Conley is also an IEEE Fellow and was elected a 2019 Fellow of the American Vacuum Society. In other recent achievements, he nearly made it to the top of Marys Peak on his road bike starting from his house in Corvallis, but got turned around by snow.
“I am excited about my new role as associate editor which will be continuing my long service to IEEE that began in graduate school as a reviewer for Transactions on Nuclear Science,” Conley said. “I view associate editorship as an honor as well as an obligation. It will require much hard work but will give me the opportunity to arrange for appropriate and constructive technical reviews and to influence the content and quality of one of IEEE’s flagship journals.”
Jordan Bartos, president of the OSU Hackathon club.
The coronavirus pandemic didn’t stop the OSU Hackathon Club from holding BeaverHacks Spring 2020 on March 27-29. Seventy-four participants formed 17 teams to develop a website, app, or API on the theme of community building.
It was held online — the usual venue for the club’s events, since the organizers are computer science students in the online baccalaureate program. However, the global health emergency still had an influence on the event.
“We had a lot of submissions that somehow tied to the pandemic,” said Jordan Bartos, postbaccalaureate student in computer science and president of the club.
Teams were judged by a panel of instructors and industry representatives. The club distributed $400 in prizes to the following winners:
First place: The Reading Room by Mae LaPresta, Elizabeth Tackett, Manda Jensen.
Second place: Where the Heck by Zach Tindell, Jeremy Binder, Chia-Tse Weng.
Third place: barterNow by Lifang Yan, Cameron Grover, Felipe Teixeira Groberio
New student category: Community Request Board by Jung Min (Judy) Lee, Wei Yu Tang, Angela Dimon.
“It was incredibly gratifying to win, because the focus of our project was something all of us felt very passionately about,” said Mae La Presta, postbaccalaureate student in computer science. She was part of the winning team that created the Reading Room app to help foster a sense of community when social distancing has become the new norm.
Although the club was started by students from the online program, they welcome all Oregon State students. Bartos says his priority as president is to grow the membership of the club and raise awareness of their events. Future events could include collaborations with other clubs on campus.
“I feel pretty strongly about the benefits of the Hackathon club because when I competed in the first one, it really ignited something in me for coding in general,” Bartos said.
Participants say that learning new technical skills, building relationships with other students, and having the reward of creating something new were the main benefits of the experience.
“I was impressed by what everyone was able to accomplish by the end of the weekend. The presentations were incredible, and it was so cool to see what everyone’s ideas were,” said Manda Jensen, postbaccalaureate student in computer science.
A collaborative project with researchers at Oregon State University and University of Southern California received Best Paper Runner-Up Award at a top conference for computer architecture. The research examines if machine learning can also teach us anything about computer architectural design.
Ting-Ru Lin (University of Southern California), Drew Penney (Oregon State University), Massoud Pedram (University of Southern California), Lizhong Chen (Oregon State University) received the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at the International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture on February 26, 2020.
Drew Penney is a doctoral student of electrical and computer engineering, and Lizhong Chen is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State.
The paper, “A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Architectural Exploration: A Routerless NoC Case Study,” develops a deep reinforcement learning based framework for flexible and efficient architectural design space exploration. The work demonstrates the viability of utilizing machine learning to improve computer architecture, and the framework will be useful for many researchers in the community.
Minsuk Kahng and colleagues at Georgia Institute of Technology and Western Washington University were recognized by the prestigious journal, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, for their research that impacts mobile health technologies.
“I’m honored that our paper has been nominated for the best paper. Our work addresses an important challenge of supporting analysis of large-scale mobile health data, by unifying scalable data mining and human-centric visualization techniques,” said Kahng, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Engineering.
The paper, titled Chronodes:
Interactive Multifocus Exploration of Event Sequences received the Best
Paper Award, Honorable Mention. The authors are Peter Polack, Shang-Tse Chen,
Minsuk Kahng, Kaya De Barbaro, Rahul Basole, Moushumi Sharmin, and Duen Horng
Chau. ACM TiiS is one of the prestigious journals at the intersection of AI and
HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), and this award is given to top selected
papers.
2019 Oregon State University Cyberforce Competition team.
For the third consecutive year, a team of Oregon State University
computer science students placed first regionally in the Cyberforce Competition hosted by the Department of Energy on November
15-16, 2019. They competed against 17 teams at Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington. The team placed sixth in the
nationwide competition, which included over 100 teams.
The team included members from the Oregon State Security Club: Cody Holliday, Ryan Kennedy, Matt Jansen, Khuong Luu, Zach Rogers, and Zander Work. Yeongjin Jang, assistant professor of computer science, advised the team.
“This competition is a highlight of the year for me,” said Zander
Work, president of the OSU Security Club. “I really enjoy getting to test out
my defensive skills in a live environment against a skilled red team. I also
enjoy the added twist of securing some real-world industrial infrastructure,
rather than a typical IT environment.”
“Open source software is changing the technology and
workforce landscape. Our work will help open source software tools and
technology support diverse cognitive styles that will help bring diversity in
thought by enabling diversity in open source contributors.”
– Anita Sarma, associate professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Oregon State.
Principal investigators:
Lead PI: Anita Sarma, associate professor of
computer science, Oregon State University
Co-PI: Margaret Burnett, Distinguished Professor
of computer science, Oregon State University
In collaboration with:
PI: Igor Steinmacher, assistant professor,
Northern Arizona University
Co-PI: Marco Gerosa, associate professor,
Northern Arizona University
Agency:
National Science Foundation
Award amount:
$1.4 million between the two universities, $870,773 to Oregon State.
Research objectives:
This research will investigate whether and how open source
software tools and technologies have gender biases tied with diverse
problem-solving styles, and how to remove any such biases.
This work will harness foundational gender research to
provide theory-based yet practical solutions and redesigns of open source
software projects to address the underrepresentation of women.
The redesigns and the process of creating inclusive tools
will be empirically evaluated to create a compendium of “best
practices” for fixing gender-bias bugs, in both products (what suitable
fixes are to such bugs) and processes (how open source software teams can work
together to fix gender-bias bugs).
Broader impacts:
Open source is having a significant impact on society, in
the products it produces and the career paths that it facilitates. However,
women are vastly underrepresented among open source developers. This is a
significant concern to these communities because it prevents them from
receiving the benefits of a larger talent pool and of team diversity. The
problem is perpetuated when women developers miss the learning and professional
growth opportunities that open source software projects provide, and are
overlooked when open source contributions are used to make hiring decisions.
Our work will help break down these gender-bias barriers in tools and
technology used in open source software.
Jennifer Parham-Mocello (left), assistant professor of computer science, specializes in computer science education.
Researchers at Oregon State University are taking an
innovative approach to teaching computer science concepts to middle school
students using tabletop games such as Connect Four and Battleship. Working in
partnership with teachers and administrators at Linus Pauling Middle School in
Corvallis, Oregon, the team will develop and investigate a new curriculum to
teach algorithmic thinking to sixth and seventh graders.
The project is part of a national movement called CSforALL
and funded by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation. This is
the second grant impacting K-12 education that Jennifer Parham-Mocello,
assistant professor of computer science, has received this year; the first was funded
by Google.
The co-principal investigators on the National Science
Foundation grant are Martin Erwig, Stretch Professor of Computer Science, and
Margaret Niess, emeritus professor of education.
This year, the team is working on curriculum development,
which will be completed by the summer of 2020 when the middle school teachers
will conduct classes for an Oregon State University STEM Academy summer camp.
In the fall of 2020, the teachers will deliver the new curriculum in their
sixth and seventh grade classes. The third year, the team will be refining the
curriculum and adding more games.
The purpose of the grant is to make computer science more
accessible and interesting to a broad range of young people. As a dual language
immersion school, Linus Pauling Middle School offers an opportunity for the
researchers and teachers to impact students from diverse backgrounds.
In addition to the regular curriculum, the group will be
hosting family game nights twice a year at the school so that students can show
their families and friends what they have been learning.
“One of the reasons we picked games for teaching
computational thinking is because they involve social interactions,”
Parham-Mocello said. “So, we thought the game nights would be a fun way for the
students to practice and get the families involved.”
Jennifer Parham-Mocello (left), assistant professor of computer science, works with a high school student.
Oregon does not have a policy to support computer science education, even though computing jobs are the No. 1 source of all new wages in the U.S. economy, according to The Conference Board Help Wanted OnLine, which tracks labor demand.
To face this challenge, Jennifer Parham-Mocello, assistant professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, has an idea to work computer science fundamentals into the existing K-12 mathematics curriculum.
Google is supporting her idea with funding for a project to teach computational thinking — the foundation of computer programming — to future secondary math teachers studying at Oregon State. The research project is a collaboration with Elise Lockwood, associate professor of mathematics in the College of Science, and Rebekah Elliott, associate professor of mathematics education in the College of Education.
“It’s great that this Google Education K-12 grant will support educating future teachers. It’s an area that’s been ignored,” Parham-Mocello said. “Everybody wants to start new computer science courses in K-12, and I just don’t think that’s realistic, especially when you’re talking about rural areas.”
The one-year award of $141,800 will support undergraduate and graduate students over the 2019-20 school year to develop new curriculum in pre-service secondary mathematics courses at Oregon State University, then test it in Corvallis middle and high schools. In the process, the Oregon State students will learn the basics of computational thinking, which they can apply in their future positions as teachers.
“Computational thinking helps people better understand their field. But it also makes them literate in the world of computation,” Parham-Mocello said. “When you have to think in terms of the process — the algorithmic steps — you internalize it differently and gain a deeper understanding.”
The researchers will begin teaching the curriculum in fall term to the secondary mathematics pre-service teachers. During the winter term, the pre-service teachers will develop and deliver units on computational thinking to students in Corvallis schools. The one-year project will help to define and develop a multiple-year program with broader reach.
“My vision is that all of Oregon will benefit from this,” Parham-Mocello said. “Most of the education students at Oregon State will become teachers in Oregon schools of all types. So, the impact will be broadening participation in computing for schools of all sizes in both rural and urban communities.”
Yue Cao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering, is collaborating with Amazon Prime Air to make UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) delivery a reality. Prime Air promises to deliver a package to the customer within 30 minutes after receiving the order. Cao will help develop an advanced propulsion system that is more reliable and efficient. This all-electric flying vehicle will have to address multi-disciplinary challenges in the areas of power electronics, motor drives, energy storage, and cooling.
Working at the Open Source Lab has been the highlight of my computer science experience at Oregon State University. It was just by chance that I came across a job listing for the OSL. I had never heard of the organization, and it certainly was not a factor in my decision to pursue computer science at Oregon State University. I’d been running Linux as my primary operating system since high school, and over time I found myself becoming more and more deeply invested in the ideological underpinnings of FOSS (Free Open-Source Software). I appreciated the transparency of FOSS, and the benefits available through free licenses that allow anyone to use the software, change how it works, repurpose it, and distribute it. Despite my strong interest in free software, I never imagined myself in the position of getting paid to contribute to open source. At the OSL I learned valuable skills and gained work experience, but the biggest thing to me was that I was able to do work that was ethical and important.
In a world shaped by a for-profit economy, our interaction with software and intellectual property is exclusive. If users cannot afford to pay for software, they are excluded access to the software or must access it illegally. Or worse, we become the products ourselves, subjected to all kinds of data collection and surveillance in exchange for access to services. The Open Source Lab offered me the opportunity to support open-source software projects, ultimately allowing me to contribute to The Commons, and better the world that we live in. It’s been very fulfilling for me to know that our projects create solutions that anybody and everybody may use.
Ethics aside, the work itself has provided me many opportunities to learn things that I couldn’t in the classroom. Experience with configuration management and automation tooling reshaped how I manage my personal systems at home. And I worked in a real datacenter! Tinkering with powerful hardware in a real production environment is way cooler than any academic project.
Looking forward, I hope that the Open Source Lab continues to grow and expand so that more students may have these same opportunities. The OSL is truly one of a kind, and I feel really thankful to have been able to work with the lab for the past several years.
Excitingly, this is my last term at Oregon State. I’ll be going on to work with Tag1 Consulting, where I will continue to tackle exciting infrastructure challenges and contribute back to the open-source community whenever I can.
