 And I want to welcome you all to Scientista's Donuts and Discussions. On behalf of the board, we really appreciate you all coming out to today's discussion. And I'm taking the time as well as our panelists taking time out of their schedule as well. To kind of reintroduce you all to who Scientista is, we are a local chapter here at UB. And we're here to promote diversity as well as race, women's representation, and STEM fields with a focus in computer science at the moment. So to kind of get into today's event, the topic is diversity. And we want to make it for first years to kind of talk about, you know, their input on diversity and kind of get their opinion on it as well as get the audience's feedback from it too. So to introduce our panelists for today, we have Professor Chris Schiller. Hi. How many of you know me? I'm from the engineering side of the bank, so if any of you in the computer organization side, computer microprocessors, embedded systems, et cetera. Great. All right, now we have Professor Jeffrey Chow. No applause. Stand up. Do you know 421? I just graduated about 7 months ago, so some of you guys may have me at some point. And last but not least, we have Professor Vina, Mama Berthby. I've been in the computer science for a long, long time, well before these guys came in about 30 years. And nearly 30 years, I should say. And I teach, at this point, I teach a lot of low-level courses and the sophomore junior-level courses. And one of the courses I teach is heavily diversified. It's not for computer science, just for general education. But I can tell you more about it at the discussion. Great. Well, thank you all for coming out today. We really appreciate you taking out the time. And I'm kind of to delve into today's discussion on diversity. We want to start off with how do you all define diversity? And what is your evaluation of the quality in the CS department? Anyone who wants to start off first, please. I'm going to draw an example from where I come from. When I started my engineering, I did my bachelor's in engineering. I had about, I think, 3% by females. I mean, I'm thinking about male-female as the diversity. It doesn't have to be. And now I look back at some of the institutions in India. I come from India. Clearly, it's more than well represented by females. 60 females or 40 males or something like that are 50-50. So I think in our department, when you come to our department, and I look at my class, you know, when they say, oh, there are scholarships available for females, hardly I have what, you know, 5 to 10% females in my class, in the class I teach, in the computer science department. On the other hand, I teach a class at the 100 level. This class is for general education. There are 46 different majors. You can see the diversity. And there are equally represented 50-50. And I teach really hardcore programming in JavaScript and all kinds of stuff. There's a stack that is so popular in emerging technology. And the people who do very well, believe it or not, are the females. So I mean, I'm just specifically looking at the females there and they are doing very well. They're all from all kinds of majors. So I feel that, you know, diversity doesn't mean that it doesn't have to be male-female. It doesn't have to be majors. If you do it the right way, you can always teach the right things to anybody, I feel. So that's my opinion. But our department doesn't have the diversity that we're talking about. The entire field doesn't have the diversity. I mean, to me, I think, you know, diversity seems like a label that's thrown around that identifies some specific quality of the population. But I would just like your scientists to look like everybody else. I would like us to be a subset of the general population. So, you know, look like the rest of you meet. Look like the rest of the United States. You can look at us in a variety of different ways. You can look at us in terms of gender. You know, I think that's a reasonable starting point because that's a... I mean, obviously that's something that's very out of whack, right? But that's also maybe one of the more basic, you know, components of human diversity, right? It's about 50-50 globally. Right, so we could get there, I don't think. But then when you look, you know, racially, you look at socioeconomic classes, you know, I would like us to look like a random subset of UB students, right? And I would like us to look, you know, more broadly as a university. I think I'd also like us to look like a general, you know, sample of the population. So that's, you know, so it's almost like I don't see it as diversity. I just see it as that's what everyone else looks like, right? I just want us to be normal, right? I don't want us to be so skewed. You know, right now we're very diverse, right? Weirdly white group, right? Look at this panel, right? I mean, you know, I hesitated when I was asked to join this panel because I was like, it's two white guys, right? Talking about diversity, right? Because when I laughed about this a few minutes ago and I said, well, this is just, so we're here as a symbol of the problem, right? Actually, the problem is worse than this panel because to have one-third female. I know, we're doing good. We just doubled the gender ratio in the department, you know. So, yeah, I mean, I think we can do a lot better. I think we need to do a lot better as well because I think from a product standpoint and what we do in the field, the people who design technology, programs, embedded systems, et cetera, who's the ultimate user, the client, the customer? People are going to buy this. And you bias things based on your experiences. So when you design an interface, for example, that interface is based on how you would prefer it to look, what you're used to. And by having a more diverse field, a more diverse group of people, the products themselves are better in tune with the people that are going to use them. Okay, so it sounds like diversity in terms of how we should be tapping it is just, it should just represent, you know, what we see on a daily basis. I just don't see it compelling. I mean, and I think the way I think about it too, I just don't see, I've never heard a compelling argument why we shouldn't look representative of the broader population, right? I mean, you get some people that make these weird arguments that are more quantitative or something like that, and there's some sense that that's true. But if you think about the actual job of the software engineer that people work in technology, right? I mean, you're not locked in a room 20 hours a day, write a computer code, no contact with other people, right? So a lot of that job comes down to other types of abilities, right? Where there's a lot more care between the sexes, even if you believe that's what it was in terms of interacting with people and working in teams and being able to communicate and stuff like that. Like I said, I've never heard a compelling reason why we shouldn't have a group of computer scientists that looks like everybody else. Sounds good. So kind of moving on to our next question. What does the department miss out on due to a lack of diversity or maybe more so with the way our conversation's going? It's not just being like how, what we see on a daily basis, when we go out to the world, there's mix of cultures. So what is the department missing out on due to this? I do interact with a lot of people from other departments. I'm sure both of these do. I feel that there's a lot of creativity in the goldmine of ideas when I go talk to somebody in dance and theater. So I think likewise, somebody comes from a different background, different outlook, different opinion, so you can get ideas that are different from that of a homogenous group. A bunch of men working together. I'm just going back to the usual theater type, typical diversity. You add a couple of women there, you may get some totally different ideas. That's what I think we are missing out on. Different outlook, just even in simple things like interface design. I would like it this way, I would like it that way. It is not single-minded, one person, one denomination kind of outlook. You have inputs from different people, different types of users, and a representative population. I don't love the phrasing of this question, but I'm not sure that, I think there's plenty of stuff that we miss out on, but I just think as a department, as a faculty, we have a responsibility, an institutional and a social responsibility to try to create as representative a body of computer scientists as we can. That's kind of our job. I think we should be sitting back to be satisfied because we have a lot of computer scientists and 85% of them are white dudes. That's just not right. That's a sign that we're doing something wrong. I feel like it's not this feature that we're trying to implement. It's a bug that we're trying to get rid of. We have this problem. We're not doing a good job of exciting people about computer science. I think that has broader implications outside the university. Primarily that lack of diversity inside the university. It's not like we want diversity because it's this one new thing. We want to fix the problems that are preventing us from attracting a diverse group of people. I guess based on that, what are some things the department and staff can do to address diversity? Looking at students ourselves maybe within the university or maybe even outside in our community. We do a lot of K through 12 outreach. I truly believe that the problem starts long before people get here. I think it's a social issue. I think it's the way that children are brought up. People, fields are stereotyped. I think that doesn't help matters. I think by the time a lot of these people get into high school they think that this is a field that is defined by this population and people will go back to typing this example. Women and men, it's a male dominated field and that's what it ought to be. It's not what it ought to be but I think that's what these folks think as they come up. To fix the problem we need to go well beyond some of its outreach to break these stereotypes. I will come after that because I'm the contrast to that. I think that we have problems at multiple parts of the pipeline. We have problems at KV-12 and after people leave college. I'm a college educator and I have the most influence here at KV-12. My concern is are we moving the needle? We get students that come in with all sorts of preconceived ideas about computer sciences and it's possible and part of what happens when you're interested in computer science that come in on day one. That core is very unrepresentative and it's due to the problems that Chris has identified. Our job is to wrap... I don't want to lose those people. The way to increase diversity is not to drive people away from the field. I don't want to lose the gamers and the white guys who grew up on the computer I don't want to lose those people and push as much other to increase the reach of computer science so that we do a job of moving us towards a more diverse environment. That's our responsibility. We can't always keep pointing fingers at KV-12. That's a part of the problem but we're a part of the problem and there's lots of evidence there's plenty of schools that have done things internally and have been able to produce much more representative student thoughts. There's plenty of evidence so we can take those same students and I'm not denying that there are plenty of stereotypes about computer science and who should be a computer scientist and if you look at the levels of exposure to computers for their kids and blah blah blah but you come to college and it's sort of like a moment where students I think are open to a lot of new ideas you're being introduced to new fields there's new courses to take there's a lot, so for example people say well we need to have computer science taught in high school because that's the only way people are going to learn about it and it's never going to be taught in high school and those fields still attract and we don't think the anthropology department is saying we need to teach anthropology in high school so that people will get excited about it and think about their college, it's never going to happen these are fields that people are exposed to when they get to college and they still manage to become interested so again I think that the, now you guys if you guys want to get involved through KV-12 outreach absolutely, that's a great thing to do but I think faculty in the department we have to be really satisfied that we've done as much as we can internally to do things on campus and to improve our department before I think we start spending a large amount of efforts in trying to fix other parts of the world so that's my decision one of the things that we think that you have to be computing only if you're a computer scientist I've worked with people who are not even computer science majors who are doing very well in the computing process that we're talking about so it doesn't have to be you cannot count just the people who are majors, there are people who are outside who are still doing computing I think most of the people outside also are doing computing, they don't have a degree in computing that's all so that's something and also my feeling on that another note, the pool that is provided to us to select from university admissions pool that itself is the raw material from which we start attracting people to computer science that itself is not representative of the diverse pools that we have outside I think this is not true of many Ivy League schools I hear I think maybe you're I know that when they admit at least the male-female ratio they admit make sure there are 50-50 I don't want to name schools at least in that diversity you can guess which school it is and then from there you have the pool which is right there diverse and then you go on and also you understand that I have a colleague who is completely all-female school he says, oh we have 100% increase in female enrollment he says there diversity means something else so I think the counting of how many females are doing how many underrepresented minorities are doing computing is somewhat not correct I feel it doesn't have to be majors you don't have to be a major to be doing computing, you can be outside and do a minor, do a few courses here things like that but you simply want people to do computing I mean to be and also you don't want to force the issue it has to be, I feel it has to be organic you know, you simply say alright we want more computer scientists everybody come and do computers and another thing I feel is that you have to go to place where there is diverse population rather than bringing them into your they may want to do dance but you can go there and say you can do computing if diversity in computing is what we are talking about I feel that's my opinion I mean what is the gender ratio of UV? no I don't think so incoming incoming female male it is roughly 50 the chances of all is almost 50-50 but we are not really like horrible computer science or engineering in general we are not representative of UV you may not be representative of the outside world but we are not any more close to being representative of UV and I think the funny thing about the idea of the exposure document is that I think a lot of these ladies institutions are actually having to depress the number of women because I think if they admitted them with equal criteria it would be a higher percentage of women you guys have to accept this you guys all know this but that is the other thing we are losing out with not having women in computer science because if you look actually in college across a lot of different disciplines women outperform men on most universities so we are missing out on those really good computer science you guys may appreciate that because your grades are a little bit better the other thing I wanted to add to this is that I am not in any way going to try to say that I am some sort of anti-stereotype but I grew up I had a Nintendo when I was a kid I played some computer games I programmed some basic back in the day my uncle got me a book on C programming when I was in high school but I got to college I never opened that book I was going to be a physics major I spent a whole year as a physics major and really what drew me in and maybe this is something I am sort of passionate about is that I took a course in computer science so I was again I looked like the stereotype white guy who showed up on campus and was like I am going to do computers and I actually don't have an undergraduate degree in computer science so I was really sort of drawn in by an apartment that taught intro courses very well that made the field very compelling and on the look, was I sort of culturally predetermined to maybe be a little bit more interested in that sort of thing maybe not show up on campus day one and want to program computers and I missed a lot of earlier opportunities to learn about the program and to kind of piggyback what you were saying before internally kind of I guess about to see how they should be involved internally and being able to kind of bring more diversity or get a better representation of the population what is it that you guys are doing internally or hope to possibly do in the future or is that something that you've been thinking about on a daily basis is that a concern or maybe something more of a back burner I think, you know and I both can speak on this but we do teach intro courses where we have non majors non CS majors and not computer engineering majors and one of the things I try to do in those courses is to try to expose that population to the field because we have undecided in there as well and to have them realize what the field is about that it can be exciting show them some of the more fascinating facts of the field in the hopes that we can take some people who would be really talented in this field and get them to think, wow, I am undecided and I think that's the route that I want to go and I've had a substantial non negligible number of students come up and talk to me and actually end up in our department and being that you teach 11 and that's what happens and also it's greatly for engineering people, long engineers take my course and also I have spoken to a lot of people who are now college students computer science majors who took non majors course they were not going to do computing and they've gone on to do computer science once again I just want to emphasize it doesn't have to be, you can tell I know that most of you guys are all computer science majors it doesn't have to be for you to be counted as computing you don't have to be a computer science major you can be doing any computing, any kind of hardcore computing without having a degree in computing I don't know whether they agree these guys agree or not I feel that because I learned it all by myself when I did engineering there was any programming available the same way when I keep myself up to date by learning by myself likewise I've seen students, I've gone, I've invented students who are not computer science majors who are going to be doing computer science PhD, believe it or not they've not taken a single course probably in computer science department they are different majors some other majors and they are going on to do it's simply that it's simply that the realization is that we need to have representation in computing from all the fields I think that's a theme of the talk so you can have them over like maybe have them over in your club tell them about computing, maybe they take a couple of courses get interested maybe for masters they can do computing like that I totally agree with you about it, it's been an invasive computing but I think we still need to look at our majors and say it's not acceptable for majors to look like that I mean if we do a good job of reaching out and I completely agree I mean programming should be a service course the way the calculus is I think 10 years from now I was really disappointed to see in the dead end things that we didn't get really solid programming courses and there is an option because you guys know how powerful these tools are I mean these are the best tools for solving problems period you guys know the sort of superpowers that you require when you start to be able to learn how to write code you can do things that your friends and a bunch of other areas would find super useful and you can do them like millions of times faster and that to me is the thing that we need to get out there and get into the community and get everybody to use and I think that's one of the things we lose out when we lose diversity we lose, Chris touched on this a little bit before but I see computing as the most powerful tools for solving problems that we may have ever created in the history of the world the pretty press is up there so I want people to have this tool so they can solve problems and I want everybody to have this tool because we have a lot of interesting problems to solve and if the people that have this tool are white men who live in San Francisco then we're going to have a lot of car sharing services and very few apps that address hunger and poverty and inequality and other big societal problems that's sort of a stereotype about San Francisco but it's sort of true, it's a little sad it's like white San Francisco problems get solved by apps all the rest of us are sitting around still trying to figure out how to use words so I think as far as I'm concerned it's stuff that we can do in the park so for example somebody pointed this out in one of the earlier universities events maybe this has been fixed, maybe it hasn't but we didn't even have a three-year flow sheet up there showing somebody how they could get a degree in computer science in three years so it's like if you don't step on the 115 bus on day one as a freshman too bad this is a computer science degree you shouldn't have to immediately know on day one of your island campus what you want to do we need to have plans for people who figure this out a little bit later and want to get involved in computer science totally oversight we have as part of the Gen Ed thing we're going to start offering some freshman seminars in the first year which I think will be very cool if you guys want to do something simple find the faculty member of the department you know best and tell them I heard about these freshman seminars it would be awesome if you could teach one these are going to be 25 student classes I'm hoping this is the way it will look there's some discussion in the department about how we're going to handle this but I think it would be awesome if you came in in the first year and you had contact with the faculty member you could work on a particular set of problems in a small context and get started in the department in a way that's a little less anonymous than some of the huge courses that we teach but I also think we need to look at some of our intro courses and figure out how can we better attract students how can we in part of the success or failure of those courses has to be what the department folks like right because that's our moment that's the moment when we can find smart students, anybody on campus and show them what computers are like and get them hooked I just think this is the coolest stuff on earth, I think a lot of you guys agree and I think once people start to find out this stuff is incredibly powerful there are these incredible success stories at Harvard they teach intro computing like a real concentrator level introduction of computing in one semester to 800 students Harvard is about a quarter of the size of you so a quarter of their student body now takes this class 25% of students this is not a tech school and most of them are computer science majors this sort of speaks to what Veena was talking about in the base of people that participate but they learn how to build a website they learn how to build C programs, they do a bunch of cool things and they walk away from the class with a real useful skill that they can apply to bio or arts or whatever they want to do I think that I think if we could get there I don't necessarily want our department to get more time to talk to them although that would be awesome we also have to be willing to grow as a department if we're scared to grow what we're going to end up with or just the diagram of people who knew they wanted to do computer science and they showed up and I think that's another problem that we're having as a department is for a variety of reasons that I'm going to bore you with we're scared to grow I think we are sort of terrified of what would happen if we really succeeded and see people in computer science as the school and we ended up with three times as many people because we don't feel comfortable that the resources would be there to actually deliver the quality of education in the long run so we're all moving to that idea that we want to make people who are not familiar with computer science how useful it can be whether they want to go into the field of computer science or other fields and how it can actually be fun because a lot of times people feel like it's such a serious you know, kind of major something scary so it seems like kind of moving to how fun it is and how useful and powerful it can be would be something that might get more interest and get a better representation in our field and I also had an idea of the growth that something that was very important and I'm I guess kind of moving on to our last question for today before we open up the open forum to all you guys is what levels of diversity have you experienced throughout your time as a student and professionals I spent time in industry and you know, I work mainly with we have mechanical engineers and electrical engineers and my background is electrical like these and the ratio that we saw was first one we want to see I work in a research group, I can tell you that in my experience I work with a lot of research groups, nothing to do with computer science, outside computer science males and females and the one that sustained for the past five years we work so beautifully is all female you know, maybe all men will work like that I think it's simply that we kind of pitch in for each other and the way we plan things like going to conferences, how we make up for each other oh, it's unbelievable so usually when a research group is formed and we people work by the end of it we are done, that's how it works out I think many other times but this has been going on for the past five years it's not that we meet every day but it's simply that it's all female group and we kind of you know, understand each other very well and very nice products and come out of it it's a success story I feel and I also have another collaboration with another female I can tell you that she had a difficulty working with a male our department and so she came to me and we've had a couple of grants and we've been working on it very well so I think there's a I mean, the contribution of having a female in your group is always I think impactful I would say for a research and that is what many groups are missing out so that's why yeah, I mean I second these comments I remember when I was Harvard as a PhD student I took a job sort of as an RA that's probably the closest analog so I was going to be in the position where I was working closely with college students and it was a job that my wife and I both did we both loved but I remember feeling like this was the first time that I had really had a professional relationship with like a significant number of women because there were a lot of other women who were in this part of the staff for this particular house and it was really helpful for me and it really made me feel a lot weirder when I went back to my department because it was like you know, walk the halls here for days on end and I don't see very many women or any women sometimes and I don't know I think sometimes doing this is a challenge for the men in the audience, I think that our field is actually sort of in this little bit of a death spiral where there's so few women and it's so male dominated that we're producing a culture that's actually causing women to leak so even when we have one who joins the field and thinks it's really cool there's all these sad stories about them graduating they go out to the work place and many times they really once is too many and then they quit and so that and it's us and the way that we act and how we're treating people and I know myself that I'm sure I do lots of things like this and I wish I had someone around to sort of point out and I tried to learn a little bit about some of the things that men do that cause women to be uncomfortable and shut down with discussions and general language to be used and stuff like that but it's hard when you're around guys almost the time because you know there's certain things that you start to just think they're kind of normal they're kind of okay and those are things that are really in many cases very very difficult for women to put up with and they shouldn't have to fight because they're just their women so I think it's a good time so we can open up the floor to you guys I'm just to let you know we'll be ending exactly at 4.50 for anyone who has classes at 5 so please feel welcome so if anyone wanted to just kind of start off but they had a question first of all thanks for being on this panel taking that time out of your day to do this I think the last thing that was said really is the biggest takeaway and so I've gone to like other talks surrounding like diversity problems and things and they're just talks right like we can talk about this problem and get together and have these like pow wows but what can we do is a short term action to actually have an impact on this problem because like something that I've started doing recently is I've started defaulting into she when I talk about something or someone that I don't know gender so like if I'm talking about an engineer instead of saying like oh and he does this thing I'll say she does this thing which I think has like a small impact but it also shows a lot of care and carefulness in your addiction so what are other sort of things that we can do as a student students in the computer science department we can kind of publicize I would say publicize good things about computer science and ask them to come into computing I would say so tell them about the success stories that you know the male and the female and it is not that difficult to survive you can tell them all the good things about the department and you know and computing for them to get it and for the females I would say maybe you can spray I would say just ignore if somebody talks very harsh to you it's their problem it's not your problem so just ignore and carry on I would say that's something you should have a thick skin to survive in computer science I can tell you from my personal opinion so just ignore just do your best I think you can do very well so I would say just at creative what I do in my class I want to give away the secret I have my students here I just make sure I know every one of my female students personally I know them like for years to come where they seem sad and I call upon them in my class she is magnanimous she has never had a class she has never had a class in my class she has never taken a course in my life but I think I know her from the document we've had very heated arguments with the Gala and myself Friday afternoons I told her I promised her a job because we had a discussion at the end of it I didn't say I am going to take out a coin but I told her I will get you somewhere we have really nice discussions specifically I reach out to the female students and also not just male-female I think I don't want to even though this kin you see all these posted about the graduate students of Kallur so I also make sure every person who contributes to the diversity of the class is given personal attention I don't tell it out ever but I think I am just telling it to you I just make sure I know there I know Dalton and I do that it's not just the skin it's not just male-female it's also other kinds of things which is not noted in the university the person who is an extrovert all those things you just as a teacher pay attention to that not paying a lot of attention it should come organically you look at somebody how they talk, how they solve problems how they answer questions and then you pick them and make sure they are mentored so that's something that I do in my own way to contribute to the diversity and I am doing that I just go all out in my non-wage discourse the people who are contributing to the diversity I think let me try to give advice to the white guys and I am not perfect following the advice of myself but I will say for the white guys that are here you probably have a tendency to think that this is good that you are here and that maybe that means that you are somehow not part of the problem and I would say you are doing better than most by being here you are doing better than most by acknowledging this is a problem and I think those things are really important so even if all we do for the next couple of years with this group is just continue to identify that there is a problem I think that accomplishes something because it allows people from the outside it allows the women and the other minorities among us to at least recognize that we know that we are athletes this isn't the way we want things to be this is a feature, it is a bug we want it to go away, we will keep talking about it now at some point we need to actually do some stuff and actually show some part I think at least beginning is just going to take a little while so at least just identify that there is a problem and understanding that and be willing to acknowledge it is a step but I would also point out and I have learned this from reading accounts online with minorities in the field there are a lot of things that you probably do that you are not entirely aware of that end up turning people off and making it difficult for them to work with you so go out and read some of those and I would say if you are trying to do the right thing it is even more frustrating when you are doing these things inadvertently so it is hard to be like I do it all the time that is not what I meant I didn't mean to come off as aggressive and bossy I am just really excited about the project but I think reading some of those accounts from the other side will give you a little bit more context and will allow you to avoid doing things that have consequences that you don't want like if you want women to be comfortable working with you you want to be able to inspire groups of people that look differently than you and think differently than you and there is tools and approaches out there and there is some perspective that you can get to a lot of results the third thing I would say though and I think this is really important because there is a small number of people in this room and a large number of people aren't here we have to stop accepting this sort of behavior when we see other people doing it just stop say something point out when you feel like people are doing things that you are not comfortable with we can't expect the one woman on every engineering team to be constantly fighting these battles it is not fair to look at why women leave the field sometimes it is because of this they are constantly having to push their way into projects point out the things that they did really sort of work really hard to establish themselves in ways that men don't and part of your role can be to make sure that doesn't have to happen stick up for those people and help them feel included and also when you see people that are behaving in ways that are negative or have stereotypes about the field say something don't be a joke about it unless you want to be unless that person did something particularly egregious in which by all means go off on them because that is the right response but I think some of this is also just rooted in ignorance and other people have thought about these issues you ought to carefully I hope that the reason we have this problem isn't because 60% of the white men in this field are actively trying to get everybody else to believe that who knows maybe that's true that would be very sad but I don't think that's the case I just think in a lot of cases it's a small minority that behave badly and a lot of us don't understand how our actions are perceived and so if we can work on ourselves and not doing things unintentionally and also work to silence that small group and get that that's a portion of the field that I would be happy to see go with then we are going to over time we'll be doing a better job of creating an environment in the house that makes people feel comfortable I think we've focused a lot today on the fact that diversity, we're talking about gender we've heard members not just gender diversity goes far beyond that and I think we've focused on that almost a little too much today but I think we need to remember that as well and everything that we talked about that gender is important to make people feel diverse in general I think it was the easiest example to pick on a show it's representative it's a little obvious I sort of feel like it's step one let's do that first sort of discussion was there or discussion was there panel's not diversity you can't blame them although there is one guy with dress shoes not one guy with that so there's an aspect of diversity that we're on I'd like to know what do you think about the current course material and the flow sheet that we have for computer science how do you think this current flow sheet encourages students to be interested in computer science one thing that is perfect for me was that I'm a junior and I'm still learning to complement a semester basis there are a lot of predictions how do you think we can change that to help people to be interested in computer science so I I'll tell you first because I have strong feelings about this I think our computer science curriculum stinks it's terrible and this is one thing that you guys could actively help change tell somebody tell Aidong tell a treat if I might if I might don't even know my name faculty and I'm supposed to take over there's no supposed to there he's going to he's going to I'll arrange a life so one of the things that I've already started doing and I've talked to a lot many of you is how, what will you do to change we are starting off with it's not going to be a one-day process not probably not one semester for about one year to take us some time but we're going to definitely by fall we're going to start looking at all we want to look at the first year courses next semester the second year courses and so forth so that in two years starting from this fall we are basically doing the whole thing I am currently already soliciting comments on 113, 116 comments teaching API I'm more than happy to come and talk to want to meet face to face that's probably fine just send me an email lately about coming to school I'll be more than happy in fact if you have something to say I highly encourage you to contact me immediately because I'm working on a document that I'm going to introduce to you that I'm going to walk over this weekend and I'm going to take that one step further too I know that your comments were with regard to the program and immediate fixes are always nuts especially after you graduate and you're out maybe doing graduate work you're in the field you might look back and say wow they could have done a lot better had they done this this and this we're here contact us it doesn't stop when you get your diploma because industry alone will enlighten you to do a lot of things and that feedback is always welcome and encouraged and very helpful but overall I'm at your point I think I like a trees approach the thing that I hate the most about curriculum is there's way too many requirements and it's way too much of it our computer science curriculum is a computer engineering approach engineers are the people who show up on the first day of school and they give you the list of every course they're going to take for the next four years or four and a half years and there's like one or two blanks where you can fill in a couple of electives but other than that you're done computer science burgers are not supposed to be one it's supposed to be you take a couple of courses and then the rest of the department is open in front at Harvard there were like three required courses you took as an undergraduate and that point you could take it does in 15, 20 different hundred level courses in artificial intelligence networking operating systems all sorts of things here it's this year by year march through I think there's a lot of repetition in my opinion it's just way too sequence and that's terrible you guys don't get to take really cool classes you should be able to take the course and your software here are artificial intelligence and then do cool stuff with that in the future I would say you have to be very very careful about arranging everything in the three plus years beforehand so that finally when you're a senior it takes you to be cool not to denigrate the courses upstream because they're important I just think in some cases it's too many alright so it looks like it's working now so if anyone had to go here for you to go please walk out if you're here then please join us and drink so if you want to you're welcome to come and can you please give a clap for our everyone