This panel presents varying global perspectives on the role of community colleges and 2- or 3-year technical schools (collectively called junior colleges here) in computing education. In some countries, students interested in a career in computing can obtain a 2- or 3-year degree instead of, or as a precursor to, ...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide an effective learning platform with various high-quality educational materials accessible to learners from all over the world. However, current MOOCs lack personalized learning guidance and intelligent assessment for individuals. Though a few recent attempts have been made to trace students' knowledge states by adapting ...

We study the problem of visualizing large-scale and high-dimensional data in a low-dimensional (typically 2D or 3D) space. Much success has been reported recently by techniques that first compute a similarity structure of the data points and then project them into a low-dimensional space with the structure preserved. These two ...

Text classification is an important problem with many applications. Traditional approaches represent text as a bag-of-words and build classifiers based on this representation. Rather than words, entity phrases, the relations between the entities, as well as the types of the entities and relations carry much more information to represent the ...

Welcome to the latest installment of "EduBits," your quarterly pipeline to new and exciting happenings in the world of ACM Education. In this edition, a preview of the third ACM Learning @ Scale conference; news from Tianjin, China on a recent summit on computing education; and an update on the ...

The IT2008 Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Information Technology is showing its age, and in 2014, the ACM Education Board agreed to oversee the creation of a revision, now being referred to as IT2017. Members of the IT 2017 Task Group have been identified, and phone conference calls ...

One of the key obstacles in making learning protocols realistic in applications is the need to supervise them, a costly process that often requires hiring domain experts. We consider the framework to use the world knowledge as indirect supervision. World knowledge is general-purpose knowledge, which is not designed for any ...

Crowdsourcing machine translation shows advantages of lower expense in money to collect the translated data. Yet, when compared with translation by trained professionals, results collected from non-professional translators might yield low-quality outputs. A general solution for crowdsourcing practitioners is to employ a large amount of labor force to gather enough ...

As the term 'information technology' has many meanings for various stakeholders and continues to evolve, this work presents a comprehensive approach for developing curriculum guidelines for rigorous, high quality, bachelor's degree programs in information technology (IT) to prepare successful graduates for a future global technological society. The aim is to ...

This paper studies the problem of embedding very large information networks into low-dimensional vector spaces, which is useful in many tasks such as visualization, node classification, and link prediction. Most existing graph embedding methods do not scale for real world information networks which usually contain millions of nodes. In this ...

In order to learn the impact of MOOCs, we conducted a SPOC experiment on the course of Data Structures and Algorithms in Peking University. In this paper, we analyze student online activities, test scores, and two surveys using statistical methods (t-test, analysis of variance, correlation analysis and OLS regression) to ...

With the recent growth of online content on the Web, there have been more user generated data with noisy and missing labels, e.g., social tags and voted labels from Amazon's Mechanical Turks. Most of machine learning methods, which require accurate label sets, could not be trusted when the label sets ...

We present VeLoc, a smartphone-based vehicle localization approach that tracks the vehicle's parking location without GPS or WiFi signals. It uses only the embedded accelerometer and gyroscope sensors. VeLoc harnesses constraints imposed by the map and landmarks (e.g., speed bumps) recognized from inertial data, employs a Bayesian filtering framework to ...

Probabilistic topic models have been widely used for sentiment analysis. However, most of existing topic methods only model the sentiment text, but do not consider the user, who expresses the sentiment, and the item, which the sentiment is expressed on. Since different users may use different sentiment expressions for different ...

A key challenge for the Chinese educational system is the development of a CS1 course for non-major college students that can meet the unique environment in our country. In mainland China, CS1 is required of all freshmen at their first semester, approximately 7 million freshmen per year. We have named ...

Five years have passed since the final publication of the ACM-IEEE information technology (IT) four-year curricula guidelines (IT2008) [1]. In September of 2012, the ACM Education Board initiated an exploratory invitation to Special Interest Group for Information Technology Education (SIGITE) to determine the efficacy of the current IT curricula guidelines ...

New challenges have been presented to classical topic models when applied to social media, as user-generated content suffers from significant problems of data sparseness. A variety of heuristic adjustments to these models have been proposed, many of which are based on the use of context information to improve the performance ...

Retweeting is the key mechanism of information diffusion on microblogging community. It is very challenging for user to choose the suitable tweets for retweeting, given the diverse and massive messages received and limited time on site. Therefore, it is crucial to design a recommender system that automatically recommends tweets for ...

Researchers and social observers have both believed that hashtags, as a new type of organizational objects of information, play a dual role in online microblogging communities (e.g., Twitter). On one hand, a hashtag serves as a bookmark of content, which links tweets with similar topics; on the other hand, a ...