Valerie Barr

• PhD, Computer Science, Rutgers University
• Professor at Bard College

To improve diversity and BPC analysis and assessment, institutions should examine cohort-based data, report intersectional data as a norm, and consider university demographic context.

Expanding students' understanding of computing's potential.

While coursework provides undergraduate data science students with some relevant analytic skills, many are not given the rich experiences with data and computing they need to be successful in the workplace. Additionally, students often have limited exposure to team-based data science and the principles and tools of collaboration that are encountere...

While coursework introduces undergraduate data science students to some relevant analytic skills, many are not given the myriad experiences with data and computing they need to be successful in the workplace. Additionally, students often have little background with team-based data science and the principles and tools of collaboration that are encou...

We strongly believe that real-world training and experiences cannot be reserved just for graduate students. The same primary argument made by Kolaczyk et al. (2021)—that graduate students need a richer understanding of the interplay of theory and practice than we have historically offered—also applies to undergraduate students. Not including these...

The biotic resistance hypothesis predicts that diverse native communities are more resistant to invasion. However, past studies vary in their support for this hypothesis due to an apparent contradiction between experimental studies, which support biotic resistance, and observational studies, which find that native and non‐native species richness ar...

Computing Education in the 21st century will have to better account for the many different educational areas and approaches that come under that term. It will also have to evolve to better ensure that those who develop technology applications in and for the developing world help to improve conditions, rather than increase inequities.

Standard analysis of computer science degree data focuses on the percentage of degrees earned by women and men respectively, or on the percentage of degrees earned by racial and ethnic minorities respectively. This analysis is inaccurate because the groups involved are not the same size and their sizes have changed over time. Longitudinal compariso...

Computer science curricula has been well defined for many years through the publication of the Computer Science Curricula reports developed jointly by the two major professional societies, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society. These documents define computer science curricula by providing knowledge areas and c...

A multi-year effort, led by the Union College computer science (CS) department, in collaboration with two dozen non-CS faculty, resulted in the infusion of a computational component in many non-CS courses and the development of a number of new intermediate-level CS courses. Many of these changes and additions have persisted well beyond the end of t...

In this special session, we share a variety of ways in which CS 1 courses can broaden their focus beyond programming. These courses strive to effectively introduce the fundamental ideas of computer science, and the importance of computing in broader contexts, without sacrificing programming rigor.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Valerie Barr gets high schoolers thinking about CS, while Mark...

This experiential paper focuses on CodeLab, a tool for improving student learning in CS1. We introduce the basic features of CodeLab, both from the student and instructor side, discuss the use of CodeLab at two different types of institutions, and compare CodeLab to other interactive programming tutor products (CodingBat, Problets, zyBooks, and Pyt...

This paper describes a 10-year multi-pronged project to introduce students campus-wide to computing, increase enrollments in the computer science department, and change the demographics of students in the introductory computer science courses. The Union College Computer Science (CS) department has changed curricula at the introductory and intermedi...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Valerie Barr considers the continuing attraction of the woman...

Panel debate and short talks to conclude the symposium.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Valerie Barr suggests how men can better promote women in comp...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Valerie Barr considers how attitude can impact teacher effecti...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Valerie Barr considers outcomes from the Grace Hopper Celebrat...

This paper is a response to the interview between Maria Klawe and Satya Nadella at the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in a context of the history of the conference since 1994. Maria Klawe is president of Harvey Mudd College and member of the Microsoft board of directors. Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft.

This session will provide information about the current status of Federal budget as it impacts NSF and the computing community. Representatives from both Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorates will provide the most up-to-date information about available funding opportunities. It...

This workshop focuses on the NSF proposal review process. Via close examination of the review process, participants gain an understanding of how to write good reviews and how to improve their own proposal writing. The workshop covers the following topic areas: the proposal review process from submission of a proposal to award or decline; elements o...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Mark Guzdial ponders a new set of research questions, while Va...

The Computing at School (CAS) Working Group aims to promote the teaching of computer science at school. CAS was born out of our excitement with our discipline, combined with a serious concern that many students are being "turned off" computing by a combination ...

In his SIGCSE 2007 keynote, Grady Booch exhorted us to share the "passion, beauty, joy and awe" (PBJA) of computing. This led to sessions that have provided a forum for sharing: What we've done: Highlighting successful PBJA initiatives the presenters have undertaken or seen and wish to trumpet; What we should do (curriculum): Pointing out where our...

This paper describes an approach to introductory CS that is based on numerous theme-based introductory courses, with resulting improvements in overall enrollments and gender diversity.

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm Jeannette M. Wing discusses her PCAST presentation about the i...

An abstract is not available.

The process of increasing student exposure to computational thinking in K-12 is complex, requiring systemic change, teacher engagement, and development of signifi cant resources. Collaboration with the computer science education community is vital to this effort.

The number of undergraduates entering computer science has declined in recent years. This is paralleled by a drop in the number of high school students taking the CS AP exam and the number of high schools offering computer science courses. The declines come at a time when career opportunities in CS continue to grow and computer science graduates ar...

With the declining interest among incoming college students and the nationwide drop in computer science (CS) enrollments ([2, 1]), many CS departments would like to broaden participation in computing by reaching out to other departments on their campuses. One tactic is to encourage interdisciplinary work that has computing as a significant componen...

The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications , we'll publish excerpts from selected posts. twitter Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM Guest blogger Valerie Barr writes about highlights of the ninth Grace Hopper Celebration of Women...

In this panel we present a number of perspectives on the creation of a campus wide computation initiative. This work is begin carried out under an NSF CPATH grant to Union and Lafayette Colleges. The goal of the grant is to increase student involvement in computing by offering a computational science curriculum, directed toward students in the scie...

One approach to verification and validation of language processing systems includes the ver-ification of system resources. In general, the grammar is a key resource in such systems. In this paper we discuss verification of lexicalized tree adjoining grammars (LTAGs) (Joshi and Schabes, 1997) as one instance of a system re-source, and as one phase o...

If Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are viewed as intelligent systems then we should be able to make use of verification and validation (V&V) approaches and methods that have been developed in the intelligent systems community.

Researchers and practitioners in the field of expert systems all generally agree that to be useful, any fielded intelligent system must be adequately verified and validated. But what does this mean in concrete terms? What exactly is verification? What exactly is validation? How are they different? Many authors have attempted to define these terms a...

An abstract is not available.

. AAAI93 Workshop on Verification and Validation of Expert Systems. 1995 Barr, Valerie. Rule-Based Systems Testing Using Rule-Base Coverage Measures. Verification and Validation Workshop at IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications. 1995 Barr, Valerie. Rule-Base Coverage Measures Applied to Testing Rule-Bases with Uncertainty. IJCAI-9...

Often a rule-based system is tested by checking its performance on a number of test cases with known solutions, modifying the system until it gives the correct results for all or a sufficiently high proportion of the test cases. However, the performance on the test cases may not accurately predict performance of the system in actual use. We present...

In this paper we discuss ways in which coverage analysis, obtained during execution of test cases over a rule-base, can be used to highlight problems in both the test suite and the rule-base, thereby pointing to areas in which we cannot guarantee or predict the system's performance. In particular, we present a series of heuristics which use coverag...

Often a rule-based system is tested by checking its performance on a number of test cases with known solutions, modifying the system until it gives the correct results for all or a sufficiently high proportion of the test cases. This method cannot guarantee that the rule-base has been adequately or completely covered during the testing process. We...

this paper we present a tool, TRUBAC (Testing with RUle-BAse Coverage), which implements a new approach to verification and validation of rule-based expert systems. An expert system contains an encoding of an expert's knowledge about some problem domain. In a rule-based system the knowledge is stored in a series of rules, usually in an if-then form...

this paper we discuss these methods of procedural program analysis, examine why they break down for rule-based systems, and introduce coverage measures and a complexity metric which can be used to guide and assess the testing of a rule-based system. An expert system is an encoding of an expert's knowledge about some problem domain. In a rule-based...

ABSTRACT All human behavior representations (HBRs) simulate some aspects of people, either individually or as groups. HBRs differ from simulations of other complex phenomena by their knowledge bases, effectively sophisticated computer programs written in a knowledge representation language. As a discipline in simulation technology, HBR validation i...