Faculty Lightning Talks

Thursday, October 4, 2012

The faculty lightning talks began at 2 PM on October 4, 2012. I had an interview with EMC Inc. at 3 PM. Needless to say I could not miss the faculty lightning talks because none other one of the great women in Computer Science here at Old Dominion University was speaking about her research. The lightning talks were 5 minutes talks about each speakers respective research. The speaker's goal was to unveil their research and ultimately recruit for researchers to assist with the research.

First was Ciera Jaspan from California State Tech at Pomona. He research was titled,"Automatic defect detection for software frameworks." She stated that she studied problems developers experienced with software used to code and debug programs. She stated that Collaboration Constraints can cause errors and that she developed a Specification System that is written locally on the framework API. It uses Static Analysis to help developers find the root cause of the error. She validated her solution by case study. She was also looking for creators of software framework to assist her with her research by participating in her case study and testing out her framework as well.

Another speaker was Helen Hu of Westminster College. Her research was entitled "Using POGIL to Help Students Become Better Problem Solvers." She spoke about a technique used to help students learn called Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning. She stated that as teacher the process has made an impact on the success of her students. It was designed with the intent to teach process skills. She said with this process students explore, are guided, then apply what they've learned. She stated the POGIL reduces student attrition and increases better attitude, mastered content and skill. She stated the process helps find out what the students are struggling with and how they stand among other students. Activities in POGIL help to teach students debugging and problem solving.

The last speaker, of which myself and Erinn were partial to was Dr. Weigle. I took Dr. Weigles CS312 Internet Concepts class and knew about the research she was conducting involving web archives. She spoke about her research and how her research has evolved.  She talked about her tool that would pull archives to one place and would therefore allow a person to see all of the pages that have been archived for a page and will also offer word clouds involving the page's archives.She made a pitch for researchers and that she was looking for them and how great a school ODU is. After she spoke I had to go to hightail it to my interview.