Computer Science: Research and Outreach Dr. Martine Ceberio Associate Professor of Computer Science The University of Texas at El Paso

Background Completed my degrees in France: Ph.D. in CS in 2003, University of Nantes Visiting Professor in CS at UTEP from 2003 to 2004 Assistant Professor in CS at UTEP from 2004 to 2012 Associate Professor in CS at UTEP since 2012 But before 1998: I hated CS…  Paths are not always very straight

Main Categories of Activities Research Teaching (More on this later) Service

Research in CS @ UTEP Successful research teams in areas as varied as: Architecture Artificial Intelligence Decision Making Computational Sciences Software Engineering Security Funded by NSF, ARL, DARPA, Army Corps of Engineers, Google, NCWIT, Microsoft, … CyberShare center: interdisciplinary research teams Lead of the Computing Alliance for Hispanic Serving Institutions (CAHSI.org)

My Research Decision making Under uncertainty Large computational problems

Decision Making under Uncertainty for Large Problems Design of algorithms: optimization, constraint solving algorithms Design of problems to be solved With one constant: the need for reliable solutions

Examples of Problems We Address

Example of Simulation

What We Added Predictions Recomputations

Who is Interested? ARL funded this work for several years Contributions to algorithmic foundations Contributions to applications

A Very Important Aspect of This Work It is conducted with students 1 post-doc researcher 3 Ph.D. students about 10 undergraduate students, 3 of whom are very involved and making significant contributions

Our App: built by UG Students

Service Takes many forms: to my department/college/university, scientific community, local community Passion: to show young students what CS is, to involve them in CS as early as possible, to acknowledge their efforts How? (selected items) Advisor of ACM-W at UTEP, among others Coordinator of the El Paso NCWIT AiC program Host of Nexus interns in CS at UTEP Contributor to CS activities for CS summer camps Host of campus visits for K-12

These Programs, and More NCWIT Aspirations in Computing (AiC) see: http://aspirations.org For young women in high-school with interest in CS When? Early fall annually What? Short paragraphs informing us (judges) about their interests, experience, and aspirations What else?? A parallel program for educators Those who support the participation of women in CS We need more applicants: I know many do a great job and we do not get a chance to acknowledge them

NCWIT AiC: Students & Educators This is a national & regional program Entering the competition once: automatically entered to the regional competition (if any): there is El Paso automatically entered to the national competition What’s in for the participants? members of a closed group of past participants scholarships in some universities prestigious award monetary prize for educators laptops for students Etc.

Nexus Internships What? When? Who? Shadowing program in Engineering at UTEP In my lab: it is more than shadowing coding (incl. scratch, java, matlab), presenting, preparing and pitching 2 projects, command line, research (as running tests for our algorithms), etc. When? Regular semesters or summer In my lab: only in summer Who? High-school students

Excites Summer Camps For middle to high-school students Many different engineering topics Some camps are focused on CS

Other Ways to Ignite CS The Hour of Code: http://hourofcode.org Annual event Also available all year long It is happening now! Easy to organize We can help!

Other Ways to Ignite CS Google IgniteCS: College students offering CS programs in K-12 schools UTEP’s ACM-W chapter has run IgniteCS programs since January 2015 Let us know if you are interested

Why is all of this important? Because: We need to inform young students about what CS is: so they can make informed decisions We need more people in CS: many jobs (and even more going forward) will require knowledge of CS, or at the very least strong computational thinking We need diversity in CS (currently not diverse) We need skilled people

Thank you for your attention! Any questions? mceberio@utep.edu http://martineceberio.fr