I enjoy spending time on curriculum design. I was the Co-PI on incorporating hands-on activies into the curriculum, an NSF CCLI grant that funded a computer science lab and helped us revamp the Senior Project, AI, Computer Science I, CS II, Data Structures and Algorithms, and Machine Organization. The major goal of the grant was to enhance our building of critical thinking skills and willingness to be creative in our majors. Liz Johnson, Mike Goldweber and I wrote a paper about how this went for SIGCSE 2005.
I am also one of the principle authors of the grading standards adopted by our department.
I'm interested in computer science education research.
I'm also interested in applied theoretical problems. My dissertation started this interest by looking at practical applications of graph coloring. I discovered most problems described as applications of graph coloring in the literature are either extremely easy or not really solved by graph coloring.
With some students, I did some work on course scheduling problems, the problem of both building a timetable for a school and scheduling students to minimize conflicts. Abby Walker and Prakash Ojha with me on a summer research project comparing several methods from the literature. We combined their work with Jen Rizzo's work on building random data sets for the problem that have optimal solutions so we could compare how close the methods get to optimal. The three of them competed in the 2001 ACM International Student Research Contest and placed second which I think is pretty cool.
I've also worked on proving (theoretically and empirically) that bipartite matching can do a rather effective job of approximating the optimal solution. (It was very competitive and very fast in the study conducted by Abby, Prakash and Jen.)
I'm getting less done in this area now because my effort has been in the CS Ed area lately. It's really a project waiting for a student to drive it again.
Yet another interest of mine is parallel computing and I was the PI on an NSF Major Research Instrumentation Grant with Mike Goldweber and Liz Johnson that provided us with a beowulf cluster. Michelle Lyman, Gaby Jonatan, Matt Kelley and Juicio Brennan were undergraduates that helped us out on this.
Most recently I've started working on Computational System Biology problems with my sister, Gail Lewandowski. We're trying to understand what happens in the nucleus that causes particular actions of a virus -- e.g. what happens to cause the herpes virus to go latent in nerve cells. Working on this is often like walking through fog -- I see a bit and can help a bit but there's a lot to learn.
I like to do service activities that have clear results and benefits. At Xavier I installed the first web server on campus, helped write the proposal that got us our first T1 line and desktop IP, and helped restart the Computer Science club. I find hiring committees to be useful and somewhat fun as well.
I was a member of the University Technology Committee for awhile; that was ok since the committee had some say in how money targeted for technology on campus would be spent; a major accomplishment when I was on that committee was the University's move to a 4 year lease cyle which ensures our technology is never too out of date.
I spent a three-year term on Benefits. We saved lots of money, supposedly, by switching carriers. Unsurprisingly they cranked up the rates the next year and we had to raise costs for everyone in the university. Since I left they've inflicted co-insurance on us, meaning, I guess, that the era of preventive medicine is over.
In early 2003 I was a member of them Academic Program Review Committee. We read the reports and reviews on all 77 academic programs at Xavier and gave our own review. This was done in six weeks and required twenty or so hours a week. Oof. It would have been better to work over a longer stretch to enhance our reflection and recommendation ability, but oh well. I now have a very global sense of the university which is a good thing. Nothing really came of the review which is a less exciting thing.
I used my global view of the university while a member of the Strategic Planning Committee for Teaching, Learning and Technology. Some of these ideas will show up in the Center for Teaching Excellence in the new Learning Commons.
My favorite committee, and the favorite of anyone ever on it I bet, is the Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee. We get to read and discuss all sorts of cool courses and programs that departments are creating. The discussion generally results in action and then you get to hear from your students who are taking and enjoying these cool new courses. Way excellent!
I'm currently Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Not much sleep involved.
My most recent addition to the service list at the university level is the Rank and Tenure committee. Like the curriculum committee, it's a pleasure to see the work people do.
On the professional level, I'm the co-program chair of SIGCSE 2009 and am co-symposium chair of SIGCSE 2010.