who often were only marginally better than others at clarifying their object of study. Hod Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University, said that some people in his field referred to consciousness as the C-word. Grace Lindsay, a neuroscientist at New York University, said, There was this idea that you cant study consciousness until you have tenure.

Nonetheless, a few weeks ago, a group of philosophers, neuroscientists and computer scientists, Dr. Lindsay among them, proposed a rubric with which to determine whether an A.I. system like ChatGPT could be considered conscious. The report, which surveys what Dr. Lindsay calls the brand-new science of consciousness, pulls together elements from a half-dozen nascent empirical theories and proposes a list of measurable qualities that might suggest the presence of some presence in a machine.

For instance, recurrent processing theory focuses on the differences between conscious perception (for example, actively studying an apple in front of you) and unconscious perception (such as your sense of an apple flying toward your face). Neuroscientists have argued that we unconsciously perceive things when electrical signals are passed from the nerves in our eyes to the primary visual cortex and then to deeper parts of the brain, like a baton being handed off from one cluster of nerves to another. These perceptions seem to become conscious when the baton is passed back, from the deeper parts of the brain to the primary visual cortex, creating a loop of activity.

Another theory describes specialized sections of the brain that are used for particular tasks the part of your brain that can balance your top-heavy body on a pogo stick is different from the part of your brain that can take in an expansive landscape. Were able to put all this information together (you can bounce on a pogo stick while appreciating a nice view), but only to a certain extent (doing so is difficult). So neuroscientists have postulated the existence of a global workspace that allows for control and coordination over what we pay attention to, what we remember, even what we perceive. Our consciousness may arise from this integrated, shifting workspace.

But it could also arise from the ability to be aware of your own awareness, to create virtual models of the world, to predict future experiences and to locate your body in space. The report argues that any one of these features could, potentially, be an essential part of what it means to be conscious. And, if were able to discern these traits in a machine, then we might be able to consider the machine conscious.

One of the difficulties of this approach is that the most advanced A.I. systems are deep neural networks that learn how to do things on their own, in ways that arent always interpretable by humans. We can glean some kinds of information from their internal structure, but only in limited ways, at least for the moment. This is the black box problem of A.I. So even if we had a full and exact rubric of consciousness, it would be difficult to apply it to the machines we use every day.

And the authors of the recent report are quick to note that theirs is not a definitive list of what makes one conscious. They rely on an account of computational functionalism, according to which consciousness is reduced to pieces of information passed back and forth within a system, like in a pinball machine. In principle, according to this view, a pinball machine could be conscious, if it were made much more complex. (That might mean its not a pinball machine anymore; lets cross that bridge if we come to it.) But others have proposed theories that take our biological or physical features, social or cultural contexts, as essential pieces of consciousness. Its hard to see how these things could be coded into a machine.

And even to researchers who are largely on board with computational functionalism, no existing theory seems sufficient for consciousness.

For any of the conclusions of the report to be meaningful, the theories have to be correct, said Dr. Lindsay. Which theyre not. This might just be the best we can do for now, she added.

After all, does it seem like any one of these features, or all of them combined, comprise what William James described as the warmth of conscious experience? Or, in Thomas Nagels words, what it is like to be you? There is a gap between the ways we can measure subjective experience with science and subjective experience itself. This is what David Chalmers has labeled the hard problem of consciousness. Even if an A.I. system has recurrent processing, a global workspace, and a sense of its physical location what if it still lacks the thing that makes it feel like something?

When I brought up this emptiness to Robert Long, a philosopher at the Center for A.I. Safety who led work on the report, he said, That feeling is kind of a thing that happens whenever you try to scientifically explain, or reduce to physical processes, some high-level concept.

The stakes are high, he added; advances in A.I. and machine learning are coming faster than our ability to explain whats going on. In 2022, Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, argued that the companys LaMDA chatbot was conscious (although most experts disagreed); the further integration of generative A.I. into our lives means the topic may become more contentious. Dr. Long argues that we have to start making some claims about what might be conscious and bemoans the vague and sensationalist way weve gone about it, often conflating subjective experience with general intelligence or rationality. This is an issue we face right now, and over the next few years, he said.

As Megan Peters, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of the report, put it, Whether theres somebody in there or not makes a big difference on how we treat it.

We do this kind of research already with animals, requiring careful study to make the most basic claim that other species have experiences similar to our own, or even understandable to us. This can resemble a fun house activity, like shooting empirical arrows from moving platforms toward shape-shifting targets, with bows that occasionally turn out to be spaghetti. But sometimes we get a hit. As Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote in his book Metazoa, cephalopods probably have a robust but categorically different kind of subjective experience from humans. Octopuses have something like 40 million neurons in each arm. Whats that like?

We rely on a series of observations, inferences and experiments both organized and not to solve this problem of other minds. We talk, touch, play, hypothesize, prod, control, X-ray and dissect, but, ultimately, we still dont know what makes us conscious. We just know that we are.

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How to Tell if Your A.I. is Conscious - The New York Times

As a teenager growing up in Lahore, Pakistan, Sami Bashir had always been fascinated by the film Moneyball. There was something magical about watching people incorporate technology to remove biases in decision-making, and create opportunities for people that, otherwise, may have been overlooked by traditional scouting systems, he shares.

The film made a profound impact on his career aspirations. As a Communications and Media Studies graduate, hed worked on a research project that focused on the impact of data analytics in soccer. This, combined with his favourite series, sparked a realisation in him. At that point, I was confident that I wanted to be in that intersection between people and technology, he says.

Dalhousie University is one of the top schools in the country and offered a programme that allowed me to gain more hands-on knowledge about the impact of data in decision-making within the context of business environments, he says. Coming here was the logical next step in my professional journey.

As one of the top 15 universities in Canada (Times Higher Education), the institution has a strong reputation for offering groundbreaking and immersive programmes for ambitious students. Its Faculty of Computer Science one of 13 academic faculties brings together award-winning professors, outstanding facilities and invaluable experiential learning experiences, creating the ideal learning environment.

The faculty has an array of excellent graduate programmes, such as the Master of Applied Computer Science and Master of Digital Innovation (MDI). Bashir chose the latter where he could explore various disciplines under the guidance of experts.

One notable course involved creating a prototype for a digital transformation project where students worked with an industry partner in the Office of the Auditor General of Canada to come up with innovative solutions to some challenges they were facing, he shares. I found this to be a fantastic way to simulate the experience of working in a technological environment, even before our co-ops.

The Faculty of Computer Science provides an ideal learning environment for ambitious international students. Source: Dalhousie University

A prominent feature of the faculty is the opportunity to participate in a Computer Science Coop, a work placement where students can apply their knowledge to the real world. This lets students develop specialised skill sets and tests them in a professional setting. They do so in Halifax, the second fastest-growing city in Canada for tech diversity and wage growth.

Two words Bashir would use to describe his co-op experience? Challenging and rewarding. I was thrilled at the opportunity to apply the knowledge I gained to solve complex business problems and create value for Scotia Investments and the nine companies under their banner, he shares. Working on multiple projects, often at the same time, helped develop my project management skills and become familiar with the pressures that come in roles that require it.

What was most memorable, however, was the chance to lead the companys website development project. Initially, I just wanted to be involved and provide support for the project, but my passion and collaborative spirit were evident from the start, he says. My responsibilities only grew from there, involving interactions with co-op students, directors, and even the CEO! Very soon, I was leading meetings with both internal and external stakeholders, and I was very proud to be able to take this project from start to completion on time and within budget.

Undergraduate students are not exempt from this experience, either both the Bachelor of Computer Science and Bachelor of Applied Computer Science similarly adopt co-op practices. For Indian-born student Shreya Sharma, this was a significant factor that led her to choose Dalhousie University.

I am currently completing my co-op at the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) as a Student Application Developer, she says. Throughout my work term, I have learned to navigate different technologies such as PowerShell Scripting, SharePoint Online, PowerApps, and Power Automate, as well as soft skills such as professional communication and documentation.

Computer science students at Dalhousie University apply what learn in the classroom in real-world scenarios. Source: Dalhousie University

Sharma was fortunate to have received two scholarships the Women in Technology and Dalhousie Entrance Scholarships. They lifted a huge burden off her shoulders. I have seen some of my friends who are very capable and hardworking, but are unable to do well in academics because they have to juggle a few jobs to pay their tuition, she explains. I am thankful that I got these scholarships and am able to focus on my academics.

With more free time, she could participate in the many exciting extracurricular activities on campus. I attend events and activities hosted by Shiftkey Labs, the Women in Technology Society (WiTS), and other societies on campus whenever I have a chance, the undergraduate student says. I was even able to become a tutor with Bisset Student Success Centre, and a Junior Head TA for the Discrete Math course.

Outside of classes, Sharma enjoys her time in Halifax. I think Halifax is an ideal place to live, work and study because of the welcoming and close-knit community, she shares.

In Halifax, if you want to do anything, you will find people and resources to support you. Through your network, you can find someone who might be able to help you. People here are lovely even if they dont know you personally, they will try to help you as much as possible to reach your goals.

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Dalhousie University: The ideal institution for ambitious computer ... - Study International News