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CRC Lab Members Participate in LaTeX Workshop

On October 3, 2017, members of the Culturally Relevant Computing (CRC) Lab at Morehouse College participated in a training workshop for LaTeX, a high tech document preparation system for technical and scientific documents. This system is free to users and is setting the standard for publication of scientific documents.  Students were given an overview of the functionality and capabilities of the software, as well as offered an opportunity to answer any questions related to initiation of use. Some of the topics covered included: formatting mathematical equations; the addition of tables, figures, and pictures; overall document formatting, and how this all relates to basic coding.

The workshop was facilitated by Earl Huff, Jr., a PhD student in Human-Centered Computing at Clemson University, under the advisement of Dr. Kinnis Gosha.  Mr. Huff’s research areas include Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and Applied Machine Learning.  As a part of the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab, Mr. Huff is afforded the opportunity to educate undergraduate students on technologies that will be of benefit to their academic growth, while supporting the vision of the lab.

 

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NSF Grant Awarded for Minority Faculty Mentorship Program

Dr. Kinnis Gosha, the founder of the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab at Morehouse College, will serve as co-Principal Investigator of the Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (Impact) grant.  This $299,856 award, funded by the National Science Foundation, Inclusion Across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) program, is led by Georgia Institute of Technology, as a multi-institutional partnership. The focus of this project is to “impact the engineering faculty ecosystem by demonstrating a new method of support and engage diverse engineering faculty through retired and emeriti faculty who may have preceded them in their chosen field of study,” according to Dr. Comas Haynes of the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

This project also seeks to broaden participation in STEM through the acquisition of a greater understanding of direct communication (i.e. telephone calls, email, in-person meetings, etc.) versus the use of technology in the form of embodied conversational agents, and how they impact interactive experiences. These efforts provide an opportunity to open new possibilities for underrepresented minorities in the engineering and science fields.

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Morehouse College Awarded NSF Grant For Virtual Mentorship Research

Dr. Kinnis Gosha, an Assistant Professor and Director of the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab at Morehouse College, has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct a study on virtual mentorship and how it impacts underrepresented minority students in the computer science and engineering fields. This grant award is for $299,882 and will span a two-year period.

The central purpose of this research is to develop and evaluate a virtual mentoring system that uses a group of embodied conversational agents (i.e., think avatars) to mentor underrepresented doctoral students, majoring in engineering and computer science and who are pursuing a career as a college professor.  This grant is also designed to provide guidance to minority students on the different paths available in the areas of engineering and computer science.

This grant is of great importance, as minority students are underrepresented in higher education in the United States, particularly in the areas of engineering and computer science.  Because of this, opportunities for mentorship in the engineering and computer science disciplines will be less scarce for interested students.  Research has shown that conversational agents used for mentoring have been effective in addressing this gap in support. The NSF award positions the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab to conduct research that can potentially transform the landscape of engineering and computer science, by providing the foundation and support needed to foster diversity through virtual mentorship.

 

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Culturally Relevant Computing Lab Member Ernest Holmes Awarded GCLA Scholarship

The Culturally Relevant Computing Lab at Morehouse College congratulates Ernest Holmes on receiving the Georgia CIO Leadership Association (GCLA) Scholarship. Every year, the GCLA awards an outstanding student that exhibits an interest in computer information systems or business, excels academically, and is active in community outreach. This year, this honor is awarded to Mr. Holmes.

Ernest is currently a junior Computer Science major at Morehouse College, and maintains a 3.68 GPA. He has been a member of the Culturally Relevant Computing Lab, led by Dr. Kinnis Gosha, since his freshman year, and has worked as an intern at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California the past two summers. He spends much of his free time participating in a number of community outreach activities that serve elementary, middle and high school students that have an interest in computer science.

The scholarship award will be presented during the GCLA CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards Ceremony, on November 15, 2017 at the Cobb Galleria Center in Atlanta, Georgia.  Over 1,000 people from various organizations across the state are expected to be in attendance.

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Four Members of Morehouse College’s CRC Lab Receive Travel Scholarships to Attend Tapia Conference

Members of Morehouse College’s Culturally Relevant Computing (CRC) Lab have received travel scholarships to attend the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, which will place September 20th-September 23rd in Atlanta, GA.  Ernest Holmes, Kevin Womack, Nathan Harris, and Leron Julian were awarded the travel scholarships to attend the conference through support from the Institute for African- American Mentoring in Computing Sciences grant (NSF grant #1303156). Travel scholarships include conference registration, meals during the conference, and hotel accommodations.

The Tapia Conference brings together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals in computing from all backgrounds and ethnicities to celebrate the diversity that exists in computing, connect with others with common backgrounds, ethnicities, disabilities, and gender so as to create communities that extend beyond the conference, and obtain advice from and make contacts with computing leaders in academia and industry.  The Tapia Conference has always been a premier venue to acknowledge, promote, and celebrate diversity in computing.

This is a great achievement for our lab members.  Tapia Conference scholarship applications are extremely competitive and are reviewed by over 90 professional volunteers in computer science industry and academia.  Congratulations to these students!

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Morehouse College Offers Android Programming Courses and Exposure to Coding Culture

Culturally Relevant Computing Lab Director, Dr. Kinnis Gosha, and Google software engineers, developed a course for Morehouse students to learn Android Application programming, along with the Applied Computer Science(CS) content, and received hands-on experience in a for-credit class.  The course, titled “Mobile App Development with Advanced Data Structures,”combined lecture, class discussion and in-class assignments targeted at learning Java, advanced data structures, ADS, and other basics for Android programming.  The Applied CS classes ran for 75 minutes and were held twice a week for 16 weeks in the fall semester of 2016. These classes, the first at the university for mobile app development, filled up quickly due to the buzz around the collaboration with Google, and 11 out of 12 students successfully completed the course.

Applied CS content enabled students to understand, apply and implement advanced data types using a mobile application platform that more than two billion devices run on today. The application development skills received provide something tangible that could be used after graduation to create software, products and even companies.  “A lot of these students get into computer science because they’re entrepreneurs and they need to understand the platform to generate revenue,” Dr. Gosha says.  “Learning coding in a platform-specific environment is a great way to prepare them both for CS or software engineering challenges, and exposes them to processes, and workflows they will encounter when using any platform or system for actually making their code run.”

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Morehouse College Awarded $400,000 to Study Effect Incorporating Data Science Fundamentals in Computing Curriculum at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) through the Targeted Infusion Project supports the development, implementation, and study of evidence-based innovative models and approaches for improving the preparation and success of HBCU undergraduate students. In doing so students are able to pursue science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) graduate programs and/or careers (Award #1623362). The project at Spelman College and Morehouse College seeks to address the need for skilled data scientists through data science and big data training for faculty and students at both colleges in partnership with the College of Charleston's Data Science program. The activities and strategies are evidence-based and a strong plan for formative and summative evaluation is part of the project.

The project has specific goals to:

  • Train faculty on data science principles that are part of computing fundamentals and infuse the existing curriculum to showcase the data science principles.
  • Develop and implement a data science curriculum at the undergraduate level at both institutions.
  • Broaden awareness of data science to students underrepresented in the discipline at the undergraduate level in preparation of graduate studies or corporate positions in data science.

Two groups of ten faculty members will be trained in data science principles, and these faculty will create, infuse and deliver data science modules to about 500 of their students.