Pankaj Jalote
Pankaj Jalote is Distinguished Professor at IIIT-Delhi, of which he is also the founding Director. Prior to this, he has been a Chair Professor at IIT Delhi, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the IIT Kanpur, and an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland at College Park. On leave from academia, he was Vice President at Infosys Technologies Ltd. for 2 years, and a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Corporation, Redmond for a year. He has a B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur, MS from Pennsylvania State University, and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of six books including the highly acclaimed CMM in Practice, which has been translated in Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc, and the best selling text book An Integrated Approach to Software Engineering. He has recently authored Building Research Universities in India (SAGE, Nov 2020). He writes a blog on Higher Education in India (jalote.wordpress.com) and has written many opinion articles in leading newspapers.
His research interests are in Software Engineering (Process, Quality, Productivity, etc), Open Source Software, AI for Software Engineering, and Higher Education.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE and INAE.
Keynote Title: Model CSE Curriculum Design for India and Teacher Training Effort
Abstract: In India, the model curriculum for 4-year program in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) was recently revised. The model curriculum is widely adopted in the country, particularly in colleges and non-top-tier institutions. The model curriculum approach, unlike the approach of providing curricular recommendations (which ACM uses), typically defines the set of core courses for the program and curriculum for each. A key objective of a model curriculum is to have some uniformity in programs across colleges. Given that the model curriculum in India is used largely by colleges and non-top tier institutions, in the latest model curriculum design exercise, we focused on non-top tier institutions and stated that preparing students for employment in the IT industry as the primary objective. Also, recognizing that different colleges have different capabilities and constraints, instead of having a fixed curriculum, we decided to provide a degree of flexibility while still providing a model curriculum – this we achieved by having “essential” and “advanced or desirable” outcomes at each level from graduate attributes to core courses to learning outcomes of each course. In this talk we discuss the process used for curriculum design, the guiding principles, and an overview of the final recommendations. We also discuss an ambitious program (CSEDU) to upgrade teachers for teaching the new program and our experience with it.
Yasmin B. Kafai
Yasmin B. Kafai is Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, with a courtesy appointment in Computer and Information Science. She is a learning designer and researcher of online tools, projects and communities to promote coding, criticality, and creativity. With colleagues at MIT, she developed the widely popular programming language Scratch, with over 100 million users, and researched computational participation in clubs, classrooms, and communities. More recently, she has investigated the use of electronic textiles to introduce computing, engineering, and machine learning to high school students and teachers as part of the nationwide Exploring Computer Sciencecurriculum. She has written several books, among them “Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming,” “Connected Gaming: What Making Videogames Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” and recently edited with N. Holbert and M. Berland “Designing Constructionist Futures: The Art, Theory, and Practice of Learning Designs” — all published by MIT Press. Kafai earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University while working at the MIT Media Lab. She is an elected Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the International Society for the Learning Sciences.
Keynote Title: Empowering the Next Generation of Computational Thinkers
Abstract: Over the past ten years, global efforts have promoted computational thinking in K-12 computer science education. With the increasing prevalence of machine learning and artificial intelligence, there is a pressing need to broaden the scope of computational thinking to enable students to become competent, creative, and critical learners. Future digital literacies should encompass an appreciation of the distinctions between machine and human thinking, an awareness of the social aspects of data production, and an understanding of the values, biases, and historical contexts embedded within digital technologies. This opens up new possibilities for teachers and schools to guide students in actively shaping their digital destinies.
Samuel Mann
Samuel Mann strongly believes that computing has the power to bring about positive change. His background in computing, geography and botany has enabled him to dedicate his career to developing frameworks to allow computing professionals to deliver on this promise of socioecological good.
His book “The Green Graduate: Educating Every Student as a Sustainable Practitioner”, outlines a framework for integrating sustainability into every course of study. This framework was successfully adopted by all polytechnic computing programmes in New Zealand, following its transformation of education at Otago Polytechnic.
However, his subsequent work on a transformation mindset has shown that even with computer science’s best efforts towards a sustainable future, there is still much to be learned. Sam has been working with indigenous groups to better understand the potential and urgency of decolonising computing, and how we can ensure that computing serves the needs of all members of society.
Sam’s book “Sustainable Lens: a visual guide” explores the visual narrative of sustainability. This book proposes a “sustainable lens”: to act sustainably we need to first “see” sustainably. Sam has a weekly radio show and podcast (http://sustainablelens.org) where he and a colleague have conversations with people from many different fields who are applying their skills to a sustainable future. In these conversations they try to find out what motivates their guest and what it means to see the world through a sustainable perspective. This research archive now has more than 850 interviews.
Keynote Title: Searching for Computing’s Soul: Professional Practice and the Future of Computing Education
Abstract: Computing has repeatedly proven its ability to change the world. Each new advancement of technology provides more power, speed, and efficiency, unleashing changes that would seem almost magical only a few years before. But even as each new thing becomes everyday, it also unleashes new challenges – unexpected ethical dilemmas and often worsening cultural, environmental, and social injustices. As computing educators, we like to bask in the glow of our graduates’ innovative abilities but we must also remain complicit in computing’s capacity for harm. We might teach ideas of computing ethics or sustainability, but these mostly get relegated to “soft skills “thank goodness I’ve finished that ethics course, now can I get back to computing?!”. I argue this problem can largely be traced back to computing’s lack of purpose – or an immature notion of a computing profession that lacks its own set of values and so accepts by default the neoliberal role as an enabler of efficiency. In this talk, I take a professional practice approach to consider how we might better integrate a hopeful and regenerative approach to computing education. I describe a professional framework of practice and its application in ethics, sustainability and decolonising computing and then provide examples of how these can be better integrated into computing education. I conclude with a manifesto for computing education.