Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science

The Park City Math Institute (PCMI) 2016 Summer Undergraduate Faculty Program met for the purpose of composing guidelines for undergraduate programs in Data Science. The group consisted of 25 undergraduate faculty from a variety of institutions in the U.S., primarily from the disciplines of mathematics, statistics and computer science. These guidelines are meant to provide some structure for institutions planning for or revising a major in Data Science

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

Transportation Life Cycle Assessment Synthesis: Life Cycle Assessment Learning Module Series

The Life Cycle Assessment Learning Module Series is a set of narrated, self-advancing slideshows on various topics related to environmental life cycle assessment (LCA). This research project produced the first 27 of such modules, which are freely available for download on the CESTiCC website http://cem.uaf.edu/cesticc/publications/lca.aspx. Each module is roughly 15- 20 minutes in length and is intended for various uses such as course components, as the main lecture material in a dedicated LCA course, or for independent learning in support of research projects. The series is organized into four overall topical areas, each of which contain a group of overview modules and a group of detailed modules. The A and α groups cover the international standards that define LCA. The B and β groups focus on environmental impact categories. The G and γ groups identify software tools for LCA and provide some tutorials for their use. The T and τ groups introduce topics of interest in the field of transportation LCA. This includes overviews of how LCA is frequently applied in that sector, literature reviews, specific considerations, and software tutorials. Future modules in this category will feature methodological developments and case studies specific to the transportation sector

EcoCyc: fusing model organism databases with systems biology.

EcoCyc (http://EcoCyc.org) is a model organism database built on the genome sequence of Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655. Expert manual curation of the functions of individual E. coli gene products in EcoCyc has been based on information found in the experimental literature for E. coli K-12-derived strains. Updates to EcoCyc content continue to improve the comprehensive picture of E. coli biology. The utility of EcoCyc is enhanced by new tools available on the EcoCyc web site, and the development of EcoCyc as a teaching tool is increasing the impact of the knowledge collected in EcoCyc

Current advances in systems and integrative biology

Systems biology has gained a tremendous amount of interest in the last few years. This is partly due to the realization that traditional approaches focusing only on a few molecules at a time cannot describe the impact of aberrant or modulated molecular environments across a whole system. Furthermore, a hypothesis-driven study aims to prove or disprove its postulations, whereas a hypothesis-free systems approach can yield an unbiased and novel testable hypothesis as an end-result. This latter approach foregoes assumptions which predict how a biological system should react to an altered microenvironment within a cellular context, across a tissue or impacting on distant organs. Additionally, re-use of existing data by systematic data mining and re-stratification, one of the cornerstones of integrative systems biology, is also gaining attention. While tremendous efforts using a systems methodology have already yielded excellent results, it is apparent that a lack of suitable analytic tools and purpose-built databases poses a major bottleneck in applying a systematic workflow. This review addresses the current approaches used in systems analysis and obstacles often encountered in large-scale data analysis and integration which tend to go unnoticed, but have a direct impact on the final outcome of a systems approach. Its wide applicability, ranging from basic research, disease descriptors, pharmacological studies, to personalized medicine, makes this emerging approach well suited to address biological and medical questions where conventional methods are not ideal

UML Class Diagram or Entity Relationship Diagram : An Object Relational Impedance Mismatch

It is now nearly 30 years since Peter Chen’s watershed paper “The Entity-Relationship Model –towards a Unified View of Data”. [1] The entity relationship model and variations and extensions to ithave been taught in colleges and universities for many years. In his original paper Peter Chen looked at converting his new ER model to the then existing data structure diagrams for the Network model. In recent years there has been a tendency to use a Unified Modelling Language (UML) class diagram forconceptual modeling for relational databases, and several popular course text books use UMLnotation to some degree [2] [3]. However Object and Relational technology are based on different paradigms. In the paper we argue that the UML class diagram is more of a logical model (implementation specific). ER Diagrams on theother hand, are at a conceptual level of database design dealing with the main items and their relationships and not with implementation specific detail. UML focuses on OOAD (Object Oriented Analysis and Design) and is navigational and program dependent whereas the relational model is set based and exhibits data independence. The ER model provides a well-established set of mapping rules for mapping to a relational model. In this paper we look specifically at the areas which can cause problems for the novice databasedesigner due to this conceptual mismatch of two different paradigms. Firstly, transferring the mapping of a weak entity from an Entity Relationship model to UML and secondly the representation of structural constraints between objects. We look at the mixture of notations which students mistakenly use when modeling. This is often the result of different notations being used on different courses throughout their degree. Several of the popular text books at the moment use either a variation of ER,UML, or both for teaching database modeling. At the moment if a student picks up a text book they could be faced with either; one of the many ER variations, UML, UML and a variation of ER both covered separately, or UML and ER merged together. We regard this problem as a conceptual impedance mismatch. This problem is documented in [21] who have produced a catalogue of impedance mismatch problems between object-relational and relational paradigms. We regard the problems of using UML class diagrams for relational database design as a conceptual impedance mismatch as the Entity Relationship model does not have the structures in the model to deal with Object Oriented concepts Keywords: EERD, UML Class Diagram, Relational Database Design, Structural Constraints, relational and object database impedance mismatch. The ER model was originally put forward by Chen [1] and subsequently extensions have been added to add further semantics to the original model; mainly the concepts of specialisation, generalisation and aggregation. In this paper we refer to an Entity-Relationship model (ER) as the basic model and an extended or enhanced entity-relationship model (EER) as a model which includes the extra concepts. The ER and EER models are also often used to aid communication between the designer and the user at the requirements analysis stage. In this paper when we use the term “conceptual model” we mean a model that is not implementation specific.ISBN: 978-84-616-3847-5 3594Peer reviewe