National Academies Press: OpenBook

Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking (2010)

Chapter: Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
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B
Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff

B.1
COMMITTEE

Marcia C. Linn (Chair) is a professor specializing in education in mathematics, science, and technology in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She directs the NSF-funded Technology-Enhanced Learning in Science (TELS) center. She is a member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. Board service includes the American Association for the Advancement of Science board, the Graduate Record Examination Board of the Educational Testing Service, the McDonnell Foundation Cognitive Studies in Education Practice board, and the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Linn earned a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University.


Alfred V. Aho (NAE) is the Lawrence Gussman Professor of Computer Science and vice chair of undergraduate education for the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. Previously, he conducted research at Bell Laboratories from 1963 to 1991, and again from 1997 to 2002 as vice president of the Computing Sciences Research Center. Aho’s current research interests include quantum computing, programming languages, compilers, and algorithms. He is part of the Language and Compilers research group at Columbia. He is widely known for his development of the AWK programming language with Peter J. Weinberger and Brian

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
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Kernighan (the “A” stands for “Aho”), and for his co-authorship of Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (the “Dragon book”) with Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey Ullman. He wrote the initial versions of the Unix tools egrep and fgrep. He is also a co-author (along with Jeffrey Ullman and John Hopcroft) of a number of widely used textbooks on several areas of computer science, including algorithms and data structures, and the foundations of computer science. He is a past president of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computability Theory. Aho has chaired the Advisory Committee for the Computer and Information Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He has received many prestigious honors, including the IEEE’s John von Neumann Medal and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Aho was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999 for contributions to the fields of algorithms and programming tools. Aho earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University.


M. Brian Blake is a professor of computer science and associate dean of engineering at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests include the investigation of automated approaches to sharing information and software capabilities across organization boundaries, sometimes referred to as enterprise integration. His investigations cover the spectrum of software engineering: design, specification, proof of correctness, implementation/experimentation, performance evaluation, and application. Blake’s long-term vision is the creation of adaptable software entities or software agents that can be deployed on the Internet and, using existing resources, can manage the creation of new processes, sometimes referred to as interorganizational workflow. He has several ongoing projects that make incremental progress toward this long-term vision. In addition, he conducts experimentation in the areas of software engineering education and software process and improvement to determine the most effective methods for training students and professionals to develop module systems that by nature are distributed. Blake has consulted for such companies as General Electric, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and the MITRE Corporation. He has published more than 95 refereed journal papers and conference proceedings in the areas of service-oriented computing, agents and workflow, enterprise integration, component-based software engineering, distributed data management, and software engineering education. Blake’s work has been funded by the Federal Aviation Administration, the MITRE Corporation, the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Air Force Research Laboratory, SAIC, and the National Institutes of Health. He earned his doctorate in information technology and computer science from George Mason University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

Robert Constable is the dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Formerly he was the chair of the Computer Science Department for 6 years. He also heads a research group in automated reasoning and formal methods in the Computer Science Department, where he is a professor. Constable is a graduate of Princeton University, where he worked with Alonzo Church, one of the pioneers of computer science. He did his Ph.D. work at the University of Wisconsin with Stephen Cole Kleene, a Ph.D. student of Church and another pioneer of computer science. Church traces his mathematical lineage back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the first logicians interested in mechanical computation and the digitization of human knowledge. Constable joined the Cornell University faculty in 1968. He has supervised more than 43 Ph.D. students in computer science. He is known for work in connecting programs and mathematical proofs that has led to new ways of automating the production of reliable software. This work is known by the slogan “proofs as programs,” and it is embodied in the Nuprl (“new pearl”) theorem prover. He has written three books on this topic as well as numerous research articles. Since 1980 he has headed a project that uses Nuprl to design and verify software systems, instances of which are still operational in industry and science. Currently he is working on extending this programming method to concurrent processes, realizing the notion of “proofs as processes.” In 1999 he became the first dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science, a unit that includes the Computer Science Department, the Department of Statistical Science, the Information Science Program, and the Program in Computer Graphics. It also sponsors the undergraduate major and graduate field in computational biology.


Yasmin B. Kafai is a professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she spent more than a decade on the faculty at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. As a learning scientist, she has researched and developed media-rich software tools and environments—most recently Scratch, together with researchers at the MIT Media Lab—that support youth in schools and community centers in becoming designers of games, simulations, and virtual worlds. As part of her policy initiatives, she wrote Under the Microscope: A Decade of Gender Equity Interventions in the Sciences (2004) and participated in the national commission that produced the report TechSavvy Girls: Educating Girls in the Computer Age (2000) for the American Association of University Women. She also briefed the Computer Science and Telecommunications National Research Council report Being Fluent with Information Technology (National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 1999). While conducting research at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

nology Media Laboratory, she received her Ed.D. in human development and psychology from Harvard University.


Janet L. Kolodner is a Regents’ Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research over the past 30 years has addressed a wide variety of issues in learning, memory, and problem solving, both in computers and in people. During the 1980s, she pioneered the computer method called case-based reasoning, which allows a computer to reason and learn from its experiences. The first case-based design aids (CBDAs) came from her lab. Archie-2, for example, helped architecture students with conceptual design. During the early 1990s, she used the cognitive model implied by case-based reasoning to address issues in creative design. JULIA planned meals, Creative JULIA figured out what to do with leftover rice, IMPROVISOR did simple mechanical design, and ALEC simulated Alexander Graham Bell in his invention of the telephone. Later in the 1990s, she used the cognitive model in case-based reasoning to guide the design of a science curriculum for middle school. Learning by Design™ is a design-based learning appoach and an inquiry-oriented project-based approach to science learning that has children learn science from their design experiences. The sequencing of activities in the classroom encourages students to reflect on their design and science experiences in ways that case-based reasoning says are appropriate for integrating them well into memory. Learning by Design curriculum units and the sequencing structures in Learning by Design are being integrated into a full 3-year middle-school science curriculum called Project-Based Inquiry Science (PBIS). Most recently, Kolodner’s research uses what she learned in designing Learning by Design to create informal learning environments to help middle schoolers come to think of themselves as competent scientific reasoners. In Kitchen Science Investigators, fifth and sixth graders learn science in the context of cooking. In Hovering Around, they learn about motion and forces, about airflow, and about how to explain in the context of designing hovercraft. Kolodner is founding editor in chief of the Journal of the Learning Sciences and is a founder and first executive officer of the International Society for the Learning Sciences. She has headed up the Cognitive Science Program at Georgia Tech and headed an organization called EduTech in the mid-1990s whose mission was to use what is known about cognition to design educational software and integrate it appropriately into educational environments. She has a B.S. from Brandeis University in math and computer science and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University.


Lawrence Snyder is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. Snyder’s research has focused on

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

parallel computation, including architecture, algorithms, and languages. He has served on the faculties of Yale and Purdue universities and has had visiting appointments at UW, Harvard, MIT, Sydney University, the Swiss Technological University, the University of Auckland, and Kyoto University. In 1980 he invented programmable interconnect, a method to dynamically configure on-chip components, and a technology used today for FPGAs. In 1990 he was co-designer of Chaos Router, a randomizing adaptive packet router. He was the principal investigator of the ZPL language design project, the first high-level parallel language to achieve “performance portability” across all parallel computer platforms. Snyder is the author of Fluency with Information Technology: Skills, Concepts and Capabilities, a textbook for non-techie college freshmen that teaches fundamental computing concepts; the book is in its third edition. With former Ph.D. student Calvin Lin (University of Texas, Austin), he has written Principles of Parallel Programming, published in 2008. Snyder was a three-term member of the Computer Research Association Board of Directors, developing a series of best-practices white papers. He chaired the NSF CISE Advisory Board as well as several CISE directorate oversight panels and numerous review panels. The two National Research Council studies that he chaired produced influential reports—Academic Careers for Experimental Computer Scientists and Engineers (1994) and Being Fluent with Information Technology (1999). He served three terms on the NRC’s Army Research Laboratory Technical Advisory Board. He serves on ACM’s Education Board, has been general chair or program committee chair of several ACM and IEEE conferences, and is a fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE. He received a B.A. from the University of Iowa in mathematics and economics and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University as a student of A. Nico Habermann.


Uri Wilensky is a professor of learning sciences and computer science at Northwestern University and holds appointments in the cognitive science program and in complex systems. He is the founder and current director of the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling and also a founder and member of the governing board of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). His most recent projects focus on developing tools that enable users (both researchers and learners) to simulate, explore, and make sense of complex systems. His NetLogo agent-based modeling software is in widespread use worldwide. Prior to coming to Northwestern, he taught at Tufts University and MIT and was a research scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation. Wilensky is a founder and an executive editor of the International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning. His research interests include computer-based modeling and agent-based modeling, STEM education, mathematics in the context

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

of computation, and complex systems. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Career Award as well as the Spencer Foundation’s Post-Doctoral Award. He has directed numerous NSF research projects focused on developing computer-based modeling tools and studying their use. Among these tools are multi-agent modeling languages such as StarLogoT and NetLogo, model-based curricula such as GasLab, ProbLab, NIELS, and BEAGLE Evolution, and Participatory Simulation Toolkits such as Calc-HubNet and Computer-HubNet. The tools enable learners to explore and create simulations of complex phenomena across many domains of the natural and social sciences and, through creating and exploring such simulations, deepen their understanding of core scientific concepts. Many of these tools are also in use by researchers across a wide variety of domains including the natural sciences, social sciences, business, and medicine. By providing a “low-threshold” language for exploring and constructing models, Wilensky hopes to promote modeling literacy—the sharing and critiquing of models in the scientific community, in education, and in the public at large. Wilensky did his undergraduate and graduate studies in mathematics, philosophy, and computer science at Brandeis and Harvard universities and received his Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

B.2
WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS

Dor Abrahamson specializes in the study of mathematical intuition, reasoning, and learning from the synergistic perspectives of cognitive and sociocultural theory. He investigates in particular the roles that mediated, reflexive interaction with a range of technologies plays in students’ content-focused and intellectual development, which he views as trajectories from intuition to inscription. A core aspect of Abrahamson’s professional practice is the design, production, implementation, and evaluation of innovative mixed-media concept-targeted curricular artifacts aligned with the emerging empiricism of individual cognition in social context. Operating in design-based research methodology, Abrahamson is particularly interested in instances of spontaneous multimodal coordination of distributed epistemic and material resources and in the roles of teachers in facilitating conceptual insight. Abrahamson also explores the impact of complexity studies’ perspectives and methodologies on education research and has been arguing for the use of agent-based modeling to advance theories of individual learning in social context. During his tenure as a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, Abrahamson developed computer-based modules for learning probability. He has published in the Handbook of Mathematical Cognition, International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning (and is a member of the editorial board), Educational Studies in Mathematics,

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

Cognition & Instruction, For the Learning of Mathematics, Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, and the Journal of Statistics Education, and he contributes regularly to major international conferences. He received his M.A. in cognitive psychology in 2000 from Tel Aviv University, Israel, and a Ph.D. in learning sciences in 2004 from Northwestern University.


Kevin Ashley holds interdisciplinary appointments as a faculty member of the Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, a senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, a professor of law, and an adjunct professor of computer science. His goals are to contribute to artificial intelligence (AI) research on case-based and analogical reasoning, argumentation, and explanation and to develop instructional and information retrieval systems for professionals in case-based domains such as law and ethics. Currently, he and his students are pursuing research projects in automatically indexing legal case texts, engaging law students in online argumentation dialogues, intelligent retrieval of ethics codes and cases, and Web-based tutoring to help students get more from reading ethics cases. For his Ph.D., he developed an AI CBR system, HYPO, which reasons by analogy to past legal cases, makes arguments about legal fact situations, and poses hypothetical cases. MIT Press/Bradford Books published his book, based on his dissertation, entitled Modeling Legal Argument: Reasoning with Cases and Hypotheticals. In April 1990, the National Science Foundation selected Professor Ashley as a Presidential Young Investigator, and in 2002 he was selected as a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. From June 1988 through July 1989, he was a visiting scientist at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. For 4 years prior to his computer science graduate work, he was an associate attorney at White & Case, a large Wall Street law firm. While a philosophy major at Princeton, he was a research assistant for Professor Walter Kaufmann. He received a B.A. in philosophy (magna cum laude) from Princeton University in 1973, a J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School in 1976, and a Ph.D. in computer science in 1988 from the University of Massachusetts, where he held an IBM Graduate Research Fellowship.


Owen Astrachan is a professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University and the department’s director of undergraduate studies for teaching and learning. He received an NSF CAREER award in 1997 to incorporate design patterns in undergraduate computer science curricula, received an IBM Faculty Award in 2004 to support componentization in both software and curricula, and was one of two inaugural NSF CISE Distinguished Education Fellows in 2007, awarded to revitalize computer science education using case- and problem-based learning. Astrachan’s

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

research interests have been built on understanding how best to teach and learn about object-oriented programming, software design, and computer science in general; he is now working on developing a portfolio of substantial, interdisciplinary problems that help explain how computer science is relevant to students in the social and natural sciences. Astrachan received Duke University’s 1995 Robert B. Cox Distinguished Teaching in Science Award, an Outstanding Instructor Award while teaching on sabbatical at the University of British Columbia in 1998, and Duke’s 2002 Richard K. Lublin Award for “ability to engender genuine intellectual excitement, ability to engender curiosity, knowledge of the field and ability to communicate that knowledge.” He earned his A.B. degree with distinction in mathematics from Dartmouth and an MAT (Math), an M.S., and a Ph.D. in computer science from Duke.


Tim Bell is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. His current research interests include computers and music, public understanding of (computer) science, and educational applications of podcasting. He received the Science Communicator Award from the NZ Association of Scientists in 1999, and an inaugural New Zealand Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award in 2002. He has appeared with his “Computer Science Unplugged” show at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, the Dunedin International Science Festival, and the Australian Science Festival. He is also a qualified musician and performs regularly on instruments that have black-and-white keyboards. He is co-author of the books Text Compression and Managing Gigabytes.


Andrew Bernat was a founding member and chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at El Paso (spending 20 years there) and a former NSF program director. He is currently the executive director of the Computing Research Association, whose mission is to strengthen research and education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve the public’s and policy makers’ understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in our society. In recognition of “his success in creating arguably the strongest computer science department at a minority-serving institution,” the Computing Research Association honored him with the 1997 A. Nico Habermann Award.


Paulo Blikstein is an assistant professor at Stanford University’s School of Education, with a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science Department. His research focuses on computational literacy, low-cost educational technologies for low-income settings, and STEM education. His

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

work cuts across age groups—he has worked extensively with inner-city students in developing countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Senegal, and Costa Rica, but also with undergraduates in elite U.S. institutions. His research tries to bring the most cutting-edge computational tools to the classroom, creating environments for students to authentically engage in advanced, deep scientific inquiry.


Lenore Blum is Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she co-directs the ALADDIN Center for Algorithm Adaptation, Dissemination and Integration, is a faculty advisor to the student organization Women@SCS, and is the principal investigator for the Google-funded CS4HS program for high school teachers. Her most recent creation and passion is Project Olympus, a high-tech innovation center that she directs at Carnegie Mellon. In 2009, the impact of this work was acknowledged by the Carnegie Science “Catalyst” award. Blum’s research, from her early work in model theory and differential fields (logic and algebra) to her more recent work in developing a theory of computation and complexity over the real numbers (mathematics and computer science), has focused on merging seemingly unrelated areas. She received her doctorate in mathematics from MIT the same year that Princeton University first allowed women to enter its graduate program. She then taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Mills College, where she founded the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (the first computer science department at a women’s college), served as its head or co-head for 13 years, and became the first holder of the Letts-Villard Chair. In 1988 she joined the Theory Group of the newly formed International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley and from 1992 to 1996 also served as deputy director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Blum spent 2 years, 1996-1998, spanning the historic handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, at CityU of Hong Kong as a visiting professor of mathematics and computer science, and she completed her book, Complexity and Real Computation, there with her colleagues. She has served the professional community in numerous capacities, including as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, as vice president of the American Mathematical Society, and as a member of numerous committees, including the MIT Visiting Committee for Mathematics and the ACM SIGACT Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1968.


Allan Collins is a professor emeritus of education and social policy at Northwestern University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence,

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
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the Cognitive Science Society, the American Educational Research Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served as a founding editor of the journal Cognitive Science and as first chair of the Cognitive Science Society. He has studied teaching and learning for more than 30 years and has written extensively on related topics. He is best known in psychology for his work on how people answer questions, in artificial intelligence for his work on reasoning and intelligent tutoring systems, and in education for his work on situated learning, inquiry teaching, design research, and cognitive apprenticeship. From 1991 to 1994 he was co-director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Center for Technology in Education.


Jan Cuny is a program officer at the National Science Foundation, heading the Broadening Participation in Computing program. Before coming to NSF in 2004, she was a faculty member in computer science at Purdue University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Oregon. Cuny has been involved for many years in efforts to increase the participation of women in computing research. She was a longtime member of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women (CRA-W), serving, among other activities, as a CRA-W co-chair, a mentor in its Distributed Mentoring program, and a lead on its Academic Career Mentoring Workshop, Grad Cohort, and Cohort for Associated Professors projects. She was also a member of the Advisory Board for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, the leadership team of the National Center for Women in Technology, the executive committee of the Coalition to Diversify Computing, and the ACM Education Council. She was program chair of the 2004 Grace Hopper Conference and the general chair of the 2006 conference. For her efforts with underserved populations, Cuny was a recipient of one of the 2006 ACM President’s Awards and the CRA’s 2007 A. Nico Habermann Award.


Joshua Danish’s research examines the role of external representations, such as drawings, maps, and computer simulations, in supporting cognition and learning. To study learning and development in classroom contexts, he employs cultural historical activity theory to articulate the influence of various mediators—the physical tools, rules, division of labor, and local community—on students’ activities as they learn and develop. Recent research has included the development and study of BeeSign, a computer simulation and accompanying curriculum that engages kindergarten and first-grade students in learning about the nectar-gathering behavior of honeybee hives; the Community Mapping Project, in which seventh-grade students learned basic statistics concepts using the MyWorld Geographical Information Systems mapping software to study

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
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local community issues; and the Semiotic Pivots and Activity Spaces for Elementary Science project, which takes advantage of sensing technologies and augmented reality tools to support first- and second-grade students in learning about physical science concepts.


Peter J. Denning is a Distinguished Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He chairs the Computer Science Department and directs the Cebrowski Institute, an interdisciplinary research center for innovation and information superiority. In the 1990s he was at George Mason University, where he was vice provost, associate dean, Computer Science Department chair, and founder of the Center for the New Engineer. In the 1980s, he was the founding director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at NASA-Ames and was co-founder of CSNET. He received a Ph.D. from MIT and a B.E.E. from Manhattan College. He was president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1980-1982. As chair of the ACM publications board in 1992-1998, he was project leader for the ACM digital library, now the ACM’s crown jewel. In 1967 he discovered the locality principle for referencing storage objects and used it to invent the influential working set model for program behavior; his original paper was named to the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame in 2005. He helped establish virtual memory as a permanent part of operating systems. He contributed important extensions to operational analysis, an approach to computer system performance prediction. He leads the Great Principles of Computing project, which is identifying the scientific theories of computing and applying them to curriculum innovation. He also co-leads an Innovation project that has identified and teaches the seven foundational practices of innovation. He has published seven books and 315 articles on computers, networks, and their operating systems. He is working on two more books, one on the foundational practices of innovation and the other on the great principles of computing. In 2002, he was named one of the top five best teachers at George Mason University and the best teacher in the School of Information Technology and Engineering. In 2003, he received one of Virginia’s 10 outstanding faculty awards. He holds three honorary degrees, three professional society fellowships, two best-paper awards, three distinguished service awards, the ACM Outstanding Contribution Award, the ACM SIGCSE Outstanding CS Educator Award, and the prestigious ACM Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. In 2007 ACM gave him a special award for 40 years of continuous volunteer service, and the NSF gave him one of two Distinguished Education Fellow awards.


Andrea diSessa is the Corey Professor of Education and a member of the National Academy of Education. His research centers on conceptual

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

and experiential knowledge in physics, and large-scale and deep implications of the use of computers in education (“new literacies”). His current work focuses on student ideas concerning patterns of behavior and control—aka dynamical systems theory. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1997-1998 and 2007-2008. He wrote the books Changing Minds: Computers, Learning and Literacy (2000) and Turtle Geometry: The Computer as a Medium for Exploring Mathematics (with H. Abelson, 1981), and he edited the volume Computers and Exploratory Learning (with C. Hoyles, R. Noss, and L. Edwards, 1995). He received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT, and an A.B., also in physics, from Princeton University.


Ian Foster has been appointed director of the Computation Institute. The Computation Institute was created by the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory in 1999 in recognition of the increasingly central role that computation plays in many disciplines of the sciences, medicine, and the humanities. Foster joined Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division in 1989 and has most recently served as associate division director and senior scientist. He is also the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests are in distributed and parallel computing, and computational science. He has published six books and more than 300 articles and technical reports in these areas. The Distributed Systems Laboratory that he heads at Argonne and Chicago pursues research in these areas and also development of the Globus toolkit, open-source Grid software used widely in business and science.


Edward Fox, after almost a year devoted to running the computer operations at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria, started teaching at Virginia Tech in 1983. Since 1987 he has worked on electronic theses and dissertations; he is executive director of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. His research, teaching, and service have focused on information, including searching, multimedia/hypertext, and digital libraries. Fox is starting his 103rd funded research grant; these have included working with many disciplines, including animal care, archeology, auto parts, chemistry, electronic publishing, fisheries, geography, gerontology, health, library and information science, physics, and sociology. Two current NSF grants supporting education include (1) “Living in the Knowledge Society (LIKES),” which promotes connecting computing with all other disciplines to ensure better preparation of college students, and (2) “Ensemble,” an NSDL pathways project that aims to help “K-gray” learning related to computing. Fox completed his B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1972

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
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at MIT. He also pursued graduate degrees in information retrieval at Cornell University from 1978 to 1982.


Christopher Hoffmann is well known for his work in geometric computing and geometric constraint solving. The simulations of the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and on the WTC-1 building generated worldwide media attention. His current projects include shape modeling for traumatic brain injury simulations, and the NSF-supported SECANT project teaching computational thinking to science majors.


Ken Kahn is a senior researcher at Oxford University and the London Knowledge Laboratory. His interest in programming languages for children was sparked while he was a Ph.D. student at the MIT AI Laboratory in the 1970s. While at the MIT AI Lab, he worked with Seymour Papert and others in the Logo Group. After 15 years as a researcher in programming languages and AI, he returned to children’s programming languages when he founded Animated Programs to develop ToonTalk. ToonTalk is an advanced programming language that looks like a video game. Children as young as 3 have successfully used it to create programs by training virtual robots to do actions such as giving birds messages to deliver, loading up trucks, and putting things in boxes. Kahn participated in two large-scale European projects in which children built computer games using ToonTalk. More recently he has been designing and building construction kits that enable students to build computer simulations by composing transparent modules.


Alan Kay, president of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions have been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering “for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers”; the Alan. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing”; and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation “for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization.” This work was done in the rich context of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) with many talented colleagues. He is an elected fellow of NAE and AAAS, as well as a member of RSA, ACM, and CHM. At Viewpoints Research Institute he and his colleagues continue to explore advanced systems and programming design by aiming

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
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for a “Moore’s law” advance in software creation of several orders of magnitude. Kay and Viewpoints are also deeply involved in the One Laptop Per Child initiative that seeks to create a Dynabook-like “$100 laptop” for every child in the world (especially in the third world). Kay has a B.A. in mathematics and biology, with minor concentrations in English and anthropology, from the University of Colorado, 1966. He also holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science (1968 and 1969, both with distinction) from the University of Utah.


Peter Lee is the head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. In this capacity, he oversees a computing organization whose research and education programs are consistently ranked among the top four in the nation. Prior to assuming his current position, Lee was the vice provost for research, providing administrative oversight and strategic guidance for Carnegie Mellon’s research activities, an enterprise that exceeds $400 million annually in sponsored research. Lee is an active researcher, educator, administrator, and servant to the academic community. For his research, he has received several awards, including the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, and election as an ACM Fellow. He is a member of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association (where he chairs the Government Affairs Committee), the Computing Community Consortium Council, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council, and the DARPA Information Science and Technology Board (of which he is the vice chair).


Richard Lipton is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His professional career has been primarily in academia. He held faculty appointments at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University before joining the faculty in the college of Computing at Georgia Tech. In addition to his computer science academic appointments, Lipton was the founding director of a computer science research laboratory for the Panasonic Corporation and is currently a chief consulting scientist at Telcordia (formerly known as Bellcore). Lipton’s research is focused primarily, but not exclusively, on theory. In a recent paper on the power of automata-based proof systems, he explored one way to address the NP = co-NP questions that considered the length of proofs of tautologies in various proof systems. In this joint work with A. Viglas he considered proof systems defined by appropriate classes of automata. Lipton found that in general, starting from a given class of automata, it was possible to define a corresponding proof system in a natural way. One new and more powerful proof system was based on the class of push-down automata. In this work, Lipton presented an exponential lower bound for oblivious read-once branching programs

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

that resulted in a proof system more powerful than oblivious regular resolution. He has also made important contributions in the areas of program testing, software engineering, and, most recently, DNA computing, combining molecular biology and computer science. It is generally acknowledged that Richard Lipton was one of the original pioneers in the field of DNA computing, along with Len Adleman.


Andrew McGettrick studied pure mathematics at the University of Glasgow. He was awarded a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, obtaining his Ph.D. in pure mathematics and, later, Diploma in computer science. Throughout his career he has been at the University of Strathclyde; he was promoted to professor in 1984 and served for many years as the head of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and of the British Computer Society, where he is also vice president, Qualifications and Standards. McGettrick is the chair of the ACM Education Board and Education Council, which provides curriculum guidelines for the key subdisciplines of computing. He also chairs the IET/BCS Competency Liaison Group. McGettrick holds the ACM SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service.


David Moursund is professor emeritus at the University of Oregon. He founded the International Society for Technology in Education and served as its executive officer for 19 years. He served 6 years as the first head of the Computer Science Department at the University of Oregon. He is the major or co-major professor of six Ph.D. students in mathematics and 70 in the College of Education. He is the author or co-author of more than 50 books and more than 200 articles. Currently, Moursund runs a nonprofit organization named Information Age Education. Its activities include a Wiki, a website, and a free twice-a-month newsletter. He received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


Roy Pea is Stanford University Professor of the Learning Sciences and director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. He has published widely on such topics as distributed cognition, learning, and education fostered by advanced technologies including scientific visualization, online communities, digital video collaboratories, and wireless handheld computers. Much of this work concerns aspects of computational thinking on the part of tool users. His current work is developing a new paradigm for everyday networked video interactions for learning and communications, and for how informal and formal learning can be better understood and connected, as co-principal investigator of the LIFE Center funded by the National Science Foundation as one of several large-scale national

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

Science of Learning Centers. He is co-editor of the 2007 volume Video Research in the Learning Sciences. He was co-author of the 2000 National Research Council volume How People Learn. Pea founded and served as the first director of the learning sciences doctoral programs at North-western University (1991) and Stanford University (2001). He is a fellow of the National Academy of Education, the Association for Psychological Science, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the American Educational Research Association. In 2004-2005, he was president of the International Society for the Learning Sciences.


Mitchel Resnick, a professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Laboratory, develops new technologies to engage people (especially children) in creative learning experiences. His research group developed the “programmable bricks” that were the basis for the LEGO MindStorms robotics construction kits. Resnick co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of after-school learning centers for youth from low-income communities. Resnick’s group recently developed a new programming language, called Scratch, which makes it easier for children to create their own interactive stories, games, and animations—and to share their creations on the Web. In the process, children learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. He worked for 5 years as a science and technology journalist for Business Week magazine, and he has consulted around the world on the uses of new technologies in education. Resnick earned a B.S. in physics from Princeton University, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT.


Eric Roberts is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and past chair of the ACM Education Board. His research focuses on computer science education, and is he the author of five textbooks that have been used widely throughout the world. From 1998 to 2005, Roberts was principal investigator for the Bermuda Project, which developed the computer science curriculum for Bermuda’s public secondary schools. Roberts has also been active in professional organizations dedicated to computer science education. From 2005 to 2007, he served as co-chair of the Education Board of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was for many years on the board of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). From 1998 to 2001, Roberts served as co-chair and principal editor for the ACM/IEEE CS Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula 2001, which published a detailed set of curriculum guidelines in December 2001. He also chaired the ACM Java Task Force from 2004 to 2006. In 2003, Roberts received the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education. Professor Roberts is a fellow of the ACM and the American Association for the

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

Advancement of Science. He received his A.B., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University.


Robert Sproull is a vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems. He founded and led the Massachusetts branch of Sun Microsystems Laboratories for more than 10 years and is currently serving as interim director of Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Since undergraduate days, he has been building hardware and software for computer graphics: clipping hardware, an early device-independent graphics package, page description languages, laser printing software, and window systems. He has also been involved in VLSI design, especially of asynchronous circuits and systems. Before joining Sun in 1990, he was a principal with Sutherland, Sproull & Associates, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a member of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He is a coauthor with William Newman of the early text Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics. He is an author of the recently published book Logical Effort, which deals with designing fast CMOS circuits. Sproull was elected in 1997 to the National Academy of Engineering for his work in computer graphics and digital printing. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Sproull received a B.A in physics from Harvard College in 1968, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, in 1970 and 1977.


Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic (formerly Matsushita) Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1964, he has worked on artificial intelligence research at MIT. He has also worked in computer languages and in computer architecture and VLSI design. Using the Digital Orrery he designed, Sussman has worked with Jack Wisdom to discover numerical evidence for chaotic motions in the outer planets. Sussman is coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the introductory computer science textbook used at MIT from 1985 through 2007. The textbook (Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, and Julie Sussman, 1985, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 1st edition, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press) has been translated into French, German, Polish, Chinese, and Japanese. Sussman has pioneered the use of computational descriptions to communicate methodological ideas in teaching subjects in electrical circuits and in signals and systems. Over the past decade Sussman and Wisdom have developed a subject that uses computational techniques to communicate a deeper understanding of advanced classical mechanics. Computational algorithms are used to express the methods used in the analysis of dynamical phenomena. Expressing the methods in a computer language forces them to be unambiguous and computationally

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

effective. Sussman and Wisdom, with Meinhard Mayer, have produced a textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, to capture these ideas. Sussman is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the New York Academy of Sciences. He received his S.B. and Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 and 1973, respectively.


Jeannette M. Wing is the President’s Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2004-2007, she was head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. Currently on leave from CMU, she is the assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Wing’s general research interests are in the areas of specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current focus is on the foundations of trustworthy computing, with specific interests in security and privacy. She published a viewpoint article in the March 2006 issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery entitled “Computational Thinking.”


Ursula Wolz is the College of New Jersey (TCNJ) Associate Professor of Computer Science and Interactive Multimedia. Wolz is also the principal investigator for the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing via Community Journalism for Middle Schoolers program, and she was the principal investigator of a Microsoft Research project on multidisciplinary game development. She is a recognized computer science educator with a broad range of publications who has taught students including disabled children, urban teachers, and elite undergraduates for more than 30 years. She is a co-founder of the Interactive Multimedia Program at TCNJ. She has a background in computational linguistics, with a Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia University, a master’s degree in computing in education from Columbia Teachers College, and a bachelor’s degree from MIT, where she was part of Seymour Papert’s Logo group at the very beginning of research on constructivist computing environments.


Wm. A. Wulf is a computer scientist notable for his work in programming languages and compilers. As of 2007, he is a professor at the University of Virginia. Wulf’s research has included computer architecture, computer

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

security, and hardware-software codesign. While at Carnegie Mellon University, he designed the BLISS programming language and developed a groundbreaking optimizing compiler for it. Wulf is a former president of the National Academy of Engineering and has previously chaired the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. He serves on the Council of the ACM and is a reviewing editor of Science. In 1994 he was inducted as a fellow of the ACM. In 1993, Wulf was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for professional leadership and for contributions to programming systems and computer architecture. He attended the University of Illinois, receiving a B.S. in engineering physics and an M.S. in electrical engineering, and then achieved a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Virginia.

B.3
STAFF

Herbert S. Lin, the study director, is chief scientist for the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, where he has been a study director for major projects on public policy and information technology. These studies include a 1996 study on national cryptography policy (Cryptography’s Role in Securing the Information Society), a 1991 study on the future of computer science (Computing the Future), a 1999 study of Defense Department systems for command, control, communications, computing, and intelligence (Realizing the Potential of C4I: Fundamental Challenges), a 2000 study on workforce issues in high technology (Building a Workforce for the Information Economy), a 2002 study on protecting kids from Internet pornography and sexual exploitation (Youth, Pornography, and the Internet), a 2004 study on aspects of the FBI’s information technology modernization program (A Review of the FBI’s Trilogy IT Modernization Program), a 2005 study on electronic voting (Asking the Right Questions About Electronic Voting), a 2005 study on computational biology (Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface of Computing and Biology), a 2007 study on privacy and information technology (Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age), a 2007 study on cybersecurity research (Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace), a 2009 study on health care information technology (Computational Technology for Effective Health Care), and a 2009 study on cyberattack (Technology, Policy, Law, and Ethics Regarding U.S. Acquisition and Use of Cyberattack Capabilities). Before his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT. Apart from his CSTB work, he is published in cognitive science, science education, biophysics, and arms control and defense policy. He also consults on K-12 math and science education.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×

Enita A. Williams is an associate program officer with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. She formerly served as a research associate for the Air Force Studies Board of the National Academies where she supported a number of projects, including a standing committee for the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and standing committee for the intelligence community (TIGER). Prior to her work at the National Academies, she served as a program assistant with the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program of AAAS, where she drafted the human enhancement workshop report. Ms. Williams graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in public policy with a focus on science and technology policy, and an M.A. in communications.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Short Biographies of Committee Members, Workshop Participants, and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12840.
×
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Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking presents a number of perspectives on the definition and applicability of computational thinking. For example, one idea expressed during the workshop is that computational thinking is a fundamental analytical skill that everyone can use to help solve problems, design systems, and understand human behavior, making it useful in a number of fields. Supporters of this viewpoint believe that computational thinking is comparable to the linguistic, mathematical and logical reasoning taught to all children.

Various efforts have been made to introduce K-12 students to the most basic and essential computational concepts and college curricula have tried to provide a basis for life-long learning of increasingly new and advanced computational concepts and technologies. At both ends of this spectrum, however, most efforts have not focused on fundamental concepts. The book discusses what some of those fundamental concepts might be.

Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking explores the idea that as the use of computational devices is becoming increasingly widespread, computational thinking skills should be promulgated more broadly. The book is an excellent resource for professionals in a wide range of fields including educators and scientists.

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