Initial Evaluation of Accessibility and Design Awareness with 3-D Immersive Environments

This paper describes an effort to build and evaluate the effectiveness of an immersive 3-D visualization system to help increase the awareness that students have when designing software that has a high level of accessibility for the differently abled. The demonstration utilizes an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment in which we simulated two types of colorblindness in a generally familiar environment. We report on the initial trial of this tool and the results of student surveys designed to assess impact on student perception and understanding and demonstrate that the use of virtual environments can give students greater empathy for individuals with visual impairments

Using a Lightboard to Enhance and Retrofit an Existing Course

IT 642 is a graduate information technology course that addresses a mix of technical and conceptual topics that has been delivered in both in-person and on-line formats. After several semesters of the course being offered in both on-line and in-person formats, the lack of human connection between instructor and students became a concern with the online versions. The need to bridge this gap became an opportunity to use Birdwell and Peshkin’s Lightboard design for video teaching. The experiences of the staff and faculty involved confirms the low barrier to entry they describe for using this technology and also demonstrate utility for the system beyond the need to present equation illustrations and scientific problems that were the original inspiration for the tool

Initial Evaluation of Accessibility and Design Awareness with 3-D Immersive Environments

This paper describes an effort to build and evaluate the effectiveness of an immersive 3-D visualization system to help increase the awareness that students have when designing software that has a high level of accessibility for the differently abled. The demonstration utilizes an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment in which we simulated two types of colorblindness in a generally familiar environment. We report on the initial trial of this tool and the results of student surveys designed to assess impact on student perception and understanding and demonstrate that the use of virtual environments can give students greater empathy for individuals with visual impairments

Approximate Bayesian Neural Operators: Uncertainty Quantification for Parametric PDEs

Neural operators are a type of deep architecture that learns to solve (i.e. learns the nonlinear solution operator of) partial differential equations (PDEs). The current state of the art for these models does not provide explicit uncertainty quantification. This is arguably even more of a problem for this kind of tasks than elsewhere in machine learning, because the dynamical systems typically described by PDEs often exhibit subtle, multiscale structure that makes errors hard to spot by humans. In this work, we first provide a mathematically detailed Bayesian formulation of the ''shallow'' (linear) version of neural operators in the formalism of Gaussian processes. We then extend this analytic treatment to general deep neural operators using approximate methods from Bayesian deep learning. We extend previous results on neural operators by providing them with uncertainty quantification. As a result, our approach is able to identify cases, and provide structured uncertainty estimates, where the neural operator fails to predict well

A Case Study Investigation of a Lightweight, Systematic Elicitation Approach for Enterprise Architecture Requirements

Enterprise architectures (EA) try to develop an alignment between an enterprise’s technology infrastructures with its business objectives and are often facilitated by an EA framework (EAF). EAFs provide the processes to create and govern an EA and have been used to understand both strategy and business architecture to synthesize a supporting information system infrastructure. However, existing EAFs do not provide lightweight, systematic process for eliciting the needed inputs to develop an EA. The contribution of this work is a lightweight, systematic approach for eliciting the enterprise vision, mission and objective requirements necessary as input to an EAF. We make two basic claims for this idea. First, the utilization of the Vision-Mission-Objectives-Strategy-Tactics (VMOST) queries provides a lightweight approach for eliciting required EA knowledge from stakeholders. Second, the use of the Grounded Theory Method, a qualitative analysis technique, provides a structured, systematic approach for analyzing and documenting elicited EA requirements. To illustrate these claims, we apply our lightweight, EA elicitation approach to a real world enterprise using the case study approach as a research methodology

So what are you here for? : self-efficacy and self-criticism as a route to coding maturity

This paper elaborates a set of experiential goals that define a key third course in Computer Science at a regional university. The assignments are sequenced and executed so that more than just conventional learning objectives are met, rather the target is promotion of student self-awareness as a practitioner. This approach is interleaved with and complements the knowledge objectives and delivery expected for the course, and helps present programming as both a profession and a craft

So what are you here for? : self-efficacy and self-criticism as a route to coding maturity

This paper elaborates a set of experiential goals that define a key third course in Computer Science at a regional university. The assignments are sequenced and executed so that more than just conventional learning objectives are met, rather the target is promotion of student self-awareness as a practitioner. This approach is interleaved with and complements the knowledge objectives and delivery expected for the course, and helps present programming as both a profession and a craft

How and Why More Secure Technologies Succeed in Legacy Markets: Lessons from the Success of SSH

Secure shell (SSH) can safely be called one of the rare successes in which a more secure technology has largely replaced a less secure but entrenched tool: telnet. We perform a market analysis to determine how and why SSH succeeded despite the existence of an entrenched legacy tool while similar technologies such as secure file transfer protocols have been far less successful. We show that network externalities, usually a first order effect, were not a significant factor impeding the adoption of SSH, and that SSH offered equivalent functionality and greater ease of use. We argue that these factors were the primary consideration in the willingness to change. Additionally, we argue that the openness of the standard, which facilitated the creation of numerous compatible implementations, was a key element in the economic decision made by system administrators