Keynote Speakers

At a time when computing is so much a part of all of our lives, has incredible job opportunities, and is so empowering, most students graduate high school without having had any introduction to computer science. A decade ago in the United States, the CSforALL movement was launched to broaden participation in computing to those traditionally underrepresented. This talk reflect on the current state of that initiative, and introduce the "Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC)" course, which has received worldwide attention and currently has 65% female enrollment at UC Berkeley, among the highest in the nation.

Coming soon.

While many faculty understand the need to implement legal components related to disability, few are confident in approaching the human side of these conversations. In this session we will introduce different social models around disability and understand how they show up in daily life. We'll focus on creating a safe space to understand how these models impact our personal points of view and begin to explore better ways of framing conversations around disability.

Passionate diversity and inclusion advocate with 10+ years of experience in program management and talent development strategies. Deep knowledge of disability issues in the workplace and how to increase inclusion of marginalized communities. Focus on developing women in leadership and creating awareness of the impact of unconscious bias. Proven change catalyst who does not shy away from difficult conversations to facilitate cultural transformation and long term company success.

In the past decade, Peer Instruction has become established as a best practice in teaching computer science. In this talk, I will first explore the evidence which led to Peer Instruction becoming a best practice, specifically looking at the research demonstrating Peer Instruction is valued by students in a diverse set of CS courses at a diverse set of institutions, results in in-class learning from peers and the instructor, reduces failure rates by 67%, results in better final exam performance, contributes to a 31% increase in 1-year major retention, and may scale better than traditional lecture as class sizes increase. Next, I’ll discuss the next wave of research using Peer Instruction as rich source of student data. This work has shown that data naturally collected while teaching using Peer Instruction can be used to identify students at-risk of failure in introductory CS courses early in the term. Ongoing work seeks to increase identification accuracy and to explore possible interventions for students.

Leo Porter is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC San Diego. His computer science education research interests include peer instruction, predicting student outcomes, faculty adoption, and concept inventories; his computer architecture research interests include speculative multithreading, transactional memory, and hardware security. He co-teaches the popular Coursera Specialization “Object-Oriented Java Programming: Data Structures and Beyond” with over 300,000 enrolled learners and the first course in the edX MicroMasters in Data Science, “Python for Data Science”, with over 100,000 enrolled learners. Dedicated to helping faculty adopt best practices in teaching, he co-leads the annual "New Computer Science Faculty Teaching Workshop" funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation. He has received five Best Paper Awards, one in computer architecture and four in computer science education research, and the Teacher of the Year Award (2015-2016) for the Computer Science and Engineering Department.

Former NSF program officer Mike Erlinger will provide a brief introduction to the behind the scenes at the NSF. This will include advice for writing successful grant applications, how to identify relevant NSF solicitations, and how to improve grants based upon reviews. Erlinger will share the most common mistakes that PIs make and what he wished every potential PI knew!

Mike Erlinger is a Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College.