Jeff Dalton reports on a presentation by Dave Jensen and David Smith on the Myths of Research in Computer Science. A key insight is that Computer Science Research is not about systems. Designing a better spam filter is a great idea, and might make you wealthy, but it is not what Computer Science is about.

I like the approach described by Jeff’s post:

Design an experiment to learn regardless of the outcome.

Of course, we all want to improve computations. However, you do not have to prove that your way is better than their way (the macho approach). This sort of contest gets boring rather quickly.

Unsurprisingly, almost all students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say they prefer courses with webcasted lectures as opposed to campus-only lectures. What is more interesting is that 60 percent said they were willing to pay more for them.

Considering how much students pay for overpriced textbooks, it is maybe not so surprising that they are willing to pay extra for online content.

Source: Downes.

You are an explorer who arrived on planet Bypolar. The Bypolarians come in two species: the Falsians and the Truans. The Falsians always lie whereas the Truans always tell the truth. Alas, you do not know how to distinguish them.

In any case, two locals are waiting for you.

First Bypolarian: You are most welcome on our planet. You are safe here.

Second Bypolarian: You must leave at once. You are in danger.

First Bypolarian: Do not mind my friend, he always lie.

Second Bypolarian: Ah… we always disagree.

Should you be worried or relaxed?

Industry has always advertised to scientists. However, this ad targeting biologists is… peculiar:

Source: Owen Kaser.

If you want to be smart, you must first learn to be free. Build low energy systems. Lean and mean machines.

To explain why freedom leads to better result, we had Adam Smith—yes, I took economics once—who used a crude model to justify the use of free markets (an innovation at the time). But it takes time and patience to convince us that thriving for more freedom is necessary. Certainly, intelligence is fuzzier than we tend to believe.

Fear is freedom’s worst enemy. Fear destroys freedom and ultimately, intelligence. In turn, this is why leaderless organizations are thriving. The leaders are not the trouble, the loss of freedom is.

MacOS has a nice “open” command that will open any document with any application from the command line. I hacked my own for Linux for a bash shell:


TEMP=`getopt -o a: -- "$@"`
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then exit 1 ; fi
eval set -- "$TEMP"
while true ; do
case "$1" in
-a) COMMAND=$2 ; shift 2;;
--) shift ; break ;;
*)echo "should not happen" ; exit 1 ;;
esac
done
if [ $COMMAND ]; then
nohup $COMMAND $@ > ~/.s1 2> ~/.s2 &
else
/usr/bin/xdg-open $@
fi


Got an email a week ago. True story:

Dear prof. X,

I see that you are chair of the certificate program in Computer Science. I want to apply to the certificate program at [insert competing university here]. Can you have a look at my application? I really need to get in!

Thank you.

Some confused student.

Stanford published 10 online Computer Science courses under a Creative Commons license. Each course is made of videos, lecture notres, assignment and homeworks. The University reports that the content is nearly identical to what is offered to on-campus students.

• Programming Methodology — CS106A
• Programming Abstractions — CS106B
• Programming Paradigms — CS107
• Introduction to Robotics — CS223A
• Natural Language Processing — CS224N
• Machine Learning — CS229
• The Fourier Transform and its Applications — EE261
• Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems — EE263
• Convex Optimization I — EE364A
• Convex Optimization II — EE364B

My only beef is that online videos are awfully boring, irrespective of the lecturer. If only I could convince more people to stop lecturing! Otherwise, the content is well organized and generally beautiful.

It is easy to dismiss these things as marketing gimmicks. But doing so would be like dismissing company Web sites in 1996 as gimmicks. These are the latest seeds of a long stream of seeds that will change higher education forever.

Disclaimer: I teach 3 online-only Computer Science university-level courses, including a graduate course.

Colin Wightman was recently fired from Acadia University. What wrong did he do? Mostly he had a one-time consensual bondage experience with a lady. They also accused him of using the university computers for some cybersex purposes.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers found the dismissal grossly abusive. They call for a censure of Acadia University unless Wightman is rehired.

Disclaimer: I was once a professor at Acadia University.

Universities worldwide are starting to offer online courses. Personnally, I just launched my first Computer Science graduate course (INF 6104, in French).

Because students can take the course on their own time at home, without having to show up at designated time, accessibility is unbeatable. (Disclaimer: some online courses still require you to show at designated times.) However, the transformation goes deeper than just having increased accessibility… the consequences are far reaching!

Some students need a professor holding their hand (see FSP’s recent account). These students are apparently reluctant to use Google, to seek the answers for themselves. In fact, they are probably perfectly able to browse, search, and read on their own. What they need is a strong emotional bound to peers and a teacher. These are the same students who will prefer to wait 30 minutes in line for a human teller instead of using an automated teller. These are the same people who will go to a crowded bookstore to buy a book, even if they have to drive 50 minutes to get there, instead of buying their book online in 3 minutes. What they seek is the human touch. Alas, in learning, shopping, traveling, the human touch will soon be an option. For computers to alleviate our work, we need to learn to rely more often on computers, and less often on human beings.

If you paid attention, you might see that I am drawing you somewhere… online teaching… automated tellers…

To a large extend, what I do with my students is to automate more and more of the teaching process. I no longer assign problems and then ask students to come to my office if they cannot do it. I post the solution online! I no longer wait for the unavoidable questions (when is homework 1 due?), I post all of the answers online. How do I know that I have posted all of the answers? Because 99% of all questions I get from students are answered on the Web site! I even get to tell my students about related stories in an automated manner (by using a blog). I work very hard so that I never need to repeat myself. I write it once for all students, for all times.

And I am not alone. My colleague Guy Tremblay designed a system called Oto. While I do not think he would spin it quite this way, the goal of Oto is to automate the marking of programming assignments to some extend.

A very popular service to learn English as a foreign language is Gymglish, an online automated teaching tool. Reviews are very good.

I conclude with some expected consequences:

• Automated teaching will make learning far more accessible and, eventually, slightly more affordable. The great benefit will be to be able to get a degree in nanomolecular physics from the North Pole.
• Students who do not need the “human touch” in any case, will get more learning done in a shorter time with automated teaching. Other students will complain that professors are no longer “there for them”. Automation will transform teaching, not make it better or worse.
• Just as computers are transforming the jobs of travel agents, bank tellers, and bookstore managers, they will have deep and profound consequences for teachers and professors. It is just a matter of time! Consider all the routine operations you do and see how you can outsource them to a computer! How much time do you spend in class telling students about when the next midterm is, and what is covered? Telling them how to get the last set of lecture notes?
• There will always be students who need the emotional bound with a professor and with their peers. Automation can only go so far. That is, until we can achieve true AI and people start becoming friend with their computers!