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Oracle to invest more than $1bn in AI and cloud computing in Spain – Verdict

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

Oracle, a US technology company, has announced an investment exceeding $1bn (930m) in Spain, focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing advancements.

This investment, which will be made over the period of ten years, will be used to establish a third cloud region in Madrid, to cater to the increasing demand for Oracles AI and cloud services within the country.

Oracle launched the first cloud region in 2022.

Madrids upcoming cloud region is designed to facilitate the migration of diverse workloads to the cloud for both public and private sector entities.

It aims to modernise applications and foster innovation through data, analytics, and AI, while also ensuring compliance with stringent regulations such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act and the European Outsourcing Guidelines.

Telefnica Espaa has been selected as the host partner for this new cloud region.

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Oracle also operates an EU Sovereign Cloud, which already has a region in Madrid.

This specialised cloud service caters to customers handling sensitive, regulated, or strategically important data and applications.

The EU Sovereign Cloud in Madrid is managed by EU-based personnel and is tailored to support workloads that must comply with EU guidelines on sovereignty and data privacy.

Spains Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Administration Jos Luis Escriv said: The opening of the third Oracle cloud region in Spain is excellent news for our country. The investment announced by Oracle provides a significant boost that will help Spanish enterprises and public sector organizations innovate with AI and continue advancing on the path of digital transformation.

Oracle Spain country leader Albert Triola said: Spanish enterprises and public sector organisations are rapidly embracing the cloud to gain access to the latest digital technologies such as AI, and the upcoming public cloud in Madrid will help them address data residency requirements as well as regulations in key sectors such as financial services.

With our plans to invest an additional $1bn in Spain over the next 10 years, we are reaffirming our commitment to helping Spanish organisations of all sizes and industries including those across Spains small and medium-sized enterprises and the financial services industry accelerate their adoption of cloud technologies to boost business performance and resilience.

Oracles announcement follows its recent collaborations with Google Cloud and OpenAI for its cloud infrastructure.

In April, Oracle disclosed plans to invest more than $8bn in the next ten years to support the growing demand for cloud and AI infrastructure in Japan.

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Oracle to invest more than $1bn in AI and cloud computing in Spain - Verdict

UVA and the Toyota Research Institute aim to give your car the power to reason – EurekAlert

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

image:

Yen-Ling Kuo, an assistant professor of computer science, is building a driving simulator, similar to this one in UVA Engineerings Link Lab, to collect data on driving behavior. Shell use the data to enable a robots AI to associate the meaning of words with what it sees by watching how humans interact with the environment or by its own interactions with the environment.

Credit: Graeme Jenvey/University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science

Self-driving cars are coming, but will you really be OK sitting passively while a 2,000-pound autonomous robot motors you and your family around town?

Would you feel more secure if, while autonomous technology is perfected over the next few years, your semi-autonomous car could explain to you what its doing for example, why it suddenly braked when you didnt?

Better yet, what if it could help your teenager not only learn to drive, but to drive more safely?

Yen-Ling Kuo, the Anita Jones Faculty Fellow and assistant professor of computer science at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, is training machines to use human language and reasoning to be capable of doing all of that and more. The work is funded by a two-year Young Faculty Researcher grant from the Toyota Research Institute.

This project is about how artificial intelligence can understand the meaning of drivers actions through language modeling and use this understanding to augment our human capabilities, Kuo said.

By themselves, robots arent perfect, and neither are we. We dont necessarily want machines to take over for us, but we can work with them for better outcomes.

To reach that level of cooperation, you need machine learning models that imbue robots with generalizable reasoning skills.

Thats as opposed to collecting large datasets to train for every scenario, which will be expensive, if not impossible, Kuo said.

Kuo is collaborating with a team at the Toyota Research Institute to build language representations of driving behavior that enable a robot to associate the meaning of words with what it sees by watching how humans interact with the environment or by its own interactions with the environment.

Lets say youre an inexperienced driver, or maybe you grew up in Miami and moved to Boston. A car that helps you drive on icy roads would be handy, right?

This new intelligence will be especially important for handling out-of-the-ordinary circumstances, such as helping inexperienced drivers adjust to road conditions or guiding them through challenging situations.

We would like to apply the learned representations in shared autonomy. For example, the AI can describe a high-level intention of turning right without skidding and give guidance to slow to a certain speed while turning right, Kuo said. If the driver doesnt slow enough, the AI will adjust the speed further, or if the drivers turn is too sharp, the AI will correct for it.

Kuo will develop the language representations from a variety of data sources, including from a driving simulator she is building for her lab this summer.

Her work is being noticed. Kuo recently gave an invited talk on related research at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial IntelligencesNew Faculty Highlights 2024program. She also has a forthcoming paper, Learning Representations for Robust Human-Robot Interaction, slated for publication in AI Magazine.

Kuos proposal closely aligns with the Toyota Research Institutes goals for advancing human-centered AI, interactive driving and robotics.

Once language-based representations are learned, their semantics can be used to share autonomy between humans and vehicles or robots, promoting usability and teaming, said Kuos co-investigator, Guy Rosman, who manages the institutes Human Aware Interaction and Learning team.

This harnesses the power of language-based reasoning into driver-vehicle interactions that better generalize our notion of common sense, well beyond existing approaches, Rosman said.

That means if you ever do hand the proverbial keys over to your car, the trust enabled by Kuos research should help you steer clear of any worries.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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UVA and the Toyota Research Institute aim to give your car the power to reason - EurekAlert

Opinion: Teaching computer science in the prison has been a challenging and rewarding experience – The San Diego Union-Tribune

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

Hogan is a doctoral student in computer science at UC San Diego and lives in Santee.

This fall will be my third time teaching introductory computer science inside Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center to a new cohort of UC Irvine students. I began my doctorate degree in the Computing Education lab at UC San Diego in fall 2021 knowing that I wanted to study how to improve computing education in prisons. With the support of my three advisers, I secured the opportunity to teach with LIFTED for the first time in fall 2022.

I receive a fair amount of skepticism from computing academics when I introduce my research (i.e., can they really learn to code?), especially after revealing the severity of the technology restrictions. So far, I have found the answer to be largely positive. However, I believe it is yet to be understood the degree of grit, resourcefulness and brilliance it takes for my students to succeed despite incredible barriers.

One of the most significant challenges for computing specifically is that students are not able to run code on their prison-issued laptops. Much of my work thus far has been developing and documenting strategies some of them entirely created by the students to simulate and supplement the critical learning for novice programmers that happens in the trial-and-error process of running code, identifying errors and fixing them. With these strategies, along with the unique assets students bring to the classroom, many students are able to achieve similar levels of proficiency to students in introductory programming courses on main campus with wildly different access to all types of resources.

However, as power and resources in our society are increasingly concentrated with those in control of our technology, structural changes will need to take place in order to truly expand the pool of those trained with computing expertise to include those impacted by incarceration and the marginalized populations they overrepresent. While higher education in prison programs have grown in recent years, there are currently no computer science degrees offered. Reasons for this include restricted access to critical technology inside, but also the difficulty college-in-prison programs face in recruiting computer science faculty. This is, at least in part, because computer science professors are currently experiencing greater demand on main campuses, and consequently require higher pay to temporarily replace them (e.g., to afford a lecturer to cover for a faculty member teaching in prison). While a short-term solution could be having graduate students (like myself) teach the computer science courses in the prison, this would create a lower standard of quality in the prison than on main campuses. If students earn the same degree in prison as on main campuses, this cannot be. At the same time, offering only the less in-demand, and therefore more affordable, areas of study in prison reproduces inequity by excluding the incarcerated students from currently more popular or lucrative majors.

Research shows that every dollar invested in correctional education returns $4-$5 in savings of taxpayer dollars, as people leaving prison have the skills needed to succeed instead of returning to prison. Therefore, I believe the necessary long-term solution should include government funding specifically to offer science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees in prison, building on existing policies supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom in the past, such as incentivizing community colleges to offer degrees in California prisons. In addition, building educational technology infrastructure in prisons needs to include critical technologies for STEM disciplines.

Creating access to computing degrees in higher education in prison programs such as LIFTED, and pipelines to careers in technology, is a necessary step towards equity in technology, higher education and the criminal justice system. Despite ongoing narratives about science-related fields being objective and neutral, the benefits and harms of current technology in our society are undeniably biased. In recent examples, machine-learning algorithms incorporated into sentencing procedures were shown to be racially biased, and facial recognition technology used in policing is less accurate for people of color. It is no coincidence that technology innovations in our society continue to fail people from racial groups overrepresented in our prison population. I believe that meaningful progress towards equity in computing higher education and our criminal justice system are similarly stagnated as long as we continue to block access to computing higher education pathways in prison.

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Opinion: Teaching computer science in the prison has been a challenging and rewarding experience - The San Diego Union-Tribune

URI to host free workshops for educators on impact of AI on K-12 education – The University of Rhode Island

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

KINGSTON, R.I. June 20, 2024 Artificial intelligence is quickly reshaping education, especially for students, teachers and administrators in kindergarten through high school.

A recent poll by the Walton Family Foundation found that use of AI among teachers and students has rapidly risen in the last year. In K-12, the number of teachers who say they are familiar with ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot, has grown from 55% to 79%. Among students, its risen from 37% to 75%. Usage has also grown with nearly half of teachers and students saying they use ChatGPT at least weekly.

To help local K-12 educators prepare for this paradigm shift, the University of Rhode Island is partnering with local education groups to provide a series of professional development workshops on AI for teachers and administrators. Workshops will be held July 22-23 for teachers and July 24 for administrators in the Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering on the Kingston Campus. More than 100 teachers and 50 administrators have already registered for the free workshops. For more information or to register, go to the event webpage.

Just a year and a half ago, we wouldnt be having this discussion. But now almost all educators are aware of AI and almost all of their students are using it. And its dramatically changing how they teach, said Victor Fay-Wolfe, URI professor of computer science. The impacts have been on two sides for educators how they can use it in their own professional development and delivery of education and how they teach their students to use it effectively and responsibly.

The AI workshops which are being organized by Fay-Wolfe and Jessica Barrett, URIs K-12 computer science program manager, along with Rhode Islands statewide CS4RI initiative, R.I. Society of Technology Educators (RISTE) and R.I. Computer Science Teachers Association have grown, in part, out of the Computer Science Departments extensive work in K-12 computer science education and teacher training. The initiatives have built a large network of educators, who asked for guidance and education in AI.

The all-day workshops 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. are geared to educators who have differing levels of knowledge and experience with AI tools. The workshops for teachers will include an introduction to AI; its capabilities and limitations; and concerns such as data privacy, student cheating, and assessing student learning along with providing teachers a chance to experiment with AI tools, including building lesson plans, said Barrett. For administrators, workshops will include an overview of AI along with sessions on policy development and advocacy to communicate the need for AI integration in their school districts.

The workshops will provide a nice introduction and foundation for all educators regardless of their experience, said Barrett. Its meant to be a first step for a lot of educators. We are planning future workshops for professional development and to enable educators to form district teams and put what theyve learned into practice for the benefit of all educators, students, and other stakeholders in the district.

The workshops will be led by Vanessa Miller, technology integration coach in the Narragansett School District and member of RISTE and the Computer Science Teachers Association, and will feature hands-on sessions and panels that include URI faculty and students.

We thought it was important that the educators heard from students so they understand that students are already using AI and want to learn about it, said Fay-Wolfe. I think theres a little bit of naivete that students arent using AI as extensively as they are.

The AI in K-12 Education program is the newest initiative in the URI Computer Science Departments work to bolster teacher training, develop standards and provide guidance for computer science education in Rhode Island.

Through the states CS4RI program, started by then-Gov. Gina Raimondo in 2016, URI has trained more than 2,000 Rhode Island school teachers to deliver computer science education at their schools. Also, more than 2,000 high school students have earned college credits in computer science through concurrent enrollment in the last seven years.

As members of the CS4RI core team, Barrett and Fay-Wolfe have also helped develop state standards for computer science education, and Fay-Wolfe helped secure a $3.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education in 2019 that provided funding for 20 Rhode Island high schools to establish or enhance computer science pathways.

Our primary role is training teachers, said Fay-Wolfe. Thats what were doing this summer, training teachers and educators in AI. Weve been training teachers in computer science for seven years now.

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URI to host free workshops for educators on impact of AI on K-12 education - The University of Rhode Island

Monica Hicks’ about-face | Stanford Report – Stanford University News

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

On Sept. 26, 2015, police officers in Contra Costa County, California, pursued a speeding vehicle driving the wrong way on a highway. When the vehicle crashed, the officers arrested the driver.

I was 22 years old and I served five days in jail for evading police, said Monica Hicks, 24. She was arrested again for missing a court date to enter her plea in the case. The situation worsened when drugs were later found on her in court, leading to a two-year state prison sentence.

It was the culmination of years of drug use and legal troubles that led her to deep personal introspection. Upon finishing her sentence, Hicks committed to changing her life. She returned to school and eventually found a place among Stanfords student body. On Sunday, she graduated with a bachelors degree in computer science.

Hicks said that she had a normal childhood in Danville, California, and was raised by good parents. She was active in gymnastics and Girl Scouts but admitted to being adifficult child who was often combative, argumentative, and selfish. Academics came naturally to her and she was intellectually curious, but often got caught up with the wrong crowd. In middle school, I would climb out of my bedroom window to meet up with high schoolers and we would drink and smoke, she recalled. Her drug use took off after trying painkillers while getting her wisdom teeth removed.

Later, tumultuous relationships with boyfriends who also used drugs further fueled her addiction. Prominent public service campaigns at the time, like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), often depicted drug users as sickly and unattractive, so when this girl Id met, who was absolutely beautiful, offered me meth, I decided that what Id been told about drugs was a lie, she said. Hicks first of many arrests occurred at 21 and was for drug possession.

During her prison sentence, Hicks mostly kept to herself, focused on her job in a kitchen, and spent her free time reading lots of historical fiction and novels by authors like Janet Evanovich. Many of the women housed with Hicks were much older and serving life sentences for more serious crimes. One of those inmates, Hicks recalled, noticed the striking parallels between their lives. You are just like me when I was younger, she told Hicks. Looking at you is like looking into a mirror. I feel like Im talking to myself.

The comment terrified Hicks. That was really scary because I knew I didnt want to be there when I was her age, she said.

One day in prison, Hicks read an article about the technology industry being welcoming to anyone with computer science skills and talent. It sounded like a really accepting and forgiving career path, she said. And that planted a seed in my mind.

Hicks served one year of her sentence and was released early for good behavior. In January 2018, she returned to her mothers home in Danville, determined to change her ways. She ended her drug use, attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and got a job. She also became inspired by her older brothers academic pursuits.

I went to his graduation from UC Berkeley and that was a really emotional experience for me, she said. Seeing what hed accomplished, and how much hed changed for the better, made me think that if he could do it, I could do it too.

... if you follow even a one-degree nudge for long enough, it can change your entire trajectory.

Hicks enrolled at a community college to study business. When shed expressed doubt about her ability to succeed in the math courses required for a STEM degree, a teacher wouldnt have it. You can do the math! she told Hicks.

Im really happy she said that because it was a tiny nudge, Hicks said. And if you follow even a one-degree nudge for long enough, it can change your entire trajectory.

Hicks loved and excelled in her math courses, leading her to change her academic focus to computer science.

She enrolled at Stanford in the fall of 2021. In addition to her classes, she said joining CS for Social Good and the Stanford Transfer Network helped her connect with the campus community. She also served as a section leader for CS198 and interned with a tech company called Recidiviz, which builds technical infrastructure to help the criminal justice system end mass incarceration. This summer, she will intern at Reddits New York office before returning to Stanford in the fall to begin her coterminal masters studies in computer science.

Hicks credits much of her personal growth to the support of mentors, as well as an optimistic attitude. I really do believe that if you think positively and have positive energy, then things will work out, she said.

Her parents, who once avoided talking about her to others, attended Stanfords Commencement ceremony on Sunday, where Hicks received her bachelors degree.

Theyre really happy, she said. And it feels really good that now theyre excited to talk about me and what Im doing.

Monica Hicks' about-face | Stanford Report - Stanford University News

Nora Kirstein to retire after 42 years in information technology at Virginia Tech – Virginia Tech

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

If there ever was a Hokie through and through, its Nora Kirstein.

During her time at Virginia Tech, she has

Kirstein, applications analyst within the Division of Information Technology, will retire July 1, after 42 years of service. I have been affiliated with Virginia Tech in almost every way possible, she said.

While a student, Kirstein worked as a wage employee and as a graduate teaching assistant and participated in Phi Beta Kappa. As an employee, shes worked full- and part-time roles, as a supervisor, and, in her words, a regular worker bee. As alums, the Kirsteins are active in the Department of Computer Science community to this day. And, as proud parents, they have seen their children experience Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, the D.C. area, and at the Steger Center for International Scholarship in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland.

Kirsteins computing career began by accident. During her senior year in high school in Alexandria, she took a computer programming class just to fill an elective.

It literally changed my life, said Kirstein. We had a teletype machine with a punched tape feed connected to the school systems mainframe. It looked so exotic something we saw on TV but would never type on ourselves.

Programming came naturally to her, as did teaching it. I would finish an assignment early, and students would come to me for help when the teacher was busy. I was good at helping them work through their problems without writing the code for them.

Before that class, Kirstein hadnt planned on going to college. After discovering her aptitude and interest in programming, she now had a reason to go. With some help from her guidance counselor, she found her way to Virginia Tech. First, this dedicated woman arranged for me to visit with programmers at Langley, the headquarters for the CIA another amazing thing one only saw in the movies. Then, she pointed me toward Virginia Tech as the place to go for technical degrees, and she mapped out a path for me to get here.

Kirstein earned her bachelor's degree in computer science at Virginia Tech in 1979 and her masters degree in 1986.

Initially, Kirstein went to work for Control Data Corporation, but she returned to Virginia Tech just two years later. My full-time jobs have all been with the finance team, but over the years our group has been part of the Accounting Office, the Controllers Office, and finally the Division of ITs Enterprise Systems unit, she said.

When I reflect on Noras contributions to Enterprise Systems, what comes to mind are her passion for Virginia Tech, her dedication to excellent service, and recognition of her vital role in the support and innovation of technology for the financial operations of the university. She has always exemplified the critical balance of stability and innovation in all her work that is the essence of enterprise applications, said Deborah Fulton, who led Enterprise Systems for over a decade.

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Nora Kirstein to retire after 42 years in information technology at Virginia Tech - Virginia Tech

UTA researchers work to prevent AI phishing scams – uta.edu

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

Friday, Jun 21, 2024 Brian Lopez : contact

A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington has developed software that prevents artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT from creating phishing websites a growing concern as cybercriminals have been utilizing the technology for designing scams.

Created by Shirin Nilizadeh, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and her doctoral students Sayak Saha Roy and Poojitha Thota, the software allows AI chatbots to better detect and reject instruction prompts entered by users that could be used to create phishing websites.

Currently, AI chatbots have some inbuilt detection capabilities, but Dr. Nilizadeh said her team has found loopholes that could easily bypass them and exploit the chatbots to create these attacks. With the emergence of AI chatbots, launching online scams has become highly accessible, even for attackers with minimal technical skills. Now, one does not need coding expertise to create a website, as AI can build one almost instantly.

These tools are very powerful, and we are showing how they can be misused by attackers, Nilizadeh said.

To develop their tool, the group initially identified various instruction prompts that could be used to create phishing websites, Saha Roy said. Leveraging this knowledge, they successfully trained their software to recognize and react to those specific keywords and patterns, enhancing its ability to detect and block such malicious prompts from being executed by the chatbots.

The team's work has captured significant attention within the cybersecurity industry, highlighted by their recent publication at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2024), the premier conference in the field. In May, the researchers not only shared their findings but also received the prestigious Distinguished Paper Award, further underscoring the impact of their research.

I want people to be receptive to our work and see the risk, Saha Roy said. It starts with the security community and trickles down from there.

The researchers have reached out to the major tech companies that drive these chatbots, including Google and OpenAI, aiming to integrate their findings into broader AI security strategies. Both Saha Roy and Thota expressed a strong commitment to their research's implications for cybersecurity.

Im really happy that I was able to work on this important research, Thota added. Im also looking forward to sharing this work with our colleagues in the cybersecurity space and finding ways to further our work.

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UTA researchers work to prevent AI phishing scams - uta.edu

Lynn Conway, Computing Pioneer and Transgender Advocate, Dies at 86 – The New York Times

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who was fired by IBM in the 1960s after telling managers that she was transgender, despite her significant technological innovations and who received a rare formal apology from the company 52 years later died on June 9 in Jackson, Mich. She was 86.

Her husband, Charles Rogers, said she died in a hospital from complications of two recent heart attacks.

In 1968, after leaving IBM, Ms. Conway was among the earliest Americans to undergo transition surgery. But she kept it a secret, living in what she called stealth mode for 31 years out of fear of career reprisals and concern for her physical safety. She rebuilt her career from scratch, eventually landing at the fabled Xerox PARC laboratory, where she again made important contributions in her field. After she publicly disclosed her transition in 1999, she became a prominent transgender activist.

IBM offered its apology to her in 2020, in a ceremony that 1,200 employees watched virtually.

Ms. Conway was probably our very first employee to come out, Diane Gherson, then an IBM vice president, told the gathering. And for that, we deeply regret what you went through and know I speak for all of us.

Ms. Conways innovations in her field were not always recognized, both because of her hidden past at IBM and because designing the guts of a computer is unsung work. But her contributions paved the way for personal computers and cellphones and bolstered national defense.

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Lynn Conway, Computing Pioneer and Transgender Advocate, Dies at 86 - The New York Times

Computer science students must be taught to consider social effects – Times Higher Education

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

In many ways, there has never been abetter time tolead acollege ofcomputer science. AtNortheastern Universitys Khoury College ofComputer Sciences, where Ihave been dean since 2022, our student body has tripled inthe past decade and enrolments are still soaring, while the gender gap isshrinking. We see great enthusiasm for careers inthis dynamic, challenging field.

But computer science is at acrossroads. Acursory review ofdaily news headlines reveals ongoing angst about the role ofAI infair decision-making, automation and job loss. And many ofthe best practices inour field, such as sharing open-source software and creating large-scale platforms for sharing information and news, have also enabled unintended, unfortunate outcomes.

For example, dubious actors have been enabled to piece together code and algorithms for face recognition. Coupled with the ability to scrape large amounts of data from social media platforms, these actors have sold extensive face-recognition systems to law enforcement agencies. While these systems can help identify and rescue abducted children, we now have databases filled with social media images of non-consenting childrens faces.

Such unforeseen outcomes raise questions that cut to the heart of our mission as computer science educators. Is an abundance of computer science graduates good for higher education and, more importantly, the world? Are our students pursuing high-income jobs regardless of the impact of their work? How do we adjust our curriculum to incorporate the effects of computer science in society? How do we encourage our graduates to build ethical and trustworthy computing systems?

I believe the field of computer science needs a fundamental course correction. We can no longer be singularly tied to our mathematical and engineering foundations, focused only on what can be built. We must also ask what should be built, and who needs to be part of that design and implementation process. These questions demand that computer science education and research broaden their community, not diminishit.

At Northeastern, the vast majority of our students study core programmes in computer science, data science and cybersecurity in tandem with diverse fields such as business, biology, philosophy and law, through our combined majors. And over athird of our faculty have joint appointments with other departments, including philosophy, journalism, law, psychology, health sciences, and mechanical and electrical engineering.

An interdisciplinary education will help to ensure that our graduates get beyond the move fast and break things concept that has often driven the tech industry over the past two decades and step up to the challenge of designing AIsystems that rise above our human biases, creating life-enhancing advancements that benefit as many people as possible.

We also need to consider who is entering computer science programmes in the first place. While wehave taken strides be more diverse, weare still seeing a deficit in under-represented populations, including women, people of colour and those who face cultural barriers to high school computer science opportunities. At Northeastern, we created a bridge masters computer science programme, called Align, for students with no formal tech background looking to pivot to a high-tech career. Some of these students come straight from undergraduate programmes, where many students are shut out of computer science programmes because of overwhelming demand. Others look to complement their current careers in healthcare, finance and law. More than half of the students who take advantage of this second chance opportunity are women.

Many programmes across the US are also grappling with how to integrate ethics. AtNortheastern, our approach recognises that stand-alone courses donot help students to understand technical trade-offs and methods for developing ethically informed systems, so we strive to integrate ethics across the curriculum, starting at matriculation with our Oath for Computing.

Modelled on the Hippocratic oath, this statement which all of our students recite and adopt recognises that with computing knowledge comes a great responsibility to serve society. We weave the tenets of this oath into our curriculum and position it as a North Star for all students.

As we enter the new era of transformative advancements inAI, wecannot afford to ignore this great responsibility. The stakes are simply toohigh.

Beth Mynatt is dean of Northeastern Universitys Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

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Computer science students must be taught to consider social effects - Times Higher Education

‘I always had the energy to push toward perfection’: Jing Wang shares his secret to academic success – Faculty of Arts & Science

June 22, 2024 | Author: admin

For Jing Wang, chasing perfection is a hobby and one hes very good at. Today, Wang graduates as a member of University College with a specialist in computer science (with focuses in artificial intelligence and theory computation) and a major in mathematics.

Over the course of his degree program, Wang obtained a cumulative grade point average of 4.0, as well as a mark of 100 per cent in 18 of his courses. He also won a staggering 15 major scholarships, and one of three Governor General's Silver Medals bestowed on the most academically outstanding graduating students. Now, hes looking forward to a brilliant new career as a software engineer.

Many students struggle with mathematics, a subject in which youve succeeded brilliantly. To what do you attribute your success?

The most important thing is that I really enjoyed my courses! I think that a love of math played a very important role in my success because it takes a lot of effort. Many of my courses were quite intellectually challenging and sometimes the workload was very high, but I just liked them so much. I always had the energy to push forward to perfection.

Math can be challenging. You need to be able to understand and write proofs. This requires logic and a clear understanding of each definition so that you can prove your argument. Professors spend a long time just teaching students how to write proofs, and when they pay close attention they do very well. Thats pretty much the core ability you need to achieve a high mark in any math course. Once you know how to work with logic, you can pretty much learn anything if you put time into it.

Math has so many applications, computer science being one of them. Was that a subject that always interested you?

I was fascinated by computers when I was young, even when I didnt know how they worked. But as soon as I started to learn programming, I realized I had the potential to build the same kind of thing myself. So that was fascinating, and it was the first program I considered pursuing at the University of Toronto. Everything is digitalized now; everything we do depends on computer systems in one way or another. So I knew that by studying computer science I would get key skills I needed to find a job or start my own company.

In computer science its harder to get a perfect score than it is in math; coding is less obvious than writing proofs and you need to think about how to explain your ideas clearly. You can certainly do well, but its harder to be perfect.

Youre very interested in the theoretical side of computers. What are some new developments in that field that interest you?

Right now were seeing the rise of large language models, the most prominent example being ChatGPT. Thats had a huge benefit in our lives and I think well soon see more development in that area. There are still many fascinating open questions in theoretical computer science, most famously the P vs NP problem the idea that every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can be quickly solved. Someday, I hope well see a solution to that one.

I understand that your studies included a one-year internship. Can you tell me about that?

I did a software engineering internship after my second year as part of a program called the Professional Experience Year Co-op (PEY). I worked at Veeva Systems, which provides software for the life sciences industry. They said theyd like to welcome me back, so Im very happy about that. It was my first experience in a professional setting: I was able to see how the knowledge I learned in class could be applied to real world problems. I also developed some key skills like teamwork, since writing software always involves teamwork. Overall it was a very meaningful experience for me when I returned to the classwork after one year I felt so much more prepared.

What does the future hold for you?

Right now my plan is to return to Veeva Systems as a full-time software engineer. I really like the company and its values. Thats the short term. In the longer term I think maybe someday Ill return to university. Ill continue to develop my career in the software industry, and eventually work in a leadership position in that field.

Any final words before graduation?

Im really thankful to the university because this long journey has been so meaningful. My professors were so nice and so knowledgeable, and I can really say they were role models for me. Often when I submitted final exams, I didnt want to say goodbye to a lot of the courses because I liked them and remembered so many things about them. I was very happy learning here; I think Ive improved so much in math and computer science, but also in the general area of learning and critical thinking.

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'I always had the energy to push toward perfection': Jing Wang shares his secret to academic success - Faculty of Arts & Science

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‘I always had the energy to push toward perfection’: Jing Wang shares his secret to academic success – Faculty of Arts & Science

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