Assistant professor of computer science Thomas Briggs found work for a machine- learning algorithms class led him to research and co-author the paper, “Discovering Domain-Specific Composite Kernels.” Briggs presented his paper at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence 2005 Conference in Pittsburgh. “They were pretty selective,” Briggs said about the conference committee. He plans to continue researching composite kernels and hopes this will contribute to his dissertation.
“I think it’s a good opportunity for high school and middle school teachers to interact with researchers and get them to exchange ideas,” said Dr. Jonathan Skaff, associate professor of history. Skaff was referring to the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for School Teachers. He presented the lecture, “Iran, China and Central Asia in Medieval Times.” Skaff was well prepared for the requested topic since he specializes in the medieval Chinese frontier and teaches about East Asia in his world history classes. Skaff has been invited to lecture next year at a National Endowment for Humanities Institute that will be held in Hawaii where he will speak about the Chinese frontier.
Due to the varying factors in computer science workplaces and clientele, it is nearly impossible to measure the effectiveness of procedures used by computer programmers. Despite this, Dr. Carol Wellington, associate professor and chair of the computer science department, was determined to investigate the influence of software engineering methodologies on group cohesion. She compared two groups of students with the same project but using two different methodologies. She presented her paper entitled, “Examining Team Cohesion as an Effect of Software Engineering Methodology,” which she co-authored with fellow faculty members Thomas Briggs and Dr. C. Dudley Girard, to the 2005 International Conference on Software Engineering in St. Louis. “There are two camps in software engineering… plan driven people and agile people, and the agile people make lots of claims about how happy their people are,” she said. Her paper concluded programmers using the agile methodology do work better as a group overall.