I had so much fun presenting the closing ITiCSE 2023 keynote “Chat Overflow: Artificially Intelligent Models for Computing Education – renAIssance or apocAlypse?” with Paul Denny, Juho Leinonen and James Prather. Rather than ramble on here, I’ll just provide links to the video and slides 🙂 Thanks to Mikko-Jussi Laakso and the ITiCSE 2023 team for inviting us!
In 2006 Renzo Davoli chaired the ACM SIGCSE Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Conference (ITiCSE 2006) in Bologna Italy. Renzo purchased a brass bell (pictured below). At the conference he would walk through the coffee break area ringing the bell encouraging folks to return to sessions. The bell then went “missing” but it is believed that it sat in Bologna for over a decade until ITiCSE 2017 which conveniently for the bell, was also in Bologna, chaired by Renzo and Mikey Goldweber. The bell then began a new life of travel. It was given to Irene Polycarpou and Janet Reed who chaired ITiCSE 2018 in Larnaca, Cyprus. The bell then traveled by itself via post to Aberdeen Scotland for ITiCSE 2019 where Bruce Scharlau and Roger McDermott rang the bell.
Then the bell, aided by a pandemic, sat again for years. In 2022 the bell traveled all on its own by post to Dublin, Ireland where myself and Keith Quille spent some time ringing the bell at ITiCSE 2022. It then sat in Dublin on my desk for a year until this week when – the bell was happy to hear – was escorted by hand on a Finnair flight to Turku, Finland. This morning I handed it to Mikko-Jussi Laakso who just a few minutes ago rang the bell to open ITiCSE 2023. The bell will later this week travel – accompanied again – this time by Mattia Monga, to its ancestral home of Italy where Mattia will, in one year, ring the bell for ITiCSE 2024 in Milan.
Where the bell will go from there is not yet known. However, given that ITiCSE 2023 is the first physical attendance only conference since 2019 and has around 250 people in attendance, the bell has a long healthy future of European travel ahead at many future ACM ITiCSE conferences.
Thanks to Mikey Goldweber and Bruce Scharlau for helping me piece together the history of the ITiCSE bell which I am happy to pass on to the community.
Registration for ITiCSE 2022 is now open at iticse.acm.org/2022 and Early-Bird registration closes May 31 so now is the time to register!
This year ITiCSE is being held in Dublin, Ireland at University College Dublin.
Conference dates are July 11th to July 13th, 2022. There is a reception on Sunday evening, July 10, along with the traditional ITiCSE excursion and banquet on Tuesday afternoon and evening.
Held annually in Europe, the ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education is the second-oldest and second-largest computer science education conference.Â
ITiCSE 2021, the 26th annual conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, is being held virtually in Paderborn, Germany. The main conference is June 28 – July 1. More information and registration is on the website https://ITiCSE.acm.org.
The term of the current Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) (https://dl.acm.org/journal/toce) is coming to an end, and the ACM Publications Board has set up a nominating committee to assist the Board in selecting the next EiC. TOCE was established in 2001 and is a premier journal for computing education, publishing over 30 papers annually.
Nominations, including self-nominations, are invited for a three-year term as TOCE EiC, beginning on September 1, 2021. The EiC appointment may be renewed at most one time. This is an entirely voluntary position, but ACM will provide appropriate administrative support.
Appointed by the ACM Publications Board, Editors-in-Chief (EiCs) of ACM journals are delegated full responsibility for the editorial management of the journal consistent with the journal’s charter and general ACM policies. The Board relies on EiCs to ensure that the content of the journal is of high quality and that the editorial review process is both timely and fair. He/she has the final say on acceptance of papers, size of the Editorial Board, and appointment of Associate Editors. A complete list of responsibilities is found in the ACM Volunteer Editors Position Descriptions (http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/position_descriptions).
Additional information can be found in the following documents:
Nominations should include a vita along with a brief statement of why the nominee should be considered. Self-nominations are encouraged. Nominations should include a statement of the candidate’s vision for the future development of TOCE. The deadline for submitting nominations is July 21, 2021, although nominations will continue to be accepted until the position is filled.
Please send all nominations to the nominating committee chairs, Mark Guzdial (mjguz AT umich DOT edu) and Betsy DiSalvo (bdisalvo AT cc.gatech DOT edu).
The search committee members are:
Louiqa Raschid (University of Maryland) will serve as the ACM Publications Board Liaison
This year I’m thrilled to be serving as the SIGCSE 2020 International Liaison. Although I originally hail from the US, I’ve been based in Ireland for decades and I attend US conferences as an “international” attendee. My first SIGCSE Technical Symposium was a bit overwhelming. I knew (of) many of those who attended my talk but they definitely didn’t know me! I also didn’t really connect much. It wasn’t until I participated in an ITiCSE working group that I really began to get involved in the SIGCSE community.
A number of recent comments have indicated opportunities to improve the experiences of SIGCSE attendees who are traveling from outside the US, and in particular for those attendees who are relative newcomers to the Symposium.
For the last decade (2010-2019 inclusive) the average symposium attendance was 1385. The average number of non-US attendees was 101 (7%). Excluding Canada, this falls to 71 (5%). In 2019, a record attendance year, these numbers were actually slightly lower percentage-wise. We would like to see these numbers improve.
I am happy to announce that this year the SIGCSE Symposium is piloting an “International Buddy Program”. Simply put, the program pairs up non-US attendees with more experienced attendees (from anywhere) to try and improve the experience of those coming from outside the US, and particularly those who are relatively new to the Symposium or the community. Everyone who registers for the Symposium will have an opportunity during registration, to sign up to be paired-up, either as a non-US attendee or as an experienced attendee. Of course this is optional! More details are available at https://www.brettbecker.com/sigcse2020/
I’d also like to thank the expanded International Committee for their service this year (listed below).
If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly.
Finally, if you are from outside the US and going to Portland, don’t forget to sign up for the international lunch during registration!
SIGCSE 2020 International Committee
| Miles Berry | University of Roehampton |
| Steven Bradley | Durham University |
| Jennifer Campbell | University of Toronto |
| Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas | UTEC |
| Paul Denny | University of Auckland |
| Rodrigo Duran | Aalto University |
| Orit Hazzan | Technion |
| Arto Hellas | University of Helsinki |
| Amey Karkare | IIT Kanpur |
| Carsten Kleiner | Hochschule Hannover |
| Viraj Kumar | Indian Institute of Science |
| Chao Mbogo | Kenya Methodist University |
| Chris McDonald | University of Western Australia |
| André Santos | Instituto Universitário de Lisboa |
| Marco Silva | Federal University of Technology |
| Lenandlar Singh | University of Guyana |
| Hironori Washizaki | Waseda University |
| Gary Wong | University of Hong Kong |
| Ming Zhang | Peking University |
I am really happy to be featured in the “People of ACM Europe” December 2019. The questions I was asked were really interesting to answer. I noticed that each month the questions are really tailored to highlight the person’s role which is really cool. This coincided with the launch of the Ireland ACM SIGCSE Chapter which currently has over 150 members! The launch was fantastic – so great to see so many computing education folks in under the same roof!
Along with Keith Quille and Catherine Mooney, I am thrilled to announce the chartering of the Ireland ACM SIGCSE chapter!*
*ACM -> Assoctation of Computing Machinery; SIGCSE -> Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education.
The mission of the Ireland ACM SIGCSE chapter is:
We now have nearly 100 members and anyone with an interest in Computing Education in Ireland can join the chapter. There are no dues, but membership in ACM and SIGCSE is encouraged. You can join the Ireland ACM SIGCSE Chapter at https://SIGCSEire.acm.org.
We are looking forward to the chapter launch, hosted by the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin on December 11, 2019 from 2-6pm. We are honoured to announce a keynote from Professor Amber Settle of DePaul Univerisity in Chicago, SIGCSE board member (immediate past-chair), who is going to officially launch the chapter. We will also have a keynote from Associate Professor Paul Dickson (Ithaca College, NY), and have welcome addresses from Associate Professor Chris Bleakley (Head of School of Computer Science, UCD) and Professor Joe Carthy (College Principal, College Of Science, UCD).
Registration for the chapter launch is free but essential (and separate to applying for membership). A link to the eventbrite registration page is available at https://SIGCSEire.acm.org. You can follow the Chapter on Twitter @SIGCSEire.
We look forward to working with you in a new era of Computing Education in Ireland!
Today I am presenting my third and final paper at the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. It is titled “What Do CS1 Syllabi Reveal About Our Expectations of Introductory Programming Students?” My coauthor is Thomas Fitzpatrick who was at the time an undergraduate student at UCD and is now pursuing a PhD there. Full details including the full paper, slides, and dataset we used in the paper are available at cszero.