Meeting with Henry Gardner (head), Chris Johnson (associate dean of education), Paul Melloy (student services, international), Peter Strazdins (senior lecturer), Jill Mayo (advisor).
Advisor Jill Mayo helps with pre-requisites for ANU courses for exchange students. Current numbers are small: 5 engineering students are abroad right now, 3 in computing. Students are now doing one semester experiences, down from one year.
Department has activities to improve recruitment of females. See http://www.techgirlsarechic.org. I have copy of the book.
Henry Gardner visited Purdue for the Computational Science and Engineering conference in the 90s. Met John Rice. He saw a cave at Argon on returning to Chicago. Built a “wedge” visualization wall, which has been installed in a places around Australia (including a nearby museum, where it is still in use).
ACT (Australia Capital Territory) designed by Frank Lloyd Wright protégé. “City built with nature.” Bush country. 300K population. ANU was established in 1946.
There is train and bus travel to Sydney.
Room and board: $300/week for room and board. Some nice places are built from shipping containers (!).
Courses available during 2nd semester of second year (and suitable for our juniors):
- Concurrent systems course taught in ADA. Heavy programming.
- Software design. Design patterns. No programming.
- Formal methods. Logic programming. Compulsory for ANU CS majors.
They use the CLRS book for algorithms. Taught at two levels, for both undergraduates (1/2 book) and graduates.
They use Processing language for joint CS/art/design course. CS students find the art part difficult, although it is taught significantly from a perspective of engineering art. New media art is an engineering discipline. Encourages experimentation. Offered during second semester (our fall).
Jill Mayo reports that they have an international students doing exchanges day to encourage ANU students to do exchanges. Does Purdue have something similar?
The BSE (bachelor of software engineering) degree has a work requirement.
They host a “career night” for high school students and parents. http://cecs.anu.edu.au/careers. They emphasize of teaching of concepts with tools to “get their first jobs”.
Australian has patent(s) on some part of wireless protocol, providing a healthy revenue stream.
Scopus (http://info.scopus.com/). Conference publications missing causing problems with review system in Australia, which will negatively affect ratings of computer science departments compared to other disciplines.
ANU was a group recipient of the Gordon Bell prize circa 2000 for a compute cluster they built.
Some courses are taught with a “practical exam”–a live programming task. First, students make changes to a program that is a variation of their project program. Second, they do a solution from scratch. Solutions are somewhat ambiguous, so grading results in a reasonable (rather than bimodal) distribution.