 | Level: Introductory Scott Laningham (scottla@us.ibm.com), Podcast Editor, IBM developerWorks
06 Mar 2007 A variety of educators and thought leaders share their views on the challenges and promises of computer science education today.
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This is the first in a series of conversations on the state of computer science education today. This entry features two conversations, the first with J. Strother Moore and Greg Lavender from The University of Texas at Austin, recognized as a top 10 school for computer science in the United States. The second interview is with Laura Baker, professor of computer science at St. Edward's University, a smaller private college, also in Austin. All reflect on how far their programs have come since the dot-com bust of 2000, and on the evolving and increasingly important role of computer science education.
Listen to Moore and Lavender (29:24)
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Listen to Baker (13:00)
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Read Part 1 of the transcript
Read Part 2 of the transcript
About the interviewees 
J. Strother Moore holds the Admiral B.R. Inman Centennial Chair in Computing Theory at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is also department chair. He is the author of many books and papers on automated theorem proving and mechanical verification of computing systems. He is co-author of The Boyer-Moore theorem prover and The Boyer-Moore fast string searching algorithm. With Matt Kaufmann, he is co-author of the ACL2 theorem prover. Moore received his doctorate from The University of Edinburgh in 1973 and his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1970. He was a co-founder of Computational Logic Inc. and served as its chief scientist for 10 years. He and Bob Boyer were awarded the Current Prize in Automatic Theorem Proving by the American Mathematical Society in 1991, and they were awarded the Herbrand Award in 1999. In 2005, Boyer, Moore, and Kaufmann won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software System Award for the Boyer-Moore theorem prover. Moore is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), an ACM Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. 
Greg Lavender is associate chair for academics in the computer science department at The University of Texas at Austin, a position he has held since June 2004. He has been an adjunct faculty member in the department since 1994, while working for various technology R&D organizations. He has 23 years' experience in Internet protocols and software R&D. Previously, he was a senior director of software engineering and division-level CTO within the software business unit of Sun Microsystems. From 1991 to 1994, he was a research scientist at the MCC research consortium in Austin, where he conducted R&D on agent-based distributed computing systems and co-developed a concurrent object-oriented actor language called Rosette. Since 1994, he has co-founded and served as chief scientist for two startup companies focused on Internet technologies. He was vice president of technology for Innosoft International, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in March 2000. He received the 2001-2002 Outstanding Young Alumnus Award from the College of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech and has served on the advisory board of the department of computer science at Virginia Tech since 2002. 
Laura Baker has been teaching at St. Edward's University since 1989. She began teaching there as an instructor hired to assist with the university's retraining effort with IBM® that was started in 1988. She then moved into a tenure-track faculty position in 1995, received tenure in 2000, and promotion to full professor in 2005. She holds a doctorate from The University of Texas at Austin in science education and is currently paper/program chair for Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, South-Central Region, as well as vice chair for computer sciences section at The Texas Academy of Science. Research interests include artificial intelligence, expert systems, and computer science education.
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Duration
22:16
Get the podcast | Description | Name | Size | Download method |
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| Interview, Part 1 |  cm-int030607a | 12MB | HTTP |
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| Interview, Part 2 | cm-int030607b | 12MB | HTTP |
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| Transcript, Part 1 | cm-int030607atxt | | HTTP |
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| Transcript, Part 2 | cm-int030607btxt | | HTTP |
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Resources
Podcast credits | 
| | Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician. |
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