Faculty Development Plan

Computer Science [Example 1]

June 2004

A.  Self Assessment

A1.  Teaching

My greatest strength as a professor is my genuine concern for students.  I care deeply about the student experience, and I feel a great responsibility to make opportunities for learning available to a broad range of students.  The ideal class, in my mind, would transform students “distinguished by ranks, according to their…chances for learning” to a group distinguished, instead, by each student’s unique interests yet more empowered in their different inspirations through a mastery of the material.  As a result, I work hard as a teacher, not only to make challenging material accessible from a variety of levels of preparation and backgrounds, but also to expose students to possibilities that help them discover their passion, their inspiration, and discover how the material can help them realize their dreams.  I believe in the dreams of good people, and I find the opportunity to contribute to my students’ discovery and realization of their inspiration to be one of the greatest honors that I can imagine.

My principle weakness as a teacher is the discrepancy between my background and that of my students.  Although this difference lends perspective to my activities, it also creates language barriers and difficulty in calibrating the student experience.  Preparation for my classes not only takes the usual time to learn new course material and develop the activities to catalyze student learning, but also a significant effort to bridge my perspective of the material with the student’s background.  Over the last year I have noticed that this discrepancy is manifest in my presentation of material that can be perceived to be too difficult and irrelevant, and I have received feedback that my pace can be too fast and difficult to follow.  My credibility is always in question, forcing me to work harder to earn student confidence and carefully motivate anything that I do differently than my colleagues.  This fact, coupled with my style of spending as much time as necessary to help struggling students and working overtime to develop new projects and examples that tie student interests to the material, can make a nominal teaching load unbearable.  I need to learn to balance the impact of this discrepancy through disciplined limits and good time management, patiently allowing myself to grow into better alignment with my students rather than attempt to immediately correct for it at the expense of my other responsibilities.     

A2.  Scholarship

One strength I bring to my scholarship is vision.  Inspired by the revelation that “the glory of God is intelligence,” I have spent my professional career refining an understanding of the nature of intelligence and related qualities, such as learning, integrity, and cooperation.   My research program, focusing on the process of using data to make decisions, strikes at the heart of the matter.  I believe mathematical systems theory is a language that can effectively span the gap between philosophical ideas on the topic and their practical application.  I understand much about the knowledge frontier I feel inspired to advance, and I believe the Computer Science Department at BYU makes the natural home for this endeavor.      

In spite of the vision, however, my scholarship suffers from my inexperience to establish consequential visibility in a research community.  While my Ph.D. research began to hint at some of the issues associated with my core vision, the research became very application focused.  In coming to the Computer Science Department at BYU, I made a conscious decision to abandon the development of my influence in that specific application area and refocus my efforts on my core vision.  Although some of my extracurricular work from graduate school provides an alternative application arena for this core vision, the discontinuity in my career development has left my publication record weak and forced me to find a new research community.  Recognizing the fact that I am not engaging the process of writing the papers that would naturally emerge from my dissertation, I need to educate myself through the publication and fund raising process and develop a clear execution strategy to establish my professional credibility.  

A3.  Citizenship

My strengths in citizenship revolve around my genuine concern for my colleagues and our mission to serve.  I believe in the mission of the Church and the mission of BYU, and I am anxious to organize my contribution to the department and university in such a way that synergizes with the whole.  I tend to make friends easily and have many throughout the university, and I have had a number of terrific experiences with colleagues in my department.  I hope to encourage more such experiences by spending time with my colleagues, such as at lunch or outside of work, allowing us to get to know each other better and bridge our differences in background.  

My challenges with citizenship revolve primarily around my difference in background with most of the faculty in our department and college.  Having never attended BYU or lived in Utah before, many cultural cues are new to me.  While my perception that good citizenship entails sincere engagement, even if it is disruptive, such disruption seems to be easily misunderstood as contention in this environment.  I have been perceived as believing that shaking things up is a good thing in and of itself, advised not to attack too many windmills, and told that I don’t yet smell like the pack.   I have had colleagues become somewhat defensive of my honest criticism of their ideas.  Where my background would suggest offering attention and being frank are gifts of value, there is a cultural norm of sensitivity at BYU that I need to appreciate.  Moreover, my natural inclination to collaborate and form partnerships is clearly not the cultural norm for many professors in our department; I need to respect those differences and be careful not to let my enthusiasm be confused for pushiness.  I don’t believe that persuasion is a good mode of interaction between colleagues, and it is important to me that my enthusiasm for the possibilities I envision is not confused with a position of advocacy.   I need to make my motives clear, that I want to work hard to creatively expand the choices available to us as a department, and then work together to sift through all possible directions and move forward, in whatever direction we rally around, as a team.

B.  Professional Vision, Goals, and Strategy

B.1.  Teaching

B.1.1.  Reflections on Teaching: The Playground

I believe that teaching means building the right playground.  Students need a safe environment to explore and play with new ideas.  These ideas should not only provide an accessible infrastructure that fills the students with wonder and motivates them to climb over and under and through each concept, but this infrastructure should also become a catalyst enticing the students to engage each other in new and exciting ways. 

I expect students to bring their own unique backgrounds, interests, and imagination to the playground and invent new ways to play with the ideas according to their tastes and needs.  Although safety must be an issue, the last thing I want to do as an instructor is to enforce the idea that the equipment is necessarily to be used only as designed.  Students dutifully following my instructions about how to play on each piece of equipment have not engaged the playground.  Instead, I believe that one of the most exciting aspects of learning is discovering novel uses or applications of a given idea, or developing a new synthesis of ideas altogether.  For this to happen, I must create a safe environment where students can experiment without fear of penalty and encourage them to share their discoveries with each other, regardless of whether those experiments were “successful” or not.         

Different courses may require very different kinds of playgrounds for a successful student experience.  Some may be like a jungle gym, with static ideas to be climbed over, under, and through.  Some may be like a swing set or jump rope, with their own dynamics that demand student participation to be fully engaged.  Others may be like an obstacle course, with concepts presented in a way for students to challenge themselves and work together to overcome obstacles and gain confidence.  Yet others are more like a workshop, where experienced students that understand the dangers and uses of power tools can craft more significant expressions of their own creativity. 

Whatever the course, however, the most important thing I will teach my students is the importance of intellectual play, not information about any one particular idea or piece of equipment.  My students must understand that critical thinking is the flip side of appreciation, modes of engagement that simply can’t be divorced.  Genuine and imaginative play begins with the realization that The Slide could be an excellent mast on our imaginary pirate ship, but, for this application, a spiral slide might have been even better.  Critical appreciation may likewise lead one student to quietly swing, and find refuge in the rhythmic periodicity and soaring of their soul, while the lack of critical appreciation may find the same student enduring the repetitious nature of The Swing and resisting their urge to twist wildly simply because they believe that swinging smoothly and without twists, i.e. “correctly”, may earn them a good grade.  Very different inward experiences can lead to similar outward expressions; the habit of critical appreciation  will forge lively and confident internal responses to the external dynamics of the playground and reveal the false authority of dogma in all its forms. 

I think students need to understand that conformity of thought, even (or especially) to me as the authority figure in the class, measures convention or popularity, not necessarily what is interesting, good, or right.  They must feel safe and free to explore, but they should also not feel pressure to play differently than others, or differently from convention, if that is not what resonates with their souls.  They need to learn to recognize their personal resonance, their inspiration, and have opportunities to pursue it, opportunities to play enthusiastically, inventively, spiritedly, and deeply while in the playground. 

However students resonate and engage their play, it is in the engagement process that success is found; apathy or even worse, complacency, is failure in the playground.  The process of ignoring, ignoring the playground, ignoring each other, ignoring the Spirit, or ignoring themselves makes the playground useless and paves the path to ignorance.  Students must understand that genuine criticism is the risk of appealing for genuine appreciation, but on the playground all these forms of interaction are part of the conversation, part of the fun.  Then, as students leave the playground, I hope they have gained more than familiarity with a new set of equipment.  I hope they begin to see the world as their sandbox and live differently for having spent some time in the playgrounds I am building for them.  

B.1.2.  Goals and Strategy

The strengths I bring to our department’s curriculum include the ability to strengthen the mathematical preparation of our students, to help them create meaningful abstractions from complex situations and use them to solve interesting problems, and to help them understand and use the scientific method.  These three areas correspond to the department curricular objectives that focus on the science half of computer science, the feature that distinguishes our students from computer programmers or computer engineers. 

My efforts thus need to complement the expertise of my colleagues to strengthen these features of our curriculum.  Since CS 236, Discrete Mathematics, had been revised and strengthened last year, the natural place for me to begin my work has been CS 312, Analysis of Algorithms.  My teaching assignment this year has therefore focused on CS 312, where I have worked to strengthen the math and science aspect of its pedagogy.  My goals are to continue to refine CS 312 and introduce a follow-on class, CS 412, to explicitly strengthen our students’ mathematical preparation, fluency in the use of abstractions, and facility with the scientific method.

My specific efforts to complete by March 2005 will include:

1)  CS 312: I will introduce tools for the analysis of difference equations and tie them to the analysis of recursive code, demonstrate their utility as a modeling abstraction for formulating some dynamic programming problems, and show how they provide the basis of pseudorandom number generation and a theoretical foundation of randomized algorithms. 

2)  CS 312: I will introduce Linear Programming as a sophisticated approach for formulating certain problems and introduce them to the Simplex Algorithms as a solution technique, highlighting that the simplex algorithm itself is a greedy algorithm, the simplest class of algorithms studied in the course, thus bringing the course full circle.

3)  CS 312: I will introduce three new laboratory projects that will simultaneously ask the students to apply the algorithmic paradigms we learn in class while introducing them to distinct career areas.  The first, Intelligent Scissors, introduces image processing application development while comparing Djikstra’s and other greedy approaches to image segmentation.  The second, SARS Genome Alignment, introduces the field of bioinformatics while applying dynamic programming to the alignment of the genome of the SARS virus with those of other Corona Viruses.  The third, Portfolio Optimization, will introduce financial engineering while developing sophisticated methods to optimize the balance of risk and reward in common problems of investment science.

4)  Honors Program: I will explore the feasibility of developing an honors section of CS 312 or finding other venues that would enable CS students to benefit more fully from the honors program or other interdisciplinary experiences.  My impression has been that students of technical programs tend not to participate in honors because honors programs often are more humanities focused and can introduce a workload that can feel irrelevant to the technical disciplines.  By helping align an honors experience for CS students, I hope to enrich the student experience by connecting their discipline to a broader intellectual perspective while helping them find more opportunities to meaningfully interact with exceptional students from other disciplines.  Alternatively, other interdisciplinary efforts such as with bioinformatics, engineering, economics, political science, etc., may also provide similar venues to enrich the student experience.  Understanding the landscape for such opportunities will enable me to better compliment, rather than duplicate, existing resources. 

5)  CS 412: I will develop an entirely new course to follow CS 312 in developing the mathematical sophistication to formulate and solve computationally challenging real-world problems.  Targeting winter 2005, I will focus the course on the theory of linear optimization and its use with stochastic models to address real-world problems from the field of operations research.          

B.2.  Scholarship

B.2.1.  Reflections on Scholarship: Intellectual Ventures and Corporations

I believe scholarship is an intellectual venture that demands good vision and organization to be worthwhile.  Success is achieved when a certain resonance develops between the researcher and a community of thinkers that critically appreciate the work of the research program.  This resonance is precisely the vehicle of learning that can make scholarly research such a useful tool for educating students.

Like all ventures, meaningful scholarship is a risky endeavor that demands application of significant effort with no guarantee of success or reward.  When those risks are eliminated, the nature of the endeavor ceases to be a venture; it reduces to a mechanical repetition that may have economic or career impact, but it loses its educational value. 

One of the greatest dangers to real scholarship are the exercises that recapitulate previous results, possibly with minor extensions, but drown attention from riskier but more fundamental, more meaningful projects.  While these activities popularize a researcher’s work, and may contribute toward an influential career, the failure to expend significant effort in the riskier but meaningful unknown misleads students into thinking that good research directions can be magically identified before the research is done.  Moreover, these activities communicate to students that the real value of scholarship is not the educational impact of a rigorous and dedicated research process, but the reputation or influence that useful, or at least well known, results can buy. 

By this calculus, however, the best scholarship becomes the safe re-application, essentially, of known results to well financed or well publicized problems (i.e. consulting), instead of the risky development of significant new results (i.e. research).  Moreover, the organization of student involvement in scholarship, under such circumstances, typically follows a corporate model where students are hired by a professor to popularize his or her agenda by mastering his/her best trick and applying it to problems that can deliver publications.  The educational justification for such a process is that the students learned the professor’s best trick, applied it successfully in a problem domain, and can now be certified through graduation to independently operate a franchise of the growing intellectual corporation.

There is another model that captures the necessary risk of meaningful scholarship without eliminating the accountability of a researcher to be productive and establish credibility: The Intellectual Venture.  Like venture capital, productivity under this model is measured by the return on investment in promising start-ups, young corporations that that appeal for seed funding based on the novelty of their ideas and the quality of their team.  In the case of venture capital, money is the resource that is managed, invested, and ultimately returned to the contributors.  A good venture capitalist understands that the development of the management team is as essential as the development of a particular investment since excellent corporate leaders may be called on later to contribute to, or even lead an inexperienced team for, new investments.  Likewise, a portfolio of investments may focus on a particular area to emphasize natural synergies between ventures, or they may be unrelated to diversify the portfolio.  Either way, however, the fund manager is responsible for raising money, keeping available capital duly invested in the most promising ventures, and serving on the board or providing necessary guidance and support until an appropriate liquidation event.  The venture capitalist’s performance is measured on the return on his investment (which is usually expected to consist of a significant portion of his own funds, besides those raised to be managed).  Moreover, the development of a successful venture consists of coaching and supporting the management team for that venture until they are successful in creating market resonance and can succeed in their endeavor, in being self supporting in doing what they do (making widgets); there is no “franchising” of the venture capitalist’s activities.

I think a professor’s scholarship activities should be very similar to those of the venture capitalist, except with the investment of intellectual capital, meaning expertise.  Rather than organize as a corporation, hiring students to work on the professor’s general area of experience, I think the professor should first generate a significant “fund” of results and expertise representing the state of the art in some area, hopefully with some personal contribution.  Next, the professor should screen start-ups, i.e. students, based on their venture idea and the quality of their “management team” (or character, experience, etc.).  Notice that the professor is not hiring a student to work on his idea, but is instead evaluating the potential of opportunities to invest the expertise of his fund in the ideas, or potential for generating meaningful ideas, of his students.  As a result, these ventures may be similar or diverse, complimentary or unrelated.  The important feature is that each should represent the potential for a significant intellectual return on the investment, the ability to develop resonance with their respective community and, in doing so, advance the state of art in the field.  Making a commitment to selected ventures, the professor then “sits on the board” and advises, nurtures, coaches, facilitates introductions—he or she does everything possible to help that venture develop their “product” and establish self-sufficient resonance in their community. 

The process of graduation liquidates the professor’s investment, possibly returning intellectual capital above and beyond that of the professor’s own expertise and knowledge of the field.  Sometimes the student’s venture doesn’t result in a return on the investment, and the resonance with the community is purely critical, without elements of serious intellectual appreciation.  Although this can happen for a variety of reasons if the venture is truly original, it is nearly guaranteed to happen if the venture is not truly original, i.e. scholarship of the “consulting” variety favored by the corporate model.  Nevertheless, even when one particular venture isn’t successful, the experience can (and should) season the student successfully so the professor knows how to call upon them in the future to help with new ventures when appropriate.  The educational value of the research experience ensures a positive accumulative affect in spite the risk associated with untested, completely original ideas (that nevertheless look promising for significantly advancing expertise in the relevant field); succeed or fail, there is nothing that can replace the experience of working one’s own idea on the frontier of knowledge.    

B.2.2.  Goals and Strategy

My research program studies the process of using data to make decisions.  Unlike statistics, however, my studies consider the dynamic effects of these decisions on the next data measurements.  In this feedback context, it is essential to characterize what constitutes information and the impact of various decision mechanisms on its evolution, i.e. the information dynamics of the decision mechanism.

This process is well understood for simple mechanical and engineered systems.  Nevertheless, since information can have economic, cultural, and other value, the process is applicable in the analysis and synthesis of much more complicated systems.  Indeed, this process strikes at the heart of scientific inquiry, and the very nature of qualities we associate with the concepts of free will and agency, such as intelligence, learning, integrity, cooperation, etc.

In spite of the general applicability of this research program, it is difficult to distill the key methodological problems in the absence of a specific context.  Complex systems, whether biological, economic, social, or engineered, provide a rich context for the study of information dynamics.  My long term research objective is to define a coherent context-independent process for rationally using data to make decisions, including characterizing the interdependencies between the modeling, abstraction, learning, and decision stages of the process.  Nevertheless, to focus my energy on the meaningful methodological issues, my goal is to establish a variety of context-specific laboratories where controlled experimentation and analysis can inspire, suggest, test, and invalidate the general theoretical questions and solutions we develop from the different perspectives of the laboratories’ particular application.

My specific efforts to complete by March 2005 will include:

1)  Computational Economics Learning Laboratory: I will create a laboratory to conduct controlled experimentation and analysis for economic systems.  This effort will demand the following steps:

A) I need to develop a testbed where we can collect relevant data, apply the theory we develop, and then test the conclusions with controlled experiments that compare the predicted impact of the theory with actual results. Such an economic laboratory does not exist, to the best of my knowledge, since the risky nature of such research can rarely be sold to management as good operating procedure for a viable enterprise. Nevertheless, it is common for departments within an enterprise to attempt to measure the return on their investment and impact of their various campaigns and programs, and sometimes an independent evaluation is outsourced as long as it is not too invasive. I need to develop relationships with firms that will allow our researchers to access their data and conduct controlled experiments as necessary.

B) I need to raise funds to support students working on projects that utilize the testbed. Since I have no credibility in economics or business per se, it will be challenging to compete for limited funds. There may be a few ways to address this problem. First, I will need to use limited department funds to engage small projects that can result in publications that can lay a foundation of credibility for future fund raising efforts. As student projects become well defined, I may be able to expand the source of funding from department to university levels by competing for ORCA, MEG, and other sources of funding. Incrementally, I may be able to build on small successes to compete for more prestigious national grants. Another approach may be to find partners that want to collaborate in developing the laboratory and can share the burden of raising funds to support student projects. Finally, there may be a way to organize industrial partners providing the testbeds to also contribute funding for student projects. However, this path can quickly digress into the “consulting” flavor of scholarship that I hope to avoid, so I will need to be selective with this type of funding.

C) I will need to select students with interests that can benefit from the testbed and laboratory, and who can benefit from whatever expertise and background I can bring to the effort. Since my vision creates an entirely new aspect to the Computer Science Department, and because I want to compliment rather than compete with other programs in the department for students, I believe that I will need to hire undergraduate researchers and develop them into the type of graduate student that can engage the laboratory's full potential. If I succeed, many of these undergraduate researchers will be recruited and choose to pursue graduate studies in top programs elsewhere. My hope is that students who choose to stay in our graduate program do so in spite of having offers to the top schools around the country, simply because of the unique opportunities we can create for them here, such as access to a real economic laboratory.

D) I will need to create the physical and intellectual environment for the laboratory. This will including buying computers, etc. It will also emerge through structured and unstructured interaction between myself and the students, as well as broader connection to other research groups with similar interests. My students need access to the primary literature in the field, and we need a culture of discussion on the latest articles and advances.

E) In addition to publishing one high quality publications on mathematical systems theory, I will break the ice in this field with a high quality journal publication and a conference publication, lead by the efforts of my students, all within the next year.

2)  Computational and Systems Biology Laboratory:  I will explore the feasibility of developing a laboratory to study biological systems.  Working with other professors in biology, chemistry, and computer science, I will invest energy in exploring the field and scouting for opportunities to relate our studies to biological systems.

3)  Engineered Complex Systems Laboratory:  I will explore the feasibility of developing a laboratory to study complex engineered systems, including networks, factories, robots, machines vehicles, computers, nano-devices, and other systems.  I will invest energy in coordinating with professors from electrical and mechanical engineering and computer science, as well as potential collaborators from national laboratories or other high tech institutions to scout for opportunities to study our core vision from the perspective of complex engineered systems.

B.3.  Citizenship

B.3.1.  Reflections on Citizenship: A Community of Peers

One of my core missions in life is the creation of or involvement in communities; communities of worship, communities of nurturing, educational communities, communities of discovery, and communities of peers.  One of my communities of peers is my department at BYU, and it is my involvement with this community that “citizenship” describes.

The existence of a community results from decisions of its members to interact in particular ways.  The nature of this interaction defines the dynamics of the community and creates the symbiosis that preserves the clustering structure of a community over time.  Failure to consciously or unconsciously define these dynamics will destabilize the structure and result in the dissolution of the community.  Moreover, failure of a particular member of a community to respect the dynamics governing a community’s interaction may alter the group entirely or ostracize that member from the group and weaken that member’s ability to function within the group.  Hence, it is critical to choose membership carefully, in those groups with dynamics that resonate with one’s inner purpose and sense of mission.  

A community of peers is distinct, in my mind, from other groups precisely because each member of the community is assumed to be, by definition, a peer.  Peers are characterized by having equal stature or authority in judgment, not by necessarily having equal perspectives, background, experience, education, or even shared opinions.  Thus, peership can be achieved simply by 1) respecting the decision authority of others and resisting opportunities to seize control, influence, or power in driving one’s own perspective or agenda; and 2) making one’s own, possibly unique, perspective available to the other members of the group for consideration, even in the face of potential ridicule, retribution, fear of appearing inexperienced, or fear of being unpopular, etc.

Choosing to belong to a community of peers obligates the individual to both effort in formulating and sharing one’s own opinion and respect for the judgment of others.  Failure of members to exert either this effort or respect will destroy the dynamics of a community of peers and replace it with the dynamics of various substitute communities, such as the gang or mob (too much control) or ghost communities (too much apathy).

Preserving a community of peers therefore demands attention to this balance of effort and respect.  Communication among the group can be stabilizing if it is informative, that is, the offering of new alternatives to consider and allowing each member of the group to understand the implications of that alternative.  Communication among the group that is apathetic (e.g. consistently failing to express any opinion or rationale for a position) or persuasive can be destabilizing.  It seems inappropriate to me for peers to adopt postures of advocacy with one another, or attempt to “push” agendas through committees, or carefully orchestrate sequences of commitment that corner the group into certain positions no matter how “right” the position may seem.  Such politics will quickly destroy the community of peers.

B.3.2.  Goals and Strategy

No group realizes the community of peers ideal; there are always interactions that create friction and discomfort.  In fact, too much effort on enforcing the ideal typically gnaws the intellectual integrity of members who begin to reflect the group opinion as their own in an attempt to avoid apathy (participation is high) and to avoid disrespect (there is harmony among the group since everyone agrees).  Substitution of conformity for real community is worse than allowing the community to destabilize and dissolve, however, because of the internal damage it causes to individuals who may not even recognize that their ability to understand their own opinions in the face of group pressure may have eroded beyond recognition.  This internal damage to the members of the group will impact every community they join and thus can have far reaching consequences.   

I want to be a force within my department that has a stabilizing influence on the community of peers without destroying the natural diversity among the group.  I want to use the community as a mechanism to inspire each other, unified by our mission to educate and serve the students in our department and advance the state-of-the-art in our field.

My specific efforts to complete by March 2005 will include:

1)  I will listen to my peers and understand their rationale on issues.

2)  I will invest the effort needed to formulate my own opinion on issues and make that opinion and its rationale known.

3)  I will not persuade nor succumb to apathy.

4)  I will balance my effort in creating a community of peers with my other responsibilities in scholarship and teaching.

In addition to my citizenship within the university, collaboration outside the University is equally important to my work.  I want to identify and engage relationships with scholars and practitioners alike, and will do so by:

1)  Participating in key conferences for both the theory and practice of my field.

2)  Identify key scholars in my field that I could invite to give a seminar at BYU.

3)  Pursue and crystallize collaborations on specific projects with colleagues from other universities, national laboratories, and industry to create a diverse support system to nurture young scholars in the department.

Faculty Development Plan
Computer Science [Example 2]
1998