NSFCPATH Town Hall Meeting

1
NSF/CPATH Town Hall Meeting

• Breakout Group 2
• Reaching Out From Institutions
• To Form Partnerships
• Azer Bestavros

2
General Comments

• Institutions have characters and brands, so no
  one size fits all for all institutions
• Industries are of different scales and needs
  again no one size fits all
• Changes in academic programs are slow by design
  make sure that outreach to industry or to
  international peers is not due to short-lived
  perceptions or trends

3
Reaching Out to Industry

• What does an institution want or expect?
• Enriching curriculum with capstones and
  experiences classes
• Ensuring value/currency of curriculum
• Better placement of its students
• Financial support
• Research collaboration

4
Reaching Out to Industry

• What does industry want or expect?
• Recruitment of the best students
• For large infrastructure industries (MS, Cisco,
  EMC, ), ensure that graduates are versed in
  companys technology/software/tools
• Establish legitimacy by pointing to established
  university relationships, or tech adoption
• Research collaboration
• Tech transfer

5
Reaching Out to Industry

• Many models
• Co-Op programs and For Credit internships
• Curriculum-based engagement, focusing on
  technologies of interest to companies
• Industrial Boards are common, especially in Eng
  departments, but hard to excite faculty
• 1-on-1 collaborations hard to institutionalize,
  sustain, or scale, but very valuable to
  individual faculty and to industry collaborators

6
Issues and Concerns

• Short versus long-term horizons of what is worth
  teaching some companies think of universities
  as trade schools
• Mixed messages for Engineering vs Liberal Arts
  pedagogies
• Overhead of on-the-job-training varies from 0
  to 8 months
• Value of thinking out of the box, ability to
  think with abstractions, and communication
  skills versus language x or tool y

7
International Outreach

• What does an institution want or expect?
• Learn about fresh pedagogical models
• Expose students/faculty to other CS/IT cultures
  experiences e.g., demystifying outsourcing
• Study-abroad opportunities could be used to
  distinguish/brand ugrad programs
• Collaborative research projects and joint courses
• Develop international presence and name
  recognition

8
International Outreach

• Comments and Success Stories
• We are as attractive (as subjects of discovery)
  as our international peers international peers
  look at the success of the liberal arts
  tradition in CS as something to copy
• Norway model of a semester-long Tour Class
  designed by students that brings seniors to the
  US for a semester-long visit to leading CS Depts,
  industries, labs, congress, funding agencies, to
  learn about how