Speaker Dr. Dan Garcia
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A Short Bio
Dan Garcia is a Lecturer SOE in the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined the Cal faculty in the fall of 2000. He has won the departmental Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002, the departmental Information Technology Faculty Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2004, and was chosen as a UC Berkeley "Unsung Hero" in 2005. He recently earned the highest teaching effectiveness ratings in the history of the department's lower-division introductory courses (tied with one other at 6.7 / 7). He has taught (or co-taught as a graduate student instructor, where he won both departmental and campus outstanding GSI awards) courses in teaching techniques, computer graphics, virtual reality, computer animation, self-paced programming as well as the lower-division introductory curriculum. He is active in SIGCSE, and serves on the ACM Education Board as well as BFOIT, a wonderful Berkeley outreach effort.
He is currently mentoring over seventy undergraduates spread across four groups he founded in 2001 centered around his research, art and development interests in computer graphics, Macintosh OS X programming, computational game theory and computer science education. He also recently co-developed a computing course for all freshman engineers. Dan received his PhD and MS in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2000 and 1995, and dual BS degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990.
On the fun side, he can dance DDR level 7, play the harmonica, juggle 5 balls, score in the low 90s on the links, spin things on his finger and knows all the words to many old-school raps, stand-up comedy bits and Monty Python sketches. He also has a collection of several hundred game and puzzle books, and terribly enjoys sharing good brain teasers or playing any one of his many exotic board games with students who drop by during open office hours.
Talk #1: Title and Abstract
274 Students Can't Be Wrong! GamesCrafters, a Computational Game Theory Undergraduate Research and Development Group at UC Berkeley
Abstract: The UC Berkeley GamesCrafters undergraduate research and development group was formed in 2001 as a "watering hole" to gather and engage top students as they explore the fertile area of computational game theory. At the core of the project is GAMESMAN, a system developed for strongly solving, playing and analyzing two-person, abstract strategy games (e.g., Tic-Tac-Toe or Connect 4) and puzzles (e.g., Rubik's Cube). Over the past nine years, more than seventy games and puzzles have been integrated into the system by over two hundred seventy four undergraduates. Relevant links (one, two).
Talk #2: Title and Abstract
Infusing Concurrency into the Intro CS Undergraduate Curricula
Abstract: The recent "sea change" to multi-core hardware and availability of cloud computing resources has caught the computing community unprepared. There is an entire generation of programmers who lack the skills to author correct, efficient, parallel software. As educators, we can address this by enhancing our curriculum with dedicated courses on concurrent programming, as well as infusing concurrency within existing offerings. This talk will provide a quick overview of the UC Berkeley Parallel Computing Laboratory (ParLab), highlight the exciting tools we've developed for our introductory computing courses (e.g., MapReduce in one line of code!), and conclude with an overview of some of the initiatives ACM has recently undertaken to address this critical issue.