Speakers

Abstract:

My vision for the 21st Century: Computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

About the Speaker:

Jeannette M. Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. From 2013 to 2017, she was a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research. She is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon where she twice served as the Head of the Computer Science Department and had been on the faculty since 1985. From 2007-2010 she was the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Wing's general research interests are in the areas of trustworthy computing, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current interests are in the foundations of security and privacy, with a new focus on trustworthy AI. She was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals, including the Journal of the ACM and Communications of the ACM.

Professor Wing is known for her work on linearizability, behavioral subtyping, attack graphs, and privacy-compliance checkers. Her 2006 seminal essay, titled "Computational Thinking," is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in fields where previously it had not been embraced.

She is currently a member of: the National Library of Medicine Blue Ribbon Panel; the Science, Engineering, and Technology Advisory Committee for the American Academy for Arts and Sciences; the Board of Trustees for the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics; the Advisory Board for the Association for Women in Mathematics; and the Alibaba DAMO Technical Advisory Board. She has been chair and/or a member of many other academic, government, and industry advisory boards. She received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the ACM Distinguished Service Award in 2014. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

Abstract:

Computational Thinking (CT) is a problem-solving process that includes formulating problems in a way that enables us to use a computer to help solve them, automating solutions through algorithmic thinking, and generalizing and transferring this problem-solving process to a wide variety of problems. This talk will provide an overview of what-why-how of CT, its relevance to India at school and college level. It will have some examples of CT education and touch upon a model for how teachers can inculcate CT in their topics. It will end with highlighting some research opportunities in CT.

About the Speaker:

Sridhar Iyer is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Head of the Interdisciplinary Programme on Educational Technology at IIT Bombay. He is also the Head of the Centre for Distance Engineering Education and the Principal Investigator of the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning at IIT Bombay.

His current research interests are in educational technology, including: technology enhanced learning environments for thinking skills; pedagogies for effective use of educational technologies; development of ICT tools for educational applications; and computer science education research.

Some development projects that that he has conceptualized and led are: Project OSCAR, a repository of approximately 450 interactive visualizations for topics at the school and higher education levels, and Computer Masti, a series of books for teaching/learning of computers in schools. These products have seen more than 100K downloads from 120 countries. Computer Masti was acquired by a company and the books are now being used in around 1,000 schools in India.