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It takes a hive: community volunteers in honeybee research

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 16:51:20 +0000

It takes a hive: community volunteers in honeybee research Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/08/2021 - 10:51

Grace Wilson

Two local high school students, Charlotte Gorgemans and April Tong, have been volunteering regularly for over two years in the Peleg Lab, an intersection of the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Led by Orit Peleg, an assistant professor in computer science, the team seeks to understand the behavior of disordered living systems, including honeybees and fireflies, by merging tools from physics, biology, engineering and computer science.

The students' work with the lab has led them to submit projects to several science fairs to great success, and has benefited the lab's research through their involvement and curiosity.

A Collaborative Process

Golnar Gharooni Fard is a PhD student co-advised by Peleg and Elizabeth Bradley. She also serves as a mentor for community volunteers.

"She's a remarkable young scientist — driven, perceptive, smart, broadly trained and a deep thinker. Her character is reflected in her mentoring and dedication to training the next generation of scientists," Peleg said.

Fard sees the research process as a collaborative one between the researchers and the hives.

"There is a feedback loop between researchers at one end and then these living organisms at the other end. We really owe a lot of our lives and our food to these small creatures," she said.

This spirit of mutual give and take is also apparent in the lab's inclusion of community researchers.

Experimental Curiosity

Charlotte Gorgemans, who just graduated from Boulder High School, decided to connect with BioFrontiers two years ago. She was fascinated by the work they were doing and wanted to understand what a path to research at the undergraduate and graduate level would look like.

"I am very grateful for the guidance I received, as this mentorship from CU helped me find my path in computer science," Gorgemans said.

She started attending lab meetings regularly and asked questions she gathered from the lab's experiments.

Gorgemans is always curious and active, asking great questions and trying to learn more, Fard said. With Fard's mentorship, she began to focus on how food is shared in a colony.

Bees need to share food, but if the food is unhealthy, there is research that suggests the hive will take steps to reduce the number of other bees they interact with. Fard saw that Gorgemans was interested in how models could be used to explain the experimental data she was seeing.

For her experiment – titled Modeling and Analysis of the Impact of Unhealthy Food on the Honeybee Colony Health – Gorgemans won second place in the Boulder Valley School District's Regional Science Fair, in the behavioral sciences track, and received the Ralph Desch Memorial Technical Writing Award from the Colorado Science and Engineering Fair.

In the fall, she starts her computer science degree at CU Boulder.

Building Model Behavior

April Tong, now a Senior at Fairview High School, started her journey with BioFrontiers through CU Science Discovery, which pairs high school students with researchers.

"I thought it was so cool that, as the lab, we could watch the bees go around and then use computer science to analyze their paths, like what turn angles they use, which normally you wouldn't think of," Tong said.

When the program was over, she asked if there was any way she could continue volunteering, and Fard agreed to mentor her. Through her continued involvement with the lab, Tong became interested in the process of modeling itself and its applications across disciplines, including swarm robotics.

"She started learning the agent-based programming language that we actually use, which is not easy,” Fard said. “She started taking classes and ended up writing parts of our code for us."

Tong's experiment – titled Exploring the Clustering Function in the Western Honey Bee for Enhancing the Rate of Liquid Food Exchange and its Applications in Swarm Robotics – received third place in the BVSD Regional Science Fair and a special award from the Society for In Vitro Biology.

Fresh Perspectives

Fard believes in the power of community volunteers both for the lab and for the students.

"What I really like about working with high school students is that they look at the problem with a very fresh perspective. The moment they think of something to ask, that's what I want to hear," Fard said.

Because the students are not yet subject-area experts, they can think through a question without immediately jumping to the tools or existing research. This openness can lead to a fresh question outside of the world of academia.

Both Gorgemans and Tong were deeply grateful to Fard, Peleg and Bradley for their time and respect. They felt their involvement in the lab mattered and appreciated the skills the Peleg lab helped them acquire.

Fard also appreciates seeing those skills building.

"After working with these volunteers for two years, I can see the impacts of their involvement with the lab in the way they think. It's a small amount of time for the mentor, but I see a huge impact on the students."

Two high school students have both been volunteering at the Peleg lab regularly for over two years. Their work with the lab has led them to submit projects to several science fairs to great success, and benefit the lab's research through their involvement and curiosity.

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NSF CAREER award supports Danielle Szafir’s data-visualization research

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 22:29:22 +0000

NSF CAREER award supports Danielle Szafir’s data-visualization research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/12/2021 - 16:29

This prestigious grant provides $550,000 over five years to help Szafir fill a huge gap in data visualization research. The goal is to create automated solutions that rapidly estimate visualization effectiveness and help designers make better choices, minimizing misleading data representations and simplifying efficient data exploration.

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CU Boulder's Alexander Repenning is a world-leader in computational thinking

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 20:19:17 +0000

CU Boulder's Alexander Repenning is a world-leader in computational thinking Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/25/2021 - 13:19

Sarah Kuta

Alex Repenning

CU Boulder computer science Professor Alexander Repenning remembers one of the key moments that affirmed his choice to study computational thinking, a relatively new field of research into the mental steps and tools used in programming.

He was visiting a Denver middle school to encourage children to learn to code by designing and programming their own digital games. A teacher pulled Repenning aside and pointed to a boy in the classroom who she said had never participated or engaged in class; she had always assumed he just didn’t care about school.

But when the student started programming games, he got so excited that he began helping other kids. He even volunteered to create a presentation about their programming projects for the school’s principal. The student who usually couldn’t sit still was now spending hours happily concentrating, solving problems and doing complex math.

“All along, it was just finding the right angle for him to finally unleash his creative energy,” said Repenning, who’s also a member of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design at CU Boulder.

Now, Repenning’s hard work and dedication to computational thinking over the last decade is being recognized, along with the work of former CU Boulder computer science graduate students Kyuhan Koh and Ashok Basawapatna.

Repenning is the No. 1 most active contributor among thousands of researchers in computational thinking, according to a recent study published in ACM Transactions on Computing Education. Koh, now an assistant professor at California State University Stanislaus, is the No. 9 most active contributor, according to the analysis; Basawapatna, now an assistant professor at State University of New York at Old Westbury, is No. 12.

“Alex often uses the word gestalt, meaning the emergent form is perceived as greater than the sum of its parts. Gestalt perfectly describes a successful result of the computational thinking process, and the research resulting from our gratifying collaborations at CU,” said Basawapatna. “Having Alex, Kyu and I included as the top contributors to computational thinking further emphasizes the significant and pivotal role CU has played in computer science education.”

To determine the most active contributors in this burgeoning field, researchers at the University of Eastern Finland and Luleå University of Technology reviewed 3,779 authors and 1,874 documents—including journal articles, book chapters and conference papers—from 2006 to 2019.

The results of their bibliometric analysis confirmed CU Boulder’s world leadership in this realm over the last decade, taking three of the top 15 spots on the list of most active contributors.

“It wasn’t just a one-shot, short flash in the pan, but a sustained effort that continued and led to this result,” Repenning said of the study’s significance.

Though even researchers struggle to agree on a definition, computational thinking is the thought process behind using computers to solve problems. Computational thinking goes beyond computer programming and encompasses the ideas, questions, research and mental steps that a coder must first perform to design a computer-driven tool to help solve a problem.

Fundamentally, computational thinking is about problem-solving through thinking with computers, Repenning said.

“It’s a way to use the computer to essentially dig into things and try to understand why something is happening or what’s happening, instead of just speculating about a phenomenon,” Repenning said. “Essentially, it’s us—the human beings—creating a theory that we put into the computer, and the computer acts almost like a magnifying glass, showing us the consequences of our own thinking.”

Over the last decade or so, computational thinking has become fundamental to teaching children and young adults how to code.

“How do we turn people into computational thinkers?” Repenning said. “If the goal is to have a 21st-century workforce that can do computational thinking, clearly we have to start early in schools. But how do we get kids interested in this topic?”

When Repenning first began work in this field, he interviewed middle school students about coding. The common refrain? Programming is hard and boring.

Repenning’s research addresses these issues from two angles: The cognitive and affective barriers to programming. On the cognitive side, how can researchers and educators make programming easier to understand and master? And on the affective side, how can they make coding exciting and relevant?

Repenning and other researchers have been chipping away at both sides, developing novel, researched-based coding tools—called block-based programming—to get kids hooked, including game and simulation design activities that are both challenging and fun.

One of Repenning’s main goals with his work is to bring underserved students into the fold — girls, minority students and children who simply feel disconnected or bored in a more traditional classroom environment.

And though he’s won numerous prestigious awards, secured millions of dollars in grant funding and is now being recognized as the top researcher in his field, there’s still nothing quite as rewarding as helping students unlock their hidden potential through coding.

“That’s super exciting to me,” he said. “That’s all I need. Wow, we can really make a difference. We can get these kids, teachers and parents excited.”

Article by Sarah Kuta

Thumbnail image shows Co-author network of CT-related articles in Scopus database. (circle size indicates paper authorship, colors indicate distinct communities of researchers who frequently collaborate together) Image courtesy of Saqr, Mohammed & Ng, Kwok & Oyelere, Solomon & Tedre, Matti. (2021). People, Ideas, Milestones: A Scientometric Study of Computational Thinking. ACM Transactions on Computing Education. 10.1145/3445984.

Alexander Repenning is the No. 1 most active contributor among thousands of researchers in computational thinking, according to a recent study published in ACM Transactions on Computing Education.

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CS student's company takes first in New Venture Challenge IT track finals

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 20:33:16 +0000

CS student's company takes first in New Venture Challenge IT track finals Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/21/2019 - 14:33

The team is creating a revolutionary software platform that helps catering companies keep their events efficiently staffed. Nimb.ly CEO and co-founder Brandon Aguirre came up with the business idea when he was working for catering companies in New York City.

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CAREER Award will support development of ‘Earable Computers’

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 22:01:21 +0000

CAREER Award will support development of ‘Earable Computers’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/14/2019 - 16:01

Assistant Professor Tam Vu has received a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for his research on enabling a new type of computer, called Earable Computers.

These small devices are worn on, in or near a user's ears. With this award, Vu hopes to lay the scientific foundation for robust and effective ear-worn systems for long-term, unobtrusive monitoring of health conditions and for hands-free control of computers.

The ears are close to the source of many physiological signals, such as the brain, eyes and facial muscles. However, because there are a lot of simultaneous signals coming from the brain and body, it is challenging to design systems that are both small enough to be widely adopted and powerful enough to be accurate. Most existing head-based sensing and stimulation methods are cumbersome, intrusive and expensive – suitable only for stationary and short-term use in clinics or hospitals.

Therefore, placing small sensors in or behind the ears could make monitoring things like cognitive load, stress or sleep quality less intrusive, while also increasing user acceptance. In addition, the ear area serves as an ideal body part for applying non-invasive brain stimulations.

“This project aims to fill a gap by enabling a novel form of wearable sensing and actuating systems that can unobtrusively, continuously, comfortably and simultaneously sense a multitude of head-based physiological signals and actuate to stimulate the brain while remaining minimally visible to the public,” Vu said.

Vu and his team will use the CAREER Award to work on:

A modular computing platform to simultaneously sense head-based physiological signals and stimulate the brain from inside and around the ears.
Novel actuation models and methods to safely stimulate the brain.
Modeling tools and analytic techniques that provide high-resolution information of wearer’s states.
Development tools that enable the designers to rapidly develop, evaluate and deploy new earable systems.

The resulting computing platform, tools and insights from this work will accelerate research and innovation in this emerging area of wearable systems and pave the way for earable systems at an unprecedented scale, Vu said.

Vu directs the Mobile and Network System Laboratory at CU Boulder. He is also a faculty member in the CU School of Medicine and a fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science. In addition, he is actively pushing his research outcomes into practice through technology transfer activities and has co-founded two startups to commercialize them.

The preliminary work for this project was also supported by NSF, through a grant from Smart and Connected Health, as well as a Google Faculty Award in 2018.

With this award, Assistant Professor Tam Vu hopes to lay the scientific foundation for robust and effective ear-worn systems for long-term, unobtrusive monitoring of health conditions and for hands-free control of computers.

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Prominent AI conference features 9 papers & posters from CU Boulder

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 16:23:29 +0000

Prominent AI conference features 9 papers & posters from CU Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/20/2018 - 09:23

Master's student Tyler Scott gives a presentation on his team's work during NeurIPS.

The Department of Computer Science’s AI chops were on full display this month at NeurIPS, the year’s biggest conference on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Professor Mike Mozer serves as secretary on the conference’s board, while Associate Professor Claire Monteleoni was an area chair on the program committee. Monteleoni also serves on the senior advisory council of the Workshop for Women in Machine Learning, which takes place annually at NeurIPS.

In addition to helping plan the conference, which sold out its 8,000 seats within hours and had 150 industry sponsors, Mozer and Monteleoni’s teams also had several papers and posters accepted to the conference.

Monteleoni’s postdoctoral researcher, Sophie Giffard-Roisin, presented a poster on Deep Learning for Hurricane Track Forecasting from Aligned Spatio-temporal Climate Datasets in the spatiotemporal domain workshop. Mozer’s team – including CU Boulder students Karl Ridgeway and Tyler Scott – presented three papers:

Assistant Professor Rafael Frongillo and PhD student Jessie Finnochiaro also had a spotlight paper, Convex Elicitation of Continuous Properties, in the main NeurIPS conference, while visiting scholar Vincent Cohen-Addad presented on Clustering Redemption–Beyond the Impossibility of Kleinberg’s Axioms.

Bo Waggoner, who will join the department as an assistant professor in 2019, had three papers in the conference:

Stephen Becker of applied math also had a paper, Low-Rank Tucker Decomposition of Large Tensors Using TensorSketch, accepted to the conference.

Photo at right: Rafael Frongillo, Bo Waggoner and Jessie Finnochiaro of CU Boulder with Daniel Mutembesa of Makerere University in Uganda.

The Department of Computer Science’s AI chops were on full display this month at NeurIPS, the year’s biggest conference on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

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