computing

Developing a techno-ethical mindset

Rena Malai — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 14:35:12 +0000

Developing a techno-ethical mindset Rena Malai Wed, 08/24/2022 - 10:35

In This Story

When it comes to technology, ethics can be complicated. With the rapid pace and evolution of digital technology, it can be tricky to understand how ethics plays a role, let alone stay on top of challenges, protocol, and procedures.

That’s why Ashish Hingle, PhD student and graduate researcher at George Mason, is helping students navigate the ethics terrain. Through an NSF grant titled Situated Algorithmic Thinking: Preparing the Future Computing Workforce for Ethical Decision-Making through Interactive Case Studies, Hingle will work alongside School of Computing’s Aditya Johri and Huzefa Rangwala, and Alexander Monea in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Their work will help technology-focused students think through ethical dilemmas, and provide the tools to imagine how ethics plays a role at school and work.

“To develop an ethical mindset, it is critical that students in IT, computing, and engineering learn to examine a problem, design, or a possible solution from different viewpoints and perspectives,” says Johri. “They should be able to take a morally sound and humanistic appraisal of the impact they have in the world through the technology they design, build, and deploy.”

Through role-play, case studies, and other activities Hingle hopes students will be engaged in technology ethics in a more creative and hands- on way.

“We want students to develop situational learning skills, and make the learning process more engaging, rather than encouraging the notion that technology ethics is closely associated with catastrophic or inequality driven events,” says Hingle. “Our job is to help students feel ready and to think of their own course of action to any ethical challenge they face with the technology they use or create.”

According to Hingle, sometimes the immediate solution is to solve ethical issues within technology, by applying more technology. This reliance on technology was a central theme of the Summer Institute of Technology Ethics at Santa Clara University, a research residency program where Hingle was selected as a research scholar. He says by giving students the tools to imagine their own course of action, it could be a more productive solution.

“We want ethics learning in technology to be more of an inclusive, fair, and transparent conversation, rather than students getting a history lesson of what went wrong in the past,” says Hingle. “Our students have been very receptive to exploring what technology ethics looks like in 2022, and are especially engaged when they realize how ubiquitous and pervasive technology can be. We want to continue to find ways to make technology ethics more approachable and adaptable.”

He says while digital technology is a relatively new concept, technology ethics have been discussed for decades. In our current landscape, they are often an afterthought. But by starting students on the path to an ethical mindset as it applies to technology, it could help prevent issues before they start.

“I’m excited about the work we do,” says Hingle. “When it comes to technology ethics, it makes sense for people to be at the center of our choices, not the tech.”

This work is partly supported by U.S. NSF Award #1937950. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.

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Students get a professional boost with Break Through Tech’s Guild program

Rena Malai — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 15:13:01 +0000

Students get a professional boost with Break Through Tech’s Guild program Rena Malai Wed, 07/20/2022 - 11:13

In This Story

Shvetha Soundararajan

Team 6 present their app project during the last day of Guild.

The 2022 Break Through Tech DC summer Guild program at George Mason took place in June. A hybrid approach allowed students to participate remotely, with the last day commencing with an in-person gathering at Dewberry Hall.

About 40 students participated in the Guild at Mason, which included interactive activities, presentations, and team projects. With networking opportunities mixed in, students from underrepresented backgrounds had a chance to do a deeper dive into their computing education and career paths through Guild.

According to Shvetha Soundararajan, Break Through Tech DC site lead at George Mason, the Guild program is intended to encourage women and students from underrepresented groups to explore computing in a meaningful way.

“Through the Guild, we showcase that computing is for all, it is inclusive and accessible, and that there are many more aspects to building software than just coding,” she says.

Guild participants worked in teams to develop an app, and present their work at the end of the week. First place went to team 2, and their app Sign With Me, which teaches preschoolers the alphabet in sign language.

Second place went to team 3 for the app Biome World, that helps educate elementary school students about biomes. Team 6 received third place for their app APventures, an AP level study app designed to feel like an adventure game.

“The 2022 Guild participants worked together in teams to create innovative and unique EdTech apps that are valuable,” says Soundararajan. “They worked very hard to create productivity, study, and collaboration apps for students of different age groups.”

Mason junior Helen Chen says Guild opened up the doors for her to learn coding, and even get in some public speaking practice.

“I was so happy to learn JavaScript and create something with code for the first time,” says Chen. “Presenting our project to the professors and industry leaders was truly an unforgettable experience and I think it might have cured my fear of public speaking a little bit.”

Freshman Anabela Shearer says Guild was a great experience and it helped her feel more confident about pursuing a computing career.

“I was able to meet Mason students who are also pursuing a career in computer science,” says Shearer. “It helped me feel confident in my knowledge of coding. I have never coded before prior to Guild but it was easy for me to catch up with the others who have.”

Mentors from major corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton and Microsoft also attended Guild. According to Gerald Irish, senior software engineer at Microsoft, it’s important to contribute towards building a more inclusive industry for the next group of IT professionals.

“Sometimes we take for granted how we navigated the challenges we faced while moving through the industry, so sharing our experiences can help students from underrepresented groups feel more comfortable navigating those challenges for themselves,” says Irish. “Going forward I hope the mentees we interacted with will use us as a resource for guidance, connections, or just as a sounding board to help them along the way.”

The Break Through Tech Guild program is open to all students with a focus on women and nonbinary individuals who are first and second year students. Students can be enrolled in any major or minor. No prior experience is required to apply for Guild.

“The Guild and other BTT programs would not be possible without the support of our industry partners,” says Soundararajan. “For a second consecutive year, we received overwhelming support from our industry partners and industry mentors from Booz Allen Hamilton, Microsoft, Appian, and Accenture.”

About Break Through Tech 

Break Through Tech works at the intersection of academia and industry to propel more women and underrepresented communities into technology degrees and careers. BTT DC is the first cross-institutional collaboration, partnering with Mason and the University of Maryland. 

Topics

Tech Talent Investment Pipeline (TTIP)

Mason to participate in new five-year $20 million grant

Martha Bushong — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 10:55:51 +0000

Mason to participate in new five-year $20 million grant Martha Bushong Thu, 07/29/2021 - 06:55

The proliferation of technology, in particular emerging platforms and services that deploy sensors and artificial intelligence (AI), creates opportunities for improving society.

The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture announced a five-year, $20 million grant to establish an AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture (AIIRA – “eye-rah”) based at Iowa State University. The institute is one of 11 new National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes that NSF has established in 2021 with a total investment of $220 million. ��AV professor Aditya Johri will serve as a member of the institute’s education and outreach team.

AIIRA aims to transform agriculture by creating a new AI-driven framework for modeling plants at various agronomically relevant scales. The researchers will accomplish this by introducing AI-driven digital twins that fuse diverse data with siloed domain knowledge. They will deploy these twins across agricultural applications that directly impact the USDA Science Blueprint for crop improvement and production.

In his role on the team, Johri will work with an interdisciplinary cross-institutional team on the education, workforce development, and outreach components of the project. He will assist with the design of learning activities and their evaluation.

The collaboration between computer scientists, electrical and mechanical engineers, agriculture specialists, and computing and engineering education experts provides a unique multidisciplinary opportunity, says Johri. “This project addresses the Broadening Participation emphasis within computing education and will study how we can convey the complexities of what computing makes possible to more people,” he says.

Johri conducts research on technology workforce development. He says, “If we want to reap the benefits of AI equitably, we have to understand the actual needs of users and then translate research into practices that work for them. We accelerate this process by educating the end-user about how AI might serve their needs. And throughout this process, we have to ensure that AI-related developments are being designed and implemented ethically.”

To facilitate broader acceptance of this project’s technical work, the team will leverage a robust training framework to power education and workforce development through formal and informal educational activities.

“Our approach starts from recruitment practices through onboarding and training practices, and extends to our communication and teamwork,” says Johri. “In conjunction with the AIIRA learning community, we will embed inclusive excellence into our mentoring and advising practices.”

“I am delighted to announce the establishment of new NSF National AI Research Institutes as we look to expand into all 50 states,” says National Science Foundation director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “These institutes are hubs for academia, industry, and government to accelerate discovery and innovation in AI. Inspiring talent and ideas everywhere in this important area will lead to new capabilities that improve our lives from medicine to entertainment to transportation and cybersecurity and position us in the vanguard of competitiveness and prosperity.”

The new institutes join seven previously announced in August 2020 that are part of a $140 million federal effort to develop hubs for artificial intelligence research that address national needs.

“AIIRA is bringing together scientists and farmers, industry and government to adopt these technologies and encourage their adoption to more effectively transform agriculture to meet the needs of our growing and the increasingly climate-challenged planet,” project leaders wrote in a summary.

Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Professor in Engineering at Iowa State, will lead the institute. The institute also includes collaborators from the tech and agriculture industries, governments, commodity groups, and other organizations.

Partner expertise

Iowa State University – plant sciences, artificial intelligence, social sciences, business

Carnegie Mellon University – robotics, artificial intelligence

New York University Tandon School of Engineering– artificial intelligence

University of Arizona – cyberinfrastructure

University of Nebraska-Lincoln – agricultural research, diverse growing zones

��AV – education, workforce development, and outreach

University of Missouri – social sciences, economics

Iowa Soybean Association – outreach

This institute is funded by USDA-NIFA.

Learn more about the NSF AI Research Institutes by visiting nsf.gov.

For more on NSF's investments in AI, see the NSF Science Matters article, “Expanding the geography of innovation: NSF AI Research Institutes 2021.”

Topics

Artifical Intelligence

computing

First Mason Guild kicks off July 26

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 15:23:12 +0000

First Mason Guild kicks off July 26 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/14/2021 - 11:23

In This Story

Shvetha Soundararajan

Shahnaz Kamberi

Huzefa Rangwala

This year's Break Through Tech at Mason Guild program will be held virtually. Students will have the opportunity to explore computing from faculty and industry mentors throughout the week.

On July 26, the first-ever Break Through Tech at Mason Guild program kicks off with a group of more than 60 women from Mason and Northern Virginia Community College who want to learn more about technology and computing.

Mason’s Guild program, created from the grant and partnership with Break Through Tech DC, is a paid opportunity for female undergraduate students to learn about the field of computing risk-free. “The Guild is a five-day program intended to encourage women to explore computing in a meaningful way,” says Shvetha Soundararajan, Break Through Tech DC co-site lead at Mason and assistant professor of computer science.

For five days, Soundararajan, Associate Professor Shahnaz Kamberi, and computing teaching assistants will immerse participants in the basics of computing and give them the chance to use their newly learned skills to design, create, and test their own computing project.

Their projects will focus on innovations in educational technology. “With the pandemic over this past year, there have been so many challenges with the way we teach and learn, and that is something they have all experienced,” says Soundararajan. “And this will give them the chance to look at those problems they’ve faced and create something that will help people.”

Throughout the week, industry mentors from companies like Microsoft, MasterCard, Verizon, and Booz Allen will also help students define the scope of their projects and show students the numerous pathways accessible to them in computing.

“We want to dispel a lot of the myths about computing. Some think it is a ‘masculine’ subject, some think computing is just about coding, but we want to show them the field is accessible to everyone, and there are many more components to computing than coding,” says Kamberi.

The Guild also focuses on building a community and making meaningful connections with fellow women in computing, which is sometimes challenging. So often, women in technology and computing can struggle to find role models and people like themselves, says Soundararajan, but the Guild’s goal is to give women a network that further inspires them in computing.

“The Guild program would not have been possible without the support of our industry partners, and there was an overwhelming response from DC area tech companies to participate in this first offering. It is exciting to note that Guild provides students the opportunity to see computing making an impact in our society, and in conjunction with other Break Through Tech programs, propels them on a successful academic and career trajectory,” says Huzefa Rangwala, professor of computer science and Break Through Tech DC site lead.

On the last day of the Guild, students will present their creations to Mason faculty, teaching assistants, and industry mentors. “This may be their first project in computing, and we hope that the experience and the support they get will push them to explore computing degrees,” says Kamberi.

Guild is only one opportunity offered by Break Through Tech DC to propel more women and people who identify as women into the field of computing. Learn more about Mason’s partnership with the University of Maryland, College Park, to diversify the tech ecosystem through Break Through Tech DC.

Topics

information sciences and technology

Mason's Women in Tech Spotlight: Kelly Glebus

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 19:24:53 +0000

Mason's Women in Tech Spotlight: Kelly Glebus Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/15/2021 - 15:24

Senior computer science (CS) major, Honors College student, and aspiring software engineer Kelly Glebus was surprised by how few women were among her peers. Once Glebus reached higher-level CS classes, she says it wasn’t uncommon for her to be one of four or five women in a class of 30 to 40 students.

Kelly Glebus.

When she was a junior in high school, she enrolled in a pre-AP computer programming class as an elective. While the class wasn’t her first choice, she quickly developed an interest in programming and learned that she was adept at problem-solving.

“On the first day and my teacher got out these huge pieces of butcher paper and had us create these “thread” conversations on them,” says Glebus. “We were answering questions like ‘What jobs are we going to lose to computer automation?’, ‘What are ways that computers make our lives easier,’ and things like that. I thought that it was a very interesting way to begin a class, so I stayed in it.”

Her interest in programming did not go unnoticed by her teacher. Glebus says “he encouraged me to continue (and gave me all the extra work I asked for), and I decided that I was going to college for computer science. He really changed my life, and I’m very grateful for him. We’re still in touch today!”

Since then, Glebus has developed into a young professional. She interned at Forward Integration Technologies as a junior software developer, where she worked with Angular and Python to do full-stack web app development. She is currently a cybersecurity intern at Colvin Run Networks doing user interface design amongst other projects.

Some more notable achievements Glebus is proud of was being “a part of the National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates held at ��AV in 2018, where I did some research with wearable technologies. I’m also currently a class facilitator for CS395: Student-Initiated Class Introduction into the Internet of Things.”

Given her passion for the field, Glebus encourages other women to try computing. She praised ��AV's Department of Computer Science for being inclusive towards all students.

“I think a lot of super qualified women feel intimidated either by the subject or even by the male-dominated environment,” says Glebus. “Like I said before, computer science is hard, there are classes that you couldn’t pay me to retake, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I wish more women would take the leap and try it; I think they’d find that they’re really good at it. Like I did.”

On March 3, Mason announced a new initiative, Break Through Tech, that aims to propel more students who identify as women and non-binary into tech education—and ultimately tech careers—through curriculum innovation, career access, and community building. The goal of the grant is to increase the number of these students graduating with a tech degree at Mason by 12.5 percent by 2026.

For more information about Break Through Tech at Mason, visit this site.

Topics

Break Through Tech

computing

software development

Computer science; computing; School of Computing

Computer science expert using natural language processing to improve equality in language technologies

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 14:24:56 +0000

Computer science expert using natural language processing to improve equality in language technologies Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/17/2021 - 09:24

Computer science researcher Antonis Anastasopoulos uses his love for computer science, language, and linguistics to improve equality in language technologies.

When people ask Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant a question, they expect the programs to understand them, but that is not always the case, he says.

Antonis Anastaspopoulos, photo provided.

A person’s language, accent, dialect, and even gender can have an impact, preventing the system from interpreting them correctly, says Anastasopoulos, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and an expert in natural language processing, which is how computers attempt to process and understand human languages.

“The systems don’t work equally well for everyone,” says Anastasopoulos, who speaks Greek (his native language), English, German, Swedish, Italian, and some Spanish.

He is one of several co-principal investigators who received a new National Science Foundation-Amazon grant for their research, “Quantifying and Mitigating Disparities in Language Technologies.”

In the fall, Anastasopoulos also won a Google 2020 Award for Inclusion Research for a project on how accent and dialect impact language technologies.

For the NSF grant, he and experts from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington are studying areas where there is bias in language technologies and measuring the discrepancies. Then they will attempt to mitigate the inequalities.

“We want to measure the extent to which the diversity of language affects the utility that speakers get from language technologies,” Anastasopoulos says. “We will focus on automatic translation and speech recognition since they are perhaps the most commonly used language technologies throughout the world.”

His research will apply to all languages. It’s important to look deeply into languages for differences because languages are flexible and diverse, he says. “There are many regional variations that are different from the standard.”

He also recently received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to build optical character recognition tools to convert scanned images of text to a machine-readable format for endangered languages.

“We are working on training machine-learning models to process images and texts in the books and documents of indigenous languages from central and South America so that these works can be made accessible to everyone,” he says. “We are building technologies to study those languages computationally.”

Anastasopoulos is also part of a prestigious group of machine-translation researchers, including experts from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, who are creating automatic tools that translate COVID-19-related content for communities where people don’t speak the languages most often used by large health organizations, including the World Health Organization.

“We are working closely with Translators without Borders. So far, we have produced terminologies for more than 200 languages and a large dataset for 35 languages, some of them extremely under-served by the current solution.”

Topics

computer science

computing

natural language processing

The need for speed: Mason makes huge strides in cyberinfrastructure

Colleen Rich — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 09:00:49 +0000

The need for speed: Mason makes huge strides in cyberinfrastructure Colleen Rich Thu, 09/24/2020 - 05:00

A new computing system will support ��AV’s expanding research infrastructure as part of its investment in cyberinfrastructure improvements, which includes upgrading facilities and hardware and software to support the educational and research missions of the university

The new computing system, named Hopper in homage to computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper, will support research and education projects focused on advancing transportation and infrastructure systems, geography and geoinformation sciences, astrophysics, social media analytics to support disaster informatics, computational fluid dynamics, materials science, natural hazards research, data mining, computer vision, automated vehicles, bioinformatics, neuroscience and economics.

Funding for this intiative comes from a variety of sources and involved collaboration across the university, led by a steering committee with membership from the Office of Research, Information Technology Services, and the colleges.

“This level of funding this quickly is without precedent,” said Aurali Dade, Mason’s interim vice president for research. “We expect enormous overhauls with these cyberinfrastructure investments as they will support high-impact research and education across all three of Mason’s multidisciplinary research institutes—Institute for Biohealth Innovation, Institute for a Sustainable Earth, Institute for Digital Innovation—and throughout the schools and colleges in numerous departments and academic programs.”

Four funding sources contributed to the initiative: $9.1 million from the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Tech Talent Investment Program, which will enable numerous upgrades and investments; $1.1 million from a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation (NSF MRI) Program grant; $4 million from Virginia’s Equipment Trust Fund (ETF); and $2.5 million from an NSF Binding Research Infrastructures for the Deployment of Global Experimental Services BRIDGES award.

The resources developed with the BRIDGES award will serve the Mason community and researchers from around the world. Each source has a unique role to play to amplify Mason’s already strong computational research portfolio. The TTIP money was crucial, but as Dade noted, the additional $1.1 million from the diverse NSF MRI grant team was a major win for Mason.

Hopper will support both traditional and nontraditional high-performance computing users. This new system will augment Mason’s current cluster, ARGO, to better serve the computational research growth at Mason.

The Proposal Team

Four research professors—Elise Miller-Hooks, Maria Emelianenko, Shobita Satyapal, and Yue Cheng—worked with Jayshree Sarma, director of research computing and co-investigator on the grant, to obtain the NSF MRI funding.

The professors see great potential for the new system in relation to their research, which includes analyzing the relationships between black holes and their home galaxies in space and studying massive transportation networks in the world’s shipping lanes.

“Hopper’s cutting-edge computational resources will allow us to test exact solution methods on real-world-size problems,” Miller-Hooks said.

Miller-Hooks is building high-fidelity, mathematical tools to study world maritime trade flows, and working with minute-by-minute data from the movement of thousands of cargo vessels around the globe.

“These tools are allowing us to study how these flows changed as the world’s supply chains shut down as COVID-19 struck.”

Maria Emelianenko, co-principal investigator and professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, said her research team is pushing the boundaries of computational mathematics

“The nature of my team’s work is highly interdisciplinary and the size of the problems and datasets often precludes the codes from running on a standard machine,” Emelianenko said. “Hopper will enable us to scale up our efforts and realize some long-standing ideas we had to put on hold.”

Those ideas include simulating the behavior of polycrystalline materials that undergo coarsening or mechanical deformations, running optimization problems related to the ideal placement of rain gauges across various regions of the world, and analyzing adapting behavior in complex biological networks.

Shobita Satyapal, co-principal investigator and professor of Department of Physics and Astronomy, studies the mysteries of black holes, including understanding the connection between supermassive black holes and the host galaxies where they reside.

Research from the fourth co-principal investigator, Yue Cheng, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, includes distributed systems, storage systems, container-based virtualization, serverless/cloud computing, and the internet of things.

The new high-performance computing initiative will be made available to all Mason researchers, faculty and students who need this level of support for their work.

The Office of Research is also gathering data from the Mason research community to help guide investment of the TTIP funds.

“We’re being very strategic about the investment of these funds” Dade said. “From a survey of faculty, we will develop a strategic plan for investing these resources that will be shared broadly.”

For more information, contact orcadmin@gmu.edu.

Topics

cyber infrastructure

Tech Talent Investment Program (TTIP)

National Science Foundation

Gunston

computing

Research