Robert Beck

Teaching:

He teaches courses in programming languages and human computer interaction as well as courses at the interface of computing and biology and an innovative introductory course for non-technical majors.

In Fall 2008 he is teaching the senior projects course, CSC 4790, the required capstone course for the computer science majors. This course challenges the students to synthesize all that they have learned about computing into a substantial research or software development project. The software development teams will be using a modified agile development process that should allow them to create a usable system in a short amount of time. The research projects will address substantial problems and will allow the students to compete in the many student research venues.

In Spring 2008 he co-taught an undergraduate interdisciplinary course in computational molecular biology His teaching partner was Dr. Wilber Baker of the Department of Biology. The course is designed around the problem-based learning paradigm and seeks to promote interaction among students in biology and computing. The course blends the view that all problems can be modeled as computations on strings of letters from an alphabet with the view that all molecular biology problems are understandable through lab work with DNA.

He also taught a section of the discrete structures course, CSC 1300. This course is required of all second-semester freshman computer science majors. The threads through the course included operators, counting things, and the mathematical view of structures.

In Fall 2007 he taught the graduate human-computer interaction course CSC 8570 - User System Interface. This course explores the fundamental principles of user interface design and their foundation in models of human computer interaction. Student teams develop web page expositions of several topics including intelligent agents, user interface metrics, CSCL, advice giving systems, and voice-based interfaces.

In Spring 2007 he taught the advanced undergraduate elective on software development and system tools CSC 4630. This course explores filters, scripts, libraries and other helpful repositories of software tools. It is loosely based on the book Software Tools in Pascal by Kernighan and Plauger, but the course is taught using the UNIX environment and C as the primary programming language. The course will also consider various scripting languages such as Perl.

In Spring 2006 he led the senior problem-based learning seminar. His team of students tackled the shortest superstring problem, the state and use of animation software, the efficiency of code from various languages, the role of proxy servers, and issues in database sharing.

Research interests:

• Evaluation techniques and metrics for user interfaces: Current questions
• Models for computational biology: Current questions
• Models for co-evolutionary development of SOA-based software systems: Current questions
• Symbolic computation, especially for linear algebra and Lie algebras
• Algorithms for operations research
• Computing courses for non-majors

Professional organizations:

• ACM, the First Society in Computing and its special interest groups SIGCSE and SIGCHI. He is the computer science representative to Disciplinary Societies Committee of the Council of Graduate Schools working jointly with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He is the Symposium Coordinator for SIGCSE.
• Sigma Xi: Past President of the Villanova University Chapter

University committees:

• College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) Strategic Planning Committee
• Chair, University Laptop Program Evaluation Committee. The committee is examining the successes and problems of the university-wide laptop program for full-time undergraduates.

Curriculum vitae