General education in the computer science curriculum

Three key forces are shaping the modern Computer Science (CS) curriculum: (1) new topics/courses are squeezing out existing ones; (2) a focus on "big picture" and interdisciplinary aspects of CS is leading to curricula in which the traditional core courses + electives model is being superseded by a more flexible approach based on tracks/threads; and (3) project-based courses are increasingly relying on a notion of just-in-time teaching in which particular skills are not bundled into a particular course, but are covered at a point when they are needed for particular project work. The undergraduate programming language curriculum is feeling the pressure of these forces. Core courses on programming languages and compilers are being changed to electives, relegated to a software/systems track, or phased out altogether. Particular programming languages and programming language concepts are being taught in a more piecemeal fashion on an as-needed basis. Unfortunately, these changes make it increasingly likely that CS majors can graduate without being exposed to certain "big ideas" of programming languages. Programming languages (along with many other subdisciplines of CS) contains ideas that every well-educated computer scientist needs to know and which are relevant to a wide variety of projects/careers. In a CS curriculum based on tracks and projects, how can we ensure that vital intellectual components are not lost in the shuffle? One way to think about this problem is to view the CS curriculum as a collection of aspects that can be combined in different arrangements to produce various projects/courses. In this paper, we consider the benefits and challenges of an aspect-oriented view of the CS curriculum, particularly in regard to programming language concepts.

In the first years of the 21st century a lot of educative innovation has been developed. One of the most relevant innovations for higher education institutions are the Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOC). In the field of Computer and Information Sciences, a lot of MOOC have been performed. In this paper we analyze the courses that are available in Coursera, one of the most popular platforms for delivering MOOC. Our intention is to assess to which extent the subjects suggested for the careers of Computer and Information Sciences are covered by the courses in Coursera. Despite the fact that are many courses in certain subjects, our results show that some subjects are not very well covered. Another conclusion that can be elicited from our analysis is that there are strong relationships among the courses that are available in Coursera. Key Words Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOC), Distance education, Computer Science.

A complete traversal of a container C (such as a set) is informally described by the iteration scheme for x in C F(x,C) where F is a function that might possibly modify C by inserting new elements into it. We assume that the order in which the elements are treated is not relevant, as long as the iteration continues until F has been applied to all elements currently in C, including those F has inserted. Standard iteration mechanisms, such as the iterators provided in the C++ Standard Template Library (STL), do not directly support complete traversals. In this paper we present two approaches to complete traversals, both extending the STL framework, one by means of generic algorithms and the other by means of a container adaptor.

We present here our findings of a study, part of larger research focusing on understanding the structure and composition of the academic community of Digital Library (DL). Using social network analysis, the present study analyses the structural features of editorial boards (EBs) of leading journals of DL. Following the premise that boundaries and directions of a field, especially an evolving one such as digital libraries is shaped by journals and their editors, we undertook a study of the editorial boards of the top 56 journals in the field of digital libraries. Techniques from social network analysis are applied to the data to reveal the structures and relationships within the EBs and journals of the DL community. The paper reveals the structure of the scientific grouping as well as the key players in the system and finds the ‘diversified convergence’ of fields. The focus is on the stars of the DL community as well as journals. We have compared the results with our previous studies carried out on different communication platforms of the DL world. Our results show that while computer science is the common thread, library and information science is the field that dominates, both in the scheme of things of top-ranking journals as well as editors.

Emphasises the need for change in the Curriculum of library and information science courses to meet the social change in information needs. Discusses the various factors affecting the design of curriculum, need for inducting supporting disciplines such as management science, computer science, and behaviour psychology. Suggests cooperative approach to information science education, suggests institution of an accreditation mechanism for the courses.

In my last column (see ibid., January/February 2001), I talked about a notational device for matrix algebra called tensor diagrams. This time I write some C++ code to symbolically evaluate these quantities. This gives me a chance to play with some as yet untried features in the C++ standard library, such as strings and standard template library (STL) container classes.

Standard iteration mechanisms, even ones of such generality as those in the C++ Standard Template Library (STL), do not allow insertions to be made in a container during a traversal of the container. Since ad hoc ways of handling such iterations are tedious to program and error-prone, programmers should ideally have at their command an efficient generic solution. In earlier work we formally characterized the complete traversal problem and presented generic solutions by means of two generic algorithms and a container adaptor, all defined within the STL framework. Here we develop additional theory for reasoning about complete traversals and address the question of how general the complete traversal problem is by showing that it subsumes well-known graph (or relation) problems such as reachability and transitive closure.

This manual provides any interested educator - formal or not - with the necessary framework, material and guidance for implementing a location-based game design course to promote physical activity and social interaction in urban open spaces. The first section presents materials and concepts that help introduce, structure and carry out a course for various target groups. The second section of the manual presents in detail examples of four courses tailored for different target groups: PART 1. Secondary education - describes a course for second stage pupils, PART 2. Higher education – imparted to architecture and urban design students, but previous experience shows that it is also appropriate in an interdisciplinary setup, PART 3. Adult learners - introduces a self-learning package and presents the topics and chapters that are covered by the learning material, and PART 4. Chronically ill children – an example that contains information for both students in higher education (computer science) and chronically ill children. Each part of the second section presents conclusions and recommendations as well as further material adapted to the needs of the presented target groups.

High performance computing education is needed at all levels of computer science education, but the need is especially clear in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. A Bootable Linux CD (B...

Scientific research processes are accompanied by burgeoning amounts of research data that serves as findings of the research and provides a platform for the results to be verifiable. Scientific researchers are under pressure to make their data openly available to other researchers for use. Access to scientific data and its curation has become a dominant theme in scientific policy discussions. Besides the funder requirements, researchers are making their data openly available for a number of reasons that include, raising the profiles of their research outputs, to increase their citations, to validate their research outputs and for their authenticity and integrity as researchers. However, not all researchers possess the skills to curate their own data and make it openly available for use in an open environment that is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). The primary objective of this paper is to raise awareness of the strategic role of data scientists in the scientific research process. The study seeks to contribute towards a growing and emergent discourse of data science in HEIs. It also seeks to contribute towards an educational model for data scientists in HEIs in South Africa. In-order to realise these objectives the paper asks the following research questions:How are the emergent roles of data scientists conceptualised in HEIs in South Africa?What is the strategic role of a data scientist in the scientific research process?.This study analysed data science programs offered by universities in South Africa to understand how the role of data scientists is conceptualised and to delineate the scope of this emergent field. A qualitative content analysis survey method is used to analyse courses offered by HEIs in South Africa. Preliminary findings from the research revealed that data scientists are drawn from fields like mathematics, statistics, information science, and computer science. The practical jobs of data scientists as conceptualised by the majority of universities employs theories drawn from the information science, computer science and statistics. The data scientists are expected to work closely with the researchers where the research is done. Most universities are offering data science programs at post-graduate level as professional courses for learners coming in from diverse backgrounds. The study recommends that the next generation of data scientists in a South African context should possess a cocktail of skills that enable them to conduct data analysis and enquiry to enable others to work with digital data. Presentation at the UCT E-Research Conference 2019: DataScience4D: Explore the practice, principles and opportunities of data science for development15 – 18 April 2019 held at the University of Cape Town

The present study examines global publications output on ‘Web 2.0 and Libraries’ published during the period 2006-15. The data for the study was sourced from Scopus database. The total global research output on ‘Web 2.0 and libraries’ comprising 482 publications, registered 14.02 % CAGR growth, cumulated 3234 citations with an average of 6.71 citations per paper. The global contributions on ‘Web 2.0 and libraries’ originated from 77 countries, 179 organizations, and 159 authors. Top 10 countries accounted for 75.10 % global publications share, 90.75 % global citations share during 2006-15. Top 15 organisations contributed 13.69 %, cumulated 15.18 % citations share. Top 21 authors contributed 14.94 % publications share, cumulated 14.81 % citations share of the global output during 2006-15. ‘Web 2.0 and libraries’ as a subject, interacts highly with other disciplines. Social sciences accounted for the largest share (72.61 %), followed by computer science (52.28 %), and 6 other disciplines. Of the total 482 global publications on the subject, 351 appeared in 94 journals, with top 19 journals accounting for 39.21 % share. The top 30 highly cited papers registered 20 to 475 citations each, cumulated 1776 citations, averaging to 59.2 citations per paper.

At first thought, one may not realize the need for a special issue of Parallel and Distributed Computing Practices focused on Cluster Computing when our community has already invested years of research and spent a wealth of resources on traditional Big Iron supercomputers, for instance, the SGI/Cray Origin and IBM SP. Academia, industry, and national laboratories are still using, and for the foreseeable future, will continue to use, supercomputers to solve both grand-challenge scale and high-throughput applications. Then why the interest and new popularity of research into clusters for high-performance parallel and distributed applications? Clusters incorporate the tremendous successes that are attributable to our parallel and distributed processing community. Over the next decade, clusters will span the entire range of high-performance computing platforms. Instead of being restricted solely to supercomputers for achieving high-performance computing, the spectrum of available platforms will spread out to Beowulf-class clusters, to superclusters, and on to supercomputers. Moving along this continuum represents increasing computational resources, which in turn allows the capability for solving larger classes of applications or instances of problems. Compute-bound applications on workstations often may take advantage of the extra horsepower provided by symmetric multiprocessors. Applications with even larger computational requirements and a high-degree of concurrency may use Beowulf clusters, that is, clusters that are home-built from mass-market, commercial off-the-shelf workstations and networks, for instance, PC's interconnected by Fast Ethernet. A supercluster may contain commodity SMP nodes interconnected with scalable, low-latency, high-bandwidth networks, and is integrated by a system vendor rather than the computational scientist. Applications with greater complexity, for example, grand challenges from the sciences, demand scalable systems with high-performance, interconnects, perhaps coupled with terascale I/O subsystems, and thus, are appropriate for these superclusters. Finally, supercomputers, the largest of the clusters, may provide the ultimate platform for the highest-fidelity models and simulations and data-intensive applications. At each step up this ladder of cluster architectures, the system cost increases approximately by an order of magnitude, but having the high-performance capability to solve the problem of interest may require an entry point at any of these levels, the Beowulf, or supercluster, or even supercomputer platform. Cluster computing with Beowulf- or superclusters, thus, may be one or two orders of magnitude less expensive than a supercomputer, and provide a cost-effective solution and capability that was not available on a workstation. But this cost comparison measures just the basic system price. What about the applications? As recently as a few years ago, the lack of a canonical high-performance architectural paradigm meant that migrating to a new computer system, even from the same vendor, typically required redesigning applications to efficiently use the high-performance system. Thus, the application must be redesigned with parallel algorithms and libraries that are optimized for each high-performance system. This process of porting, redesigning, optimizing, debugging, and analyzing, the application may in fact be prohibitively expensive, and certainly frustrating when the process is completed just in time to greet the next generation system! That was then, this is now. With the successful standardization of system-level interfaces, many of these issues no longer hinder our expedited use of these new, high-performance clusters. The message-passing interface (MPI) is a clear example of a standard that has contributed significantly to the success of cluster computing. Supercomputer vendors working together with the high-performance computing community embarked on a process to standardize the user-level interface and behavior for passing messages between concurrent tasks. Now, using ordinary sequential compilers and vendor-supplied or freely-available implementations of this message-passing interface, applications can be implemented efficiently on one supercomputer and ported with little or no effort to other parallel machines. The message-passing paradigm, thus, provides a reasonably good canonical high-performance model and methodology for implementing high-performance applications. An algorithm that exhibits efficient execution and scaling on one machine then is likely to perform well on another with little or no additional programming effort. Using this cluster computing paradigm, algorithms typically are optimized by minimizing the number of remote memory accesses (reducing the amount of messages passed), and carefully organizing the data placement to increase memory locality. Thus, high-performance algorithms and applications that have been optimized for supercomputers, using the same cluster paradigm, may be appropriate for Beowulf and superclusters. Cluster computing, realizing the importance of a standard high-performance programming environment that applies equally well to both ends of the architectural spectrum, highly leverages these and other successes from parallel and distributed processing research and development. This is in an exciting, new era for high-performance computing where the canonical architectural paradigm stretches from home-built Beowulf clusters, to superclusters, and on to supercomputers. But cluster computing faces some challenges ahead of it. Continued research is required for designing 1) scalable, high-performance algorithms, applications, and methodologies, that can tolerate the communication overheads, and adapt to hybrid, SMP, and heterogeneous, nodes; 2) high-performance computer architectures, scalable interconnection networks, and I/O subsystems; and 3) scalable systems software, compilers, and monitoring tools. Cluster computing has come of age, and it is high time for the parallel and distributed processing community to lay the groundwork for our own legacy of success stories. David A. Bader University of New Mexico

A functional style of programming has become common in C++, following the introduction of the Standard Template Library (STL) into C++'s standard library. C++ is, however, notably lacking in its support for this style and thus cannot take full advantage of its own standard libraries. C++'s mechanisms for defining functions or objects to pass to STL algorithms are overly verbose. The effective use of modern C++ libraries calls for lambda functions in the language.This paper describes a design and implementation of built-in lambda functions for C++. C++'s compilation model, where activation records are maintained in a stack, and the lack of automatic object lifetime management, make safe lambda functions and closures challenging: if a closure outlives its scope of definition, references stored in a closure dangle. Our design is careful to balance between conciseness of syntax and explicit annotations to guarantee safety.Lambda functions can be declared without annotating their parameter types. C++0x, the forthcoming revision of standard C++, supports constrained templates and modular type checking. We describe how to infer parameter types of lambda functions from the constraints of generic functions in order to support modular type checking in the presence of lambda functions. Our design is currently under consideration for adoption to C++0x.

In today's technological market, job candidates must possess technical and communication skills to acquire a desired position. Computer science programs, for the most part, provide the technological training, but are inconsistent in teaching students all the necessary communication skills. In many computer science curricula faculty members realizing the importance of improving writing ability have incorporated writing intensive courses. However, many computer science curricula neglect oral communication, largely because of the amount of class time needed to make presentations. Several gaps exist between computer science curricula and business world reality. Computer science curricula must teach students to listen and express themselves clearly, since getting the maximum utilization of an information resource requires contact with the user community. This is not to say that educators have ignored industry requests. The emerging trend in computer science curricula is to stress written and oral communication skills. This article discusses the importance of incorporating speaking intensive courses into computer science programs. In addition, this article reviews two courses that have included speeches and presentations. Finally it presents a new way to grade oral communication.

We present DASH, a C++ template library that offers distributed data structures and parallel algorithms and implements a compiler-free PGAS (partitioned global address space) approach. DASH offers many productivity and performance features such as global-view data structures, efficient support for the owner-computes model, flexible multidimensional data distribution schemes and interoperability with STL (standard template library) algorithms. DASH also features a flexible representation of the parallel target machine and allows the exploitation of several hierarchically organized levels of locality through a concept of Teams. We evaluate DASH on a number of benchmark applications and we port a scientific proxy application using the MPI two-sided model to DASH. We find that DASH offers excellent productivity and performance and demonstrate scalability up to 9800 cores.