05-06	06-07	Increase
a.	Core	CIS 1.0	118.0	17.2
b.		Core 5.1	98.6	---
c.		CC 3.12	---	258.8
d.		CC 30.3	---	35.4
e. ( =a+b+c+d)	Total Core		216.6	311.4	94.8 ( + 43.8%)
f.	Intro CIS	CIS 1.5	66.4	76.4
g.		CIS 5.2	132.0	175.6
h. ( =f+g)	Total Intro CIS		198.4	252.0	53.6 ( + 27.0%)
i. ( =e+h)	Total Core & Intro		415.0	563.4	148.4 (+ 35.8%)
j.	Other CIS	Other CIS	353.5	344.8
k. ( =h+j)	Total non-Core, non-Intro CIS		551.9	596.8	44.9 (+ 8.1%)
l. ( =e+k)	Total Core & CIS		768.5	908.2	139.7 (+ 18.2%)

FTE Enrollment of Students In Undergraduate Courses Sponsored by CIS

 

2006-07 Compared to 2005-06

 

 

h.      Department faculty obtained and implemented a number of grants:

 

i.         The NSF grant on Broadening Participation in Computing (Profs. Sklar, Rudowsky, Chopra and Parsons) has completed its first year, and we have run themed sections of CC 3.12, CIS 1.5 and CIS 15 under its auspices. We have also sponsored classes and a summer institute for high school students to attract them to computing. Professor Sklar also obtained an NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) supplement to this grant.

 

ii.        Professors Ted Raphan, Simon Parsons, and Frank Grasso (Psychology) have an NSF-MRI grant to develop an Agents Lab for designing sensor-based robot motion control. This is being done in Professor Raphan’s lab. The group now has Aibo quadrupedal robots that they have enhanced and the group is in the process of designing learning algorithms to improve the robots’ locomotor performance. They have also obtained two bipedal robots that are in the process of being enhanced, and will soon begun work on algorithmic design of the locomotion characteristics.

 

This work is being supported by a CUNY collaborative grant (Simon Parsons, Jizhong Xiao (City College), and Ted Raphan), which has been ongoing for the past two years and will end this September. It is also in part being supported by Professor Raphan’s Locomotion grant from the NIH and a Core Center grant from the NIH. The student participants on this grant are two doctoral students and one undergraduate student from City College (Dept. of Electrical Engineering).

 

iii.       Dina Sokol received a research grant from NSF for developing software for Tandem Repeats, and a database of repeats for the Human Genome, funded by the NSF Division of Biological Infrastructure (http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~sokol/tandem.)

 

            A tandem repeat in DNA is a sequence of two or more contiguous, approximate copies of a pattern. They are important in numerous fields including disease diagnosis, mapping studies, human identity testing, sequence homology, and population studies.

 

            Dr. Sokol and her students have developed an efficient algorithm to find all tandem repeats over the edit distance. The description of this algorithm has appeared in the Bioinformatics journal, and was presented both at the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) and at the Haifa Stringology Research Workshop.

 

            They have implemented the algorithm in C++, and it is available for use

            on the Web. They are also distributing the source code upon request under the Aladdin Free Public License. Thus far, they have received requests from many diverse research groups including: Boston University, University of California, University of Georgia, Indiana University, CNRS Montpellier, France, Yahoo Research in India, and PhD students in Germany and New Zealand.

 

            They are currently developing a database at the project website that will contain the tandem repeats found in the genome of the homo sapiens. The results will be presented both in tabular format, and graphically.

 

iv.       Professors Chaya Gurwitz, Ted Raphan and Elizabeth Sklar, plus faculty from other departments, received an NSF CCLI (Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement) grant in connection with the program for the STAR high school.

 

v.         We have also just been notified that, as part of a consortium led by Georgia Tech, we have been awarded an NSF grant to spread innovation in computer science curricula. The Brooklyn College effort for this is led by Professor Elizabeth Sklar and also involves Professors Rudowsky and Weiss.

 

vi.       Professor Sklar also obtained and began work on a grant from the NSF STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) program on Academic Assessment Within a Community of Evolving Learners, together with a company that does assessment of elementary school children, to determine learning from game activities. She has also been informed that a continuation proposal to the Department of Education SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) is being funded.

 

Prof. Sklar does research in a number of areas:

 

·         simulation and modeling of large datasets from the education sector;

 

·         modeling and applying interaction mechanisms in multi-agent systems;

 

·         developing intelligent interactive learning systems;

 

·         educational robotics.

 

i.         Distinguished Professor Ted Raphan continued his astonishing record of grant procurement and renewal with continuation of funding from NIH. Raphan and his team recently implanted an artificially constructed vestibular system, a component of the human central nervous system, into a robot "dog". The resulting studies, focusing on primate locomotion, will eventually help scientists to develop better techniques for curing neurological disturbances that affect many people’s daily activities, particularly walking.

 

Raphan has discovered that, although the vestibular system is extremely adaptive, an impaired vestibular system can be quite debilitating, causing imbalance, vertigo, and disorientation. This imbalance can prevent an individual from walking normally or performing normal daily activities.

Raphan's research team, which includes Professor Simon Parsons, equipped the quadruped robot to sense velocity and acceleration, and to stabilize gaze-key functions for both human and robot locomotion.

The vestibular system, which includes the sensory organ for angular and linear acceleration embedded in our skulls, governs balance, eye and head movements, and body position in space.

Using a commercially available Sony AIBO quadruped robot, Raphan and his team mounted an acceleration sensor in its head. The robot was then equipped with a lightweight binocular ocular system. The software was developed by Raphan himself, an authority on the applications of computers to the study of the brain's function.

The robot and its artificial system mimic primates' neurological reactions to head and eye movements that occur during locomotion; the software sends out command signals that compensate for any small change in movement.

This research sets up a symbiotic relationship between understanding human and robot locomotion. The research can be used to help understand the gait of patients who have trouble walking or with balance, due to illnesses such as Parkinson's disease or vestibular imbalance. On the other hand, the implanted system will make the "dog" walk more naturally, and should help in the design of robots that navigate better over uneven terrain.

Professor Raphan also has received grants from NIH on modeling the neural basis for learning and on modeling the neural basis for motion sickness.

viii.     Professors Amotz Bar-Noy and Simon Parsons participated in a consortial CUNY-based grant from IBM, US DOD and the UK Armed Forces. The project, which involves a number of universities in the US and the UK, aims at creating an international collaborative research culture of academia, industry, and government. Aspects of the collaboration include:

 

·         Innovative multidisciplinary approaches

·         Developing ground-breaking fundamental science

·         Empowering innovators

·            Developing understanding of the root cause of military technical challenges

·         Making an impact on coalition military effectiveness

·         Focusing on key problems with a critical mass of researchers

·         Gaining synergies from UK/US alignment

·         Innovative transition model

 

Two of the projects in this collaboration that our faculty are working on are network theory, to enable the formation and operation of ad-hoc teams, and sensor information processing and delivery from distributed sensor networks to support enhanced decision-making

 

ix.       Professor Bar-Noy received a grant from NSF on communication algorithm and a grant from New York State on energy efficiency algorithms.

 

x.         Professors Whitlock, Clark and Cox obtained a WDI (Workforce Development Initiative) from CUNY to develop curricula in Parallel and Distributed Computing. They have developed proposals for an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate in this area. They are applying for another WDI grant for 07-08.

 

xi.       Professor Chaya Gurwitz received a summer grant from the Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education to develop a Web resource for students taking the science related CIS 1.5. Professors Yedidyah Langsam and Professor Theodore Raphan received an award of Compact I funds from the College to develop a workbook for teaching science related 1.5. This will be combined with the work that Professor Gurwitz is doing to form a comprehensive resource for science-based instruction in CIS 1.5 for both undergraduates and the high school students in the Star program.

 

xii.   Professors Parsons and Sklar are Senior Personnel on an NSF GK12 grant "City as Lab," led by Professors Wayne Powell (Geology) and Eleanor Miele (Education), which will fund 10 science PhD students for the next five years to work with public school teachers to advance science curriculum. In particular, the project will fund computer science students to bring modeling and simulation tools into the classroom. A number of CIS doctoral students will participate in this project in 2007-08.

 

xiii.  Overall, our department received four Compact grants from the College.

 

xiv.  Eleven members of our faculty received PSC-CUNY grants for 2007-08.

 

i.   Establishing a Robotics Laboratory in 233R, under the auspices of Professors Parsons, Raphan, Sklar and Grasso (Psychology). This laboratory is now fully operational for both educational and research activities.

 

j.   Faculty signed book contracts with prestigious publishers and produced important monographs:

 

i.   Professor Noson Yanofsky has a contract from Cambridge University Press for a text on quantum computing, a leading-edge subfield of Computer Science and Physics.

 

ii.  Professor Danny Kopec received a contract from Thomson Publishing for a book on artificial intelligence, together with Prof. Steven Lucci of City College.

 

iii. Professors Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter have produced a monograph on Open Source Software, an important computing phenomenon at the leading edge of today’s application and system software worlds. The book is published by Routledge. They are now working on obtaining a contract for a second book.

 

iv. Professor Paula Whitlock is under contract with Wiley-VCH, Heidelberg, Germany, to produce the second edition of her classic book, "Monte Carlo Methods: Basics", whose first edition has been in print for more than 20 years. The co-author is Malvin Kalos of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

 

k.   A world-class mini-conference on Mathematical Methods in Social Science was held at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, organized by Distinguished Professor Rohit Parikh and Professor Noson Yanofsky. Leading logicians and game-theorists came together at the College to disseminate and discuss the latest mathematical results on a number of topics of social science, including voting behavior and methods, promoting behavior for the common good, group dynamics, etc. This conference was held on the same day as the Sprague-Taylor Lecture of the Department of Philosophy, and the Lecture was incorporated into the Conference Program. The interaction of the Philosophers and Logicians was quite beneficial to everyone.

 

The Indian Institute of Technology organized a meeting in January 2007 in honor of Professor Rohit Parikh’s 70th birthday and, following this meeting, a letter written by three IIT faculty describing Prof. Parikh’s recent work appeared in the Times of India (the Indian equivalent of the New York Times). The meeting was attended by prominent logicians from Australia, Europe and the US as well as, of course, from India.

 

The Graduate Center, with support from the Department, also organized a meeting in honor of Prof. Parikh on the occasion of his 70^th birthday, and many leaders in the field of logic, from the United States and abroad, attended. Professor Noson Yanofsky was a co-organizer of this meeting.

 

Also, a project on Social Software was organized in the fall of 2006 at The Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, led by Jan van Eijck and Rineke Verbrugge. Prof. Parikh gave two talks there, as well as talks in Paris and Bristol.

 

Prof. Parikh also gave the first Simon Newcomb Lecture at Johns Hopkins last December and an invited talk at the Association for Symbolic Logic meeting in Chicago in March.

 

l.   Graduate curriculum changes were also introduced:

 

i.   We removed the 600-level courses from our two Master’s programs, so that students will begin the program with graduate level study in computer science.

 

ii.  We instituted four new graduate courses, CIS 712—Social Software, CIS 717.2—Advanced Database Systems, CIS 717.5—Multimedia Databases, and CIS 728—Quantum Computing. These courses were also added to the curriculum of our two Master’s programs.

 

iii. We developed a proposal for a Graduate Certificate in Parallel and Distributed Computing, an area where there is a serious shortage of competent professionals. This proposal is now being converted to a formal Letter of Intent.

 

m. Professors Parsons and Sklar were the recipients of the Technical Innovation Award, Robotics Competition and Exhibition, at the 21^st Annual Conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2006.

 

Professor Parsons is doing research on three main areas:

 

·      Agent communication: developing and analyzing formal models of communication between intelligent systems, especially models based on logical argumentation.

 

·      Electronic markets: developing new algorithms for automated commodity trading and new kinds of commodity market in which these algorithms can be deployed.

 

·      Mobile robots: deploying coordinated teams of robots, and learning new kinds of gait for legged robots.

 

n.   Professor Elizabeth Sklar organized the Second Annual New York City Regional RoboCup Junior Competition in February 2007 at the CUNY Graduate Center. This competition involves students (of high-school age and below) developing robots to play soccer, dance, and accomplish other tasks in a competition that is both educational and entertaining.

 

o.   Professor Neng-Fa Zhou’s B-Prolog CSP solver (Prolog from Brooklyn) won in two categories in the Second International Solvers Competition. 21 solvers from around the world entered the competition and 3425 problem instances were used to evaluate and rank the solvers. The problems were divided into five categories. The B-Prolog CSP solver was ranked top in two of the most important categories. B-Prolog gave no wrong answer on any test, where many other solvers that entered the competition did produce at least one wrong answer.

 

16)Discuss your department’s activities in the following areas:

 

a)  curricular change

 

See items 2a., c.-f., and l.

 

b)  participation in the Core

 

See items 2f. and 2g. We offered over 70 sections of Core courses in 2006-07. The Chair of CIS also chaired the College Core Curriculum Committee.

 

c)  developing new programs and discontinuing old ones

 

See items 2a., 2c., 2d.iv., 2l.i., and 2l.iii. We also proposed a new MS program in Information Assurance and Security that was not brought forward by the administration.

 

We also decided not to revive the joint Master’s in CIS and Health Science.

 

d)  participation in faculty development, including the use of educational technology

 

We are heavy users of educational technology, but have not had formally organized faculty development in this area.

 

Professor Scott Dexter has received a Faculty Development CUE grant for next year to work with Laurel Cooley of Mathematics to teach mathematics through computing applications. As part of a larger project dedicated to integrating learning theory more fully with math classroom practice, they plan to develop 3-4 curriculum modules for an undergraduate linear algebra course. These modules will be designed with three purposes: (1) to allow students to explore some mathematical ideas behind several computer science applications, such as watermarking and image processing; (2) to draw on well-established theories of how people learn math, using these theories with the students so that the students may also reflect on their learning as it occurs; (3) to provide a framework within which faculty may reflect on themselves as learners and teachers. The integration of mathematical content, applications, and math learning theories will provide an enhanced experience of learning not only linear algebra content but also learning about students’ own learning processes.

 

We have also proposed a Faculty Development project to help our faculty familiarize themselves with the two new application design and implementation courses we are adding to our curriculum.

 

e)  any modifications in departmental organization

 

None.

 

f)   improvement of services to students

 

Additional advice to students regarding career opportunities, CIS as a major, and CIS courses for non-majors have been placed on our website, communicated to students via mailings, and communicated to the Magner Center for dissemination. We have also worked closely with the Magner Center in communicating employment opportunities and internships to our students.

 

We sent a mailing to all our majors and to students enrolled in non-major courses, making them aware of opportunities in computing at Brooklyn College and in industry. We included detailed advice on courses to register for, prerequisites, and applicable academic regulations.

 

We produce two extensive student advice brochures, both in print and on the Web, one for undergraduates, and one for graduate students.

 

We make constant use of the billboards in the hall outside our offices to post advice and information useful to our students.

 

Student counseling via electronic means (Website, email and instant messaging) has increased, in addition to face-to-face counseling. On-line courses have been instituted for student convenience, and have proved popular.

 

g)  reaching out to your majors and advising your students

 

See item f) above.

 

h)  increasing faculty diversity

 

We have not hired, nor searched for, any new permanent staff in 2006-07. We did hire a female Visiting Associate Professor, Sheila Tejada, for 2007-08, and we believe she is from a non-majority population. We also hired new non-majority adjuncts.

 

i)   increasing curricular diversity

 

The combination of our Core, service, undergraduate major, and graduate courses makes our computer science program one the most diverse in the City. We expect that changes to the program requirements listed in items 2a, 2c, 2d.iv. and 21 will further enhance this diversity.

 

We are also concentrating on improving gender diversity. While Brooklyn College is nearly 70% female, the department’s student body is nearly 70% male. This is not out of line with national figures for gender diversity in computer science, but is being increasingly recognized as a focus area for improvement in both academia and the information technology industry. As part of our Bridges to Computing program, we are developing themed versions of our Core, entry-level programming, and intermediate programming courses. Such themed sections, with a recognizable emphasis on computer applications in addition to computer methodology, are theorized to be more appealing to women. A number of previous national initiatives support this theory.

 

Bridges to Computing is also working to attract minority, urban high school students to computing with summer institutes and enrichment high school computing activities.

 

One of our Compact initiatives, under the supervision of Professor Jacqueline Jones, was to bring in a speaker and hold a lunch to promote the formation of a Women in Computing chapter at the College. Marjorie Skubic of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Missouri-Columbia spoke on Recognition Technology for Functional Assessment of Older Adults, a topic in which, experience has shown, women are interested. Note that the topic also promotes diversity in the direction of older adults, who are the subject of study and the target of the technologies discussed.

 

In addition, Dr. Fran Allen, the most recent Turing Awardee (the Turing Award is the highest in the discipline of computer science) is scheduled to talk at the College on October 23, 2007, to promote diversity in computing.

 
j)   reviewing, assessing, re-vitalizing good programs

 

We underwent an external department review in May 2006, and are working to develop a multiyear strategic plan, after changes were suggested in the plan we put forward initially. As a result of that external review, we have assessed and revised our major, and are developing a number of new programs, as outlined extensively earlier in this Report.

 

We have carried out assessment exercises in CC 3.12, CIS 1.5 and in CIS 27 this year. We expect to carry out additional assessment activities on a continuing basis.

 

See also the items referenced in 3a. and 3c. above.

 

k)  funded research

 

See item 2h. Professors Dexter, Kopec, Yarmish, Zhou and Harrow also submitted external funding proposals.

 

l)   involvement of students (undergraduate, masters, doctoral) in research.

 

Under our CIS 88.X program, undergraduate students are doing quality research with faculty. Additional research is being done by Master’s and Doctoral students. Centers for student research in our department include the Institute for Neural and Intelligent Systems (Prof. Raphan), The Agents Laboratory (Profs. Sklar and Parsons), The METIS Laboratory (Profs. Whitlock, Clark, Cox and Gross), The Bridges to Computing Project (Professors Sklar, Parsons, Rudowsky and Chopra), Turingscraft (Professors Arnow and Weiss), and individual mentorships by Profs. Sokol, Dexter, Yanofsky and Kopec.

 

17)With regard to your department’s Outcomes Assessment Plan:

 

a)  Do you have a mission statement, program goals, learning objectives/course grid and examples of assessment tools?  

 

We have all of the above.

 

b)  If yes, have these materials been reviewed by the faculty resource person for your division and/or Michael Anderson, the Director of Academic Assessment?

 

Yes.

 

c)  Do they agree that your department is ready to begin implementation of its Outcomes Assessment Plan?

 

We have not yet adopted an overall Outcomes Assessment Plan, though we are well along in assessment activities.

 

d)  If you are ready, which goal(s) have you chosen to assess through which objectives in which specific courses for the upcoming year? 

 

This decision has not yet been made for 2007-08.

 

18)What resources, including special equipment, were obtained last year by your department?

 

Several faculty received new computers and/or printers.

 

The department obtained replacement fax and copy machines and an HP All-in-One low-speed Color Copier/Fax/Scanner/Printer, for administrative and research use.

 

The Metis project received 6 Dell quad-processors last academic year from STF funds, which were installed during the summer of 2006.

 

The Bridges, Agents and Robotics programs received a laptop cart of MacBook computers, other computers and servers, and a large number of different kinds of robots from grants and from STF funds.

 

Prof. Yedidyah Langsam replaced his student network in his laboratories, and Professor Theodore Raphan purchased a great deal of equipment for his research work. Professor Raphan also assembled a number of powerful leading-edge computers, saving the College, the Department and his grants a great deal of money and providing cutting-edge computers, ahead of what companies have yet assembled for mass production.

 

Department research overhead funds were used extensively to support and upgrade the departmental UNIX research network to provide redundancy, additional storage, additional robustness and extended usability.

 

19)Describe your efforts to secure funding for:

 

a)  professional development

 

We have requested from the Provost released time funds to allow professional development to enable us to implement the changes to our major.

 

b)  research

 

See items 2h. and 3k.

 

c)  student scholarships

 

Professor Elizabeth Sklar, together with Professors Basil (Biology) and Perdikaris (Anthropology) submitted an NSF SSTEM proposal to fund scholarships in Science and Technology. The proposal was not funded.

 

d)  support of departmental goals.

 

See items 2h. and 3k. In addition, 8 STF funding proposals were submitted this year.

 

20)Discuss your department’s participation in the following:

 

a)  collaborations/partnerships and/or interdisciplinary programs with other departments, colleges, or levels of education (i.e., K-12 or doctoral)

 

We offer cross-listed courses with the Departments of Art (inactive), Biology, Economics, Education (inactive), Health and Nutrition Sciences, Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology.

 

Professor Samir Chopra teaches for the Honors College and for the Philosophy department. Professor Brinton (English) teaches for CIS.

 

We offer a joint BS-MPS program with Business that has just been revamped, and a joint undergraduate major in Computational Mathematics with Mathematics. We are proposing a joint BS program with Business. We have a joint minor in cognitive science with Philosophy and Psychology.

 

Professors Raphan, Parsons and Sklar are working with Professors Powell (Geology) and Miele (Education) on an NSF GK12 grant, “City as Lab” (see item 2.h.xii).

 

We participate in the Engineering Program, jointly with Polytechnic University and City College.

 

We have joint Collaborative programs with City College, and have proposed one with College of Staten Island.

 

We have been told we will be awarded a consortial grant with a group led by Georgia Institute of Technology to develop innovative computer science curricula.

 

We have articulation agreements with Kingsborough and BMCC, and are developing one with NYCCT.

 

Distinguished Professor Ted Raphan does research in collaboration with Mount Sinai Medical Center and with City College.

 

Professor Efstathios Zachos is active in bringing doctoral students from National Technical University of Athens to Brooklyn College and CUNY, and has a presence at NTUA..

 

We offered a section of CC 3.12 to the Nurses’ Program at the SUNY Brooklyn Medical Center.

 

We hosted a group of Kingsborough computer science students who were interested in the possibility of transferring to Brooklyn College. We presented a number of our research and educational projects to the students. The visit was very well received.

 

Professors Sklar, Rudowsky, Parsons and Chopra are active in the Bridges to Computing project, and run a summer institute and enrichment courses at Brooklyn College for high school students from throughout Brooklyn. They are working with a professor from Columbia University, who is responsible for assessing the program.

 

Professor Elizabeth Sklar is active in working with elementary school students and assessing their learning as part of ED and NSF grants.

 

Professor Sklar also organized high school teacher training programs on the Java programming language, as part of the ACM Computer Science Teachers’ Association TECS program, and on educational robotics in connection with the RoboCup Junior Regional Competition at the Graduate Center.

 

Professor Sklar also runs an educational robotics outreach program that places BC undergraduates and graduate students in local public schools. The students work with teachers and bring robotics and other technology to classrooms and after-school programs. In 2006-07, the schools she worked with included, in Brooklyn, the Mark Twain Middle School and several schools on the Wingate High School campus (in collaboration with the BC Community Partnership; and, in Manhattan, the Booker T Washington Middle School and the Bard Early College High School.

 

Professor Ted Raphan and Chaya Gurwitz are active in the Star High School Project, doing curriculum development and teaching in the program. They recently received an NSF grant together with faculty from Biology and Anthropology.

 

We are an important part of the CUNY Doctoral Program in Computer Science. A number of our faculty teach in the program regularly and mentor doctoral students. We also support a number of doctoral students through grants, Graduate Fellowships, and adjunct teaching.

 

Two of our faculty, Professor Danny Kopec and Professor Gabriel Yarmish organized a conference at the Graduate Center in Computer and Human Errors.

 

We supported and participated in a Conference at the Graduate Center in honor of Professor Rohit Parikh’s 70^th birthday. A similar conference was held in India. Prof. Parikh also lectured several times in the Netherlands.

 

Professors Bar-Noy and Parsons participate in a CUNY grant from IBM, the US Department of Defense, and the UK Armed Forces.

 

Professors Sokol, Kopec and Zhou are each working separately with faculty from Biology on various projects.

 

Professor Paula Whitlock spent part of her sabbatical at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. She also organized a conference at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

 

Professors Kopec and Yarmish worked with faculty from SUNY Old Westbury to organize a conference on Computer and Human Errors at the Graduate Center. Professor Yarmish also submitted NSF grant proposals with faculty from Polytechnic University.

 

Professor Parsons collaborated, on separate projects, with faculty and researchers from University of Liverpool, England, Columbia/Presbyterian Hospital, the Spanish National Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (CSIC/IIIA) in Barcelona, the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Professor Sklar collaborates with faculty from Columbia University, Teachers’ College, Maquarie University in Sydney, Australia, Vrije Universitat in Amsterdam, and the Spanish national institute for Artificial intelligence (CSIC?IITA) in Barcelona.

 

 

Professors Sklar and Parsons have hosted a number of visiting graduate students from universities in Spain, Denmark and The Netherlands, each of whom came to BC for 4-6 months and did research leading to their doctoral theses.

 

b)  teacher education programs

 

We are currently not involved in teacher education programs, although we are looking into the possibility of an Education concentration in CIS.

 

c)  multicultural activities

 

With Compact funds, we have begun working on organizing a Women in Computing chapter at the College. The Bridges to Computing project works primarily with minority high school students.

 

d)  community programs

We have placed interns with the Church Avenue Merchants Business Association.

 

e)  distance or distributed learning projects

 

We began offering online courses in Fall 2006, and are continuing to do so.

 

f)   multimedia projects

 

We have proposed a BS Program in Multimedia Computing, which has been approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees and is now being considered by SED. We also have a number of Core and major courses in robotics, and are doing research in robotics.

 

g)  other college-wide or university initiatives

 

Professor Whitlock, Cox and Clark were working under a CUNY Workforce Development Initiative grant to develop programs in Parallel and Distributed Computing. Two such programs, an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate have been proposed. Many of our faculty have PSC/CUNY grants.

 

We have received a number of Compact grants: to develop a Women in Computing organization on campus, to underwrite student travel to conferences to deliver papers, to develop Help facilities for software used in our teaching, to run a Mini-Conference on Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences together with the Graduate Center with world-renowned logic and game theory specialists.

 

We also participate in a Conference at the Graduate Center in celebration of Distinguished Professor Rohit Parikh’s 70^th birthday. In addition, Professors Danny Kopec and Gabriel Yarmish of our department organized a Conference on Human and Computer Errors at the Graduate Center, whose papers are being collected in the journal Inroads.

 

We ran a summer institute for incoming freshmen under the CUE grant. The CUE grant also funds a tutoring program for CIS 1.5 before and during the final exam period, with good feedback from students.

 

Professor Tenenbaum presented at the Core Summer Seminar and chaired the Core Curriculum Committee.

 

Professor Sklar participated in the Writing Across the Curriculum Seminar in Fall 2006.

 

Professor Chopra taught in the CUNY Honors College.

 

h)  activities sponsored by Student Life.

 

None.

 

21)Describe how your department acclimates its new faculty and adjunct faculty to the department and to the college? (For example, does your department offer new faculty any orientation to courses, orientation to students, welcome to the department, course handbooks, etc.?) If you distribute any materials that you think might be useful or serve as models for other departments, please list here and send a hard copy to the Associate Provost.

 

For every new course a faculty member teaches, we assign a faculty mentor who has taught the course to guide the new instructor in teaching. We also have much course material up on our department website.

 

22)Indicate the noteworthy faculty accomplishments, honors, or awards in your department in the areas of:

 

 

a)  teaching

 

Professors Arnow and Weiss continue to develop computer science teaching materials under the aegis of Turingscraft, which they founded. This is being well-received in the CS education community.

 

Professors Langsam and Raphan and Information Associate Lawrence Goetz have produced a tutorial to the use of Code::Blocks, an Open Source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that students can easily learn to use in debugging and tracing their code.  It can also be used as a teaching tool and in interactive learning, as the students can step through their code while running their assignments or in conjunction with the instructor. Thus, the students learn a tool that they can use throughout their careers and can then learn how to use more sophisticated IDE's as needed. The tutorial produced by Goetz, Langsam and Raphan has been well-received in the Code::Blocks community.

 

Professors Harrow and Jones have revised their text on C programming into a text on C++.

 

Professor Langsam issued a Workbook on C++ Programming that is widely used in our classes and in other colleges.

 

Professor Keith Harrow continued supervision of the development of SmartTutor, a tutoring tool used in the Learning Center for our programming students.

 

Professor Elizabeth Sklar is being awarded a CPATH grant for computer science curricular reform, an STTR grant for peK-3 early assessment of numeracy and literacy skills, and continues leading the Bridges to Computing NSF BPC program together with Professors Rudowsky, Parsons, and Chopra.

 

Professors Rudowsky and Weiss are co-PIs on the CPATH grant mentioned above.

 

Professors Gurwitz and Raphan have been awarded an NSF CCLI grant to improve College-High School partnerships in science teaching, together with professors Basil and Perdikaras.

 

b)  curriculum development

 

The entire department has been very active in curriculum development this year.

 

Professors Whitlock, Cox, Clark, Gross and Tenenbaum developed proposals for a minor and a graduate certificate in parallel and distributed computing. Professors Whitlock, Cox, and Clark also developed an undergraduate course in the area. They have also proposed two new graduate courses.

 

Professor Chaya Gurwitz developed a website for CC 3.12, and has coordinated that class, which has been given in over 65 sections over the course of 2006-07.

 

Professor Elizabeth Sklar developed and coordinates CC 30.03, Exploring Robotics, in collaboration with several of her doctoral students. The course has been offered in 13 sections during 2006-07.

 

Professor Sklar developed two courses in Design and Implementation of Software Applications that is being incorporated into our major. She and Professor Parsons developed and delivered a doctoral robotics course at the Graduate Center.

 

Professor Scott Dexter led our Undergraduate Curriculum Committee in a very busy year of curricular reform.

 

Professors Harrow and Dexter developed modifications to our initial major courses (CIS 1.5 and 15) to upgrade them from C to C++.

 

Professors Clark and Jones developed a proposal to combine our courses in Assembly Language (4.1) and Computer Organization (27) into a single course (27.1).

 

Professor Tenenbaum, with Professor Friedman of Economics, developed proposals for a BS-MPS in business information systems and for a BS in information systems.

 

Professor Tenenbaum worked to develop articulations with Kingsborough, BMCC and NYCCT.

 

Professor Rudowsky developed a course in Management Information Systems (CIS 9.2 / BUS 31.3) and worked with an adjunct, Carmela Balassiano, to develop a graduate course in Advanced Databases (CIS 717.2). CIS 717.2 was offered successfully in Spring 2007, and CIS 9.2 is scheduled for Fall 2007.

 

Professor Parsons taught a course (CIS 32.5) in Robotics, that he had developed, for the first time in Fall 2006.

 

Professor Scott Dexter developed a proposal for an MS in Information Assurance and Security that was not put forward by the College.

 

Professor Parikh brought forward a graduate course in Social Software. Professor Noson Yanofsky put forth a graduate course in Quantum Computing.

 

Professors Chopra and Dexter developed an upper-tier core course proposal, “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age." While the proposal was not approved as an upper-tier Core course, due to questions about its categorization within the upper-tier Core rubrics, they may teach the course for the Honors Academy Scholars Program in Fall 2008.

 

Professor Kopec also proposed an upper-tier core course on global e-commerce that was not accepted by the Upper-Tier Core Committee within the rubric Exploring Global Connections.

 

c)  research and scholarship (Provide 3 key words that capture each faculty member’s research/scholarship interests.)            

 

See item 2h.-k., 2m.-o., and the Faculty Profile website.

 

The key words can be found on our website, http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/cis/main/grad/facspecs.html

 

d)  grant funding and proposal preparation/submission                                                        

See item 2h. In addition, Professors Kopec and Whitlock submitted a grant proposal to NSF. Professor Bar-Noy has submitted several proposals.

 

e)  publication of books and/or articles (Highlight all publications in which undergraduate and masters-level students appear as co-authors.)

 

See the faculty profile web pages.

 

The following publications involved an undergraduate or Master’s student (student’s name is bolded). In addition, many papers were published with doctoral students.

 

A. Murray Gross and Justin Stallard, Implementing Grover’s Algorithm Using Linear Transformations in Haskell, Proceedings of the 8^th Annual Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming, 2007.

 

Elizabeth Sklar, Jordan Salvit, Christopher Camacho, William Liu and
Valerie Andrewlevich, An Agent-Based Methodology for Analyzing and
Visualizing Educational Assessment Data, in Proceedings of the Sixth
International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
(AAMAS), 2007.

 

Susan Imberman, Aleksandr Barkan and Elizabeth Sklar, Extra-Curricular Robotics: Entry-level Soccer for Undergraduates, in Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Robots and Robot Venues: Resources for AI Education, 2007.

 

Micha Tomkiewicz, Maxim Titley, Alison Cichowski, Vinit Parmar,
Elizabeth Sklar, Philip Gallagher and Mary Gallagher, Toward
Management of an Energy Feeding Transtion, presented at the CUNY
Sustainability Conference on Energy and Environmental Sustainability:
Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, City University of New York,
December 8, 2006.

 

Elizabeth Sklar, Simon Parsons, M. Q. Azhar and Valerie Andrewlevich,
Educational Robotics in Brooklyn, in Proceedings of the AAAI-06 Mobile
Robot Workshop, 2006.

 

D. Sokol, G. Benson, and J. Tojeira. Tandem Repeats over the Edit Distance. Bioinformatics, 23(2), e30-e35, 2006.

 

D. Sokol, G. Benson, J. Tojeira. Tandem Repeats over the Edit Distance. Presented at the European Conference of Computational Biology, (ECCB) January 2007.

D. Sokol and J. Tojeira. Filtering Tandem Repeats in DNA Sequences. Proceedings of BIOCOMP '06: International Conference on Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, (Las Vegas, NV), p. 161-167, 2006.

 

I. Rudowsky, O. Kulyba, M. Kunin, S.Parsons, T.Raphan, Reinforcement Learning Interfaces for Biomedical Database Systems, IEEE-EMBS 2006, New York, NY, Aug 30-Sept 3, 2006, pp.

6269-6272.

 

 

 

 

f)   service to the department, college, university, or community

 

Almost every faculty member in the Department has a service and/or committee membership role in the Department structure. Especially noteworthy are our department deputies, Professors Langsam, Thurm, Harrow and Kopec; the Chair of our Curriculum Committee and our Core Committee, Professor Dexter; our CC 3.12 Coordinator, Professor Gurwitz; and the Chair of our Graduate Curriculum Committee, Professor Yanofsky.

 

It is well known that CIS faculty are among the most participatory in College governance.

 

·   Professor Langsam chairs the Committee on Committees and is a member of Faculty Council Steering.

 

·   Professor Harrow chaired the Graduate Curriculum Committee.

 

·   Professor Tenenbaum chaired the Core Curriculum Committee.

 

·   Professor Arnow chaired CUET.

 

·   Professor Jones chaired Academic Integrity.

 

·   Professors Kopec, Rudowsky, Cox, Cogan, Chopra, Parsons, Sklar, Bar-Noy and Weiss were all members of Faculty Council committees.

 

·   Profgessor Augenstein is on the College Review Committee.

 

·   Professor Weiss is on the Provost’s Released Time Committee.

 

·   Professor Arnow is a representative to the University’s ERP Committee.

 

·   Professor Zhou is on the University Computer Science Research Committee.

 

·   Professor Parsons is leading the Roosevelt-Ingersoll Planning Committee.

 

·   Professors Raphan, Parsons and Sklar serve on the Provost’s Science Research Council.

 

·   Professor Tenenbaum serves on the Board of the CUNY Institute for Software Design and Development. Professor Bar-Noy serves on the Executive Committee of the CUNY PhD Program in Computer Science.

 

·   Professors Langsam, Harrow, Arnow and Chopra are members of the Provost's Distance Learning Task Force.

 

·   Professor Keith Harrow served as Chapter President of the Brooklyn College Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa for the past three years, and represented the College Chapter at the national Annual Meeting of Phi Beta Kappa for the past two years.

 

Professor Ted Raphan serves on the Board of Directors of the Star-Early College High School that is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is now also supported by the NSF-CCLI grant and college funds.

 

Professor Elizabeth Sklar serves as the 2007 Chair of the International League of the RoboCup Junior championships, in which children and teen-agers compete to field robotic soccer-playing teams. She and Professor Simon Parsons are also very active in the senior RoboCup competitions and conferences, and have guided the Brooklyn College team to the international tournament in Atlanta in June 2007. Professor Sklar is also a member of the 12-member international RoboCup Federation of Trustees, the governing body of the non-profit RoboCup organization.

 

Professor Sklar also co-organized a workshop on Agent-Based Systems for Human learning and Entertainment at the International joint Conference on Autonomous and MultiAgent Systems. She served as Workshops Chair for that Conference.

 

Professor Paula Whitlock serves as the Brooklyn College representative to the PSC-CUNY Welfare Fund. Ahmet Eskicioglu was also an elected representative. There has not been an election to elect a replacement since he became ill.

 

Professor Simon Parsons organized the workshop program at the Annual Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and ran the ninth edition of the workshop "Game Theoretic and Decision Theoretic Agents" at the AAAI Spring Symposium Series. He also co-organized a workshop on Argumentation Multiagent Systems at the International joint Conference on Autonomous and MultiAgent Systems. He and Prof. Sklar also organized the workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce at the same Conference.

 

Prof. Whitlock was the local organizer of the conference "40 Years of Green's Function Monte Carlo" which was held at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU on May 11th and 12th. The conference honored Malvin Kalos and attracted attendees from around the world.

 

Professor Parsons’s doctoral students, students, Jinzhong Niu and Kai Cai have developed and distributed the open-source platform JCAT for running simulated markets (jcat.sourceforge.net).

 

 

a)  professional travel, presentations at conferences (Highlight all presentations in which undergraduate and masters-level students are listed as co-authors of abstracts and/or co-presenters.)

 

See the Faculty Profile web site.

 

b)  involvement with national disciplinary trends.

 

We have been working to bring our curriculum in line with Curriculum 2001, as recommended by the leading professional societies in computing.

 

 

16)Indicate how your department helps promote the three major goals of the Brooklyn College Strategic Plan:

 

a)  to maintain and enhance academic quality

 

We are introducing and implementing a number of new cutting-edge programs and enhancing existing programs, as described in items 2a., c.-f., and l., above.

 

We are actively pursuing and attaining scholarly achievements, as outlined in items 2h.-k., above, and in our online Faculty Profile.

 

We are experimenting with new ways of teaching, including online courses, and we are looking into the possibility of programming laboratories.

 

b)  to assure a student-oriented campus

 

We are revising our departmental web site, using many modalities of contact with our students (mail, email, website, instant messaging, open office hours, etc.)

 

c)  to become a “model citizen” in the borough of Brooklyn.

 

We are producing graduates with the technical skills to stoke the economic engine of Brooklyn, the City and the nation. We are expanding our service courses to other majors and to other themes to insure the computer literacy of our broad, future citizenry. Through our BPC grant, we are engaging the high school students of Brooklyn to gain interest in computing.

 

17)What are your department’s major goals for Academic Year 2007-2008? Indicate any special needs or anticipated problems in achieving these goals.

 

 

a.  Continuing the enrollment increases of 2006-07 into 2007-08.

 

New programs and themed courses should help in this direction. We are also working to improve retention in CIS 1.5, a crucial item for enrollment growth.

 

b. Planning implementation of the BS in Multimedia Computing beginning in 9/08

 

A line for a Director of this Program is crucial, now that Professors Scarlatos and Eskicioglu have left the College.

 

c.  Implementing the BS-MPS in Business Information Systems

 

The key here is recruiting appropriate adjuncts from industry. Also crucial is publicity and recruiting. A limited number of students are ready to commit and sustain a BS-MPS program.

 

d. Gaining approval of the BS in Information Systems

 

The approval of fast-track status for this is helpful. An informal proposal has been written and a curriculum has been formulated and approved by both CIS and Economics. It remains to be seen whether Master Planning approval of this is necessary, and if so, what hoops we will have to jump through to get it.

 

e.  Passage and implementation of changes in our major

 

We have submitted, to Faculty Council, changes in our major in the area of computer application design and development instead of computing infrastructure. These will change our major in the direction of Curriculum 2001, the standard template for computer science curricula, and towards demands of industry. Two courses in this area (CIS 20.1 and 20.2) have already been approved by Faculty Council, and changes to our major to incorporate the two courses, and remove some obsolete requirements have been submitted. We look forward to these changes being passed. However, we do need faculty development in this area. We have asked for resources from the Provost, but while we have heard favorable reaction, a solid plan for such faculty development has not yet materialized.

 

We have also modified the key entry and intermediate computing courses in our major to use the C++ computer language. This language, used widely in industry, and especially in the New York area for back-office operations, is a more practically oriented language upgrade from the C language that we have been using for the past 10 years.

 

f.  Passage and implementation of the Minor in Parallel and Distributed Computing

 

Based on industry need and with the help of a Workforce Development Initiative grant from CUNY, we have proposed a new course (CIS 47) and a minor in Parallel and Distributed Computing. We look forward to passage by Faculty Council in the Fall and implementation of this minor next year.

 

g. Submission of a Proposal for a Graduate Certificate in Parallel and Distributed Computing

 

Based on industry need and with the help of a Workforce Development Initiative grant from CUNY, we have proposed a new Graduate Certificate in Parallel and Distributed Computing. We have already created an informal proposal, which has received an initial go-ahead from the College administration. We now plan to develop a formal Letter of Intent, and submit it to Master Planning and CUNY. We have applied for another Workforce Development Initiative grant for this purpose.

 

h. Continuing the Bridges to Computing program under the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) grant

 

The Bridges to Computing Program, led by Professor Elizabeth Sklar, brings under-represented groups into computing. We have several programs focused for high school students, and special, themed sections of CC 3.12, CIS 1.5 and CIS 15, to attract students to computer science who would not otherwise consider the field. This is in response to nationwide drops in CIS enrollment, reduction in the diversification of the computing workforce, and the poor reputation that the field has garnered as a result of the massive shifts in the discipline as both an academic and an industrial occupation. Our initial year of the program has been quite positive, with many achievements, and we hope to continue this positive momentum.

 

i.  Implementing the CCLI grant and continuing science-oriented computing courses

 

The newly awarded CCLI grant for high-quality science education in conjunction with the STAR high school will allow important curriculum and pedagogical improvements in science education in secondary schools and on the Brooklyn College campus. Professors Chaya Gurwitz and Ted Raphan represent CIS in this grant, and their dedication insures the forward movement of this program and its success. Professor Raphan and Professor Yedidyah Langsam are, at the same time, developing science-oriented computing courses for Brooklyn College students. These are important in upgrading overall computing education at the College.

 

j.  Increasing interest in and use of Linux and Unix, and open source software

 

Linux and Unix are becoming stronger alternatives to Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop and network environments. They typify a trend towards open-source software, where the software source code is publicized and available for all to use and modify at no charge, and where large communities of developers co-operate in the creation of community computing products. Professors Scott Dexter and Samir Chopra are at the forefront of this effort, having authored an important monograph in the field. In addition, the effort in Parallel and Distributed Computing (see items f. and g. above) is largely based on Unix and Linux. We plan to intensify our educational offerings in this area.

 

k. Expansion of online course offerings     

 

We hope to expand opportunities for students to register for online courses, and thereby also attract additional students to the College and CIS. We also hope to work with the Business Program and the new online Business degree program of the School of Professional Studies, to the benefit of both SPS and Brooklyn College. This will, we hope, work synergistically with the new BS-MPS in Business Information Systems and will provide new opportunities for our faculty and leverage our resources.

 

l.  Increase grant procurement

 

We hope to continue and improve our record of grant procurement. We hope to take advantage of opportunities for both internal and external grant programs.

 

m.Development of an Education concentration in CIS

 

Professor Tenenbaum will work with faculty from the School of Education to develop a concentration for Education students in computing. Schools are increasingly looking to technology, and teachers increasingly need expertise in computing technologies.

 

 

Is your department considering any new programs?

 

Yes. See items 2a., c., d.iv., l.iii.; 3c.; 7b.; and 11b., c., d., f., g., m.

 

 

 

14)If you have not been able to submit full-time and/or adjunct appointment forms in a timely manner, please provide an explanation of some of the difficulties you’ve faced in doing so.

 

NA

 

 

15)If your department has submitted within the last five years a multi-year plan, following an external evaluation, describe the progress you’ve made in implementing that plan.

 

NA