Engaging undergraduate students in the study of ethics and technology is an important and difficult task for both computer science programs and individual instructors. Narratives, especially science fiction, have become a popular way to entice students to deeply engage with ethics topics. We detail experiences across six different institutions of implementing full-semester, part-semester, and single-lecture lessons from the recently-published book Computing and Technology Ethics: Engaging through Science Fiction. We provide an overview of both the book and related instructor materials; explaining how they can be used to effectively teach topics in ethics to undergraduate students in computing and technology development courses. We close by reflecting on how the book was received by students, and general suggestions for implementing ethics education across a range of institutional contexts.

The excitement around ChatGPT 3.5 underscores its potential to transform various fields in education, including STEM. However, we must approach these claims cautiously. While AI can enhance STEM education, there are ethical concerns and potential inaccuracies linked to unsupervised automated responses. To comprehensively evaluate ChatGPT's influence on STEM, we conducted a controlled experiment that involved answering a question set in mathematics and CS in a time-limited session. To avoid bias, we recruited four groups of math and CS students with similar abilities -each group comprised five students. Two groups utilized ChatGPT, while the other two did not. Students who used ChatGPT were tasked with explaining how and where they employed the tool. Conversely, students who did not use ChatGPT were asked to showcase their problem-solving process. We analyzed the responses from these four groups, alongside the analysis of ChatGPT conversations for those who employed ChatGPT. Performance, confidence level, and completion time of each participant were recorded. Experts in mathematics and CS were then consulted to review participant responses. These experts were subsequently interviewed to gain deeper insights and draw conclusive findings. Our findings show that students who didn't use ChatGPT in Mathematics scored better than those who did, Specifically, ChatGPT provided the correct working process but yielded a wrong final answer due to arithmetic mistakes. Similarly, in programming, ChatGPT led to less elegant code. Our findings provide valuable insights into the benefits and challenges of AI integration in these fields, helping educators and students to adapt to AI advancements.

This Birds of a Feather will begin with a high-level overview of the SIGCSE Reads 2024 books and then quickly move to discussion about mentoring students in the era of large language models and ChatGPT, including how students may value the curriculum differently, how learning outcomes may change, and how we can support students and alumni/ae as they work with rapidly changing job and learning expectations. We expect that many of the sessions at SIGCSE will address the radical shifts in learning outcomes and curricular changes due to LLMs. We will not focus on the particulars of these changes, but rather on mentoring in this time with Sister Resisters: Mentoring Black Women on Campus by Janie Victoria Ward and Tracy L. Robinson-Wood as a resource. How do we guide our students through the curriculum upheaval triggered by shifting learning outcomes? How do we help them prepare for the new instantiation of computer science?

Current Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, like Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, or Amazon's Alexa, continue to only support a small number of languages (English, Mandarin, Arabic, etc.), primarily those spoken in developed nations with abundant resources. While these languages have been able to reap the benefits of having such technology at their disposal, places like Ethiopia, and Vietnam are still far behind. This work represents a global collaboration to create a framework for customizing ASR systems for low resource languages (LRLs), or languages with limited human and financial resources. This paper describes the methodology for using an existing application (Kaldi) to implement an ASR system for two such languages, Amharic and Vietnamese, with the least amount of annotated speech. The languages are chosen to leverage available student expertise and create cross-cultural connections. The objective of the research is to create a procedure by which, given enough training records and annotation, any language can be added.

This special session furthers the work associated with SIGCSE Reads and the growing community of SIGCSE members who connect to each other through science fiction. This session extends the experiences of earlier sessions by addressing the global and cultural experiences that our students will face in the computing profession through examining works of fiction. The work of the special session will involve diving into the cultural context of this year's SIGCSE Reads stories with discussion about how this experience can be translated to the classroom, with the goal of better preparing students to consider their computing degrees and careers in a pluralistic, global, equitable and just context.

This special session furthers the work associated with SIGCSE Reads and the growing community of SIGCSE members who connect to each other through science fiction. This session extends the experiences of earlier sessions by incorporating a new ethical framework, capability ethics, that supports analysis at a societal level rather than a personal level. Updated materials will be available so that the exercise can be translated to other classrooms. Building on an initial description of ethical frameworks and how they have been used with earlier SIGCSE Reads stories, the exercise will be followed by discussion about new stories that provide additional challenges to both teachers and students, with the goal of better preparing students to consider their computing degrees and careers in a pluralistic, global, equitable and just context.

Computing professions are increasingly accessible through alternate educational pathways in addition to traditional undergraduate Computer Science bachelor's degrees (CSBach). In particular, coding bootcamps (CBC) are now widespread. In 2020, 42% of entry-level technology professionals entered the USA job market through the CBC pathway (25K CBC vs 34K CSBach). Despite the influx of CBC graduates, current literature lacks insight into technology professionals' retrospective thoughts on their chosen educational paths. In particular, what paths might a bootcamp graduate have taken with respect to their undergraduate degree? Would a CSBach graduate choose a CBC instead? During semi-structured interviews, a group of similar age, gender balanced CSBach (N=12) and CBC (N=19) graduates currently working in the technology industry were asked if they would have skipped college for a CBC. Upon reflection, the CSBach participants would repeat their undergraduate degrees and majors. Of the fourteen bootcamp graduates who also held non-CS bachelor's degrees, eight reported that they would not have forgone their undergraduate experience but would have instead majored in CS (N=7) or taken CS classes (N=1). Of the remaining six bootcamp graduates who completed college, three would have bypassed college in lieu of a CBC and three were unsure. Finally, the five CBC graduates who did not attend (N=2) or complete (N=3) college would still not obtain any bachelor's degree. Regardless of current considerations, however, CBC graduates felt no more unprepared than their CSBach peers.

Research shows a sense of belonging increases the likelihood of undergraduate computer science retention, though literature currently lacks a coding bootcamp perspective. The qualitative study described in this poster found that men maintained a mostly consistent sense of belonging in four-year computer science programs and coding bootcamps while women had a heightened sense of belonging in coding bootcamps compared to four-year computer science programs. However, men's sense of belonging was impacted by intrinsic factors such as chronically feeling like an outcast, whereas women's was entirely impacted by extrinsic factors such as classroom gender composition and their program's culture. Gender nonconforming bootcamp graduates were impacted by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

This special session furthers the work associated with SIGCSE Reads and the growing community of SIGCSE members who connect to each other through science fiction. The goal of this session is to provide a practical experience addressing one of the five common goals presented previously: a learning experience for participants in how science fiction can be used in computing classrooms to teach ethics and develop CS students' facility for considering ethical situations with deeper critical thinking. Materials will be available so that the exercise can be translated to other classrooms. By providing this experience in a virtual format, participants will be able to translate it to their own setting, whether virtual or face-to-face. Building on an initial description of ethical frameworks, the exercise will be followed by discussion about ways to adapt, adjust and modify the exercise to incorporate other fictional works, to fit into a variety of courses, or to address different levels of learners.

This special session furthers the work associated with SIGCSE Reads and the growing community of SIGCSE members who connect to each other through science fiction. The session starts with a practical experience addressing one of the five common goals presented previously: a learning experience for participants in how science fiction can be used in computing classrooms to teach ethics and develop CS students' facility for considering ethical situations with deeper critical thinking. Materials will be available so that the exercise can be translated to other classrooms. This will be followed by a significant Q & A session with one of this year's authors, Hugo Award winner David D. Levine, whose short story "Damage" addresses questions of ethical decision making by an AI.

About twice a year, typically at the start of a new semester, the SIGCSE community listserv comes alive with a discussion of tools for grading. This panel formed from a challenge to submit novel perspectives on grading. Of the dozen replies posted within 48 hours, the assembled panelists provide differing perspectives on the same point: let's return to building tools and methodologies for teaching rather than focusing on grading

This special session will allow discussion of how many common goals of CS educators (conveying core CS concepts, creating community for our students, discussing ethics, etc.) can be furthered through the use of literature in CS courses. We will present five goals which are common in CS education, and discuss how incorporating literature relates to them. We will present small case studies showing concrete examples of assignments and courses which have successfully utilized literature in common, core CS courses. We will showcase a Q & A with author Naomi Kritzer, winner of the 2016 Hugo Award for her short story "Cat Pictures Please".

Have you read any of the common reads for SIGCSE 2017? Now's your chance to talk about them! Two novels: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage: The Mostly True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua (Pantheon Graphic Novels, 2015) and The Martian by Andy Weir (Broadway Books, 2014) as well as a short story: "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov (Science Fiction Quarterly, 1956) were proposed at the end of the 2016 conference. If you're interested in science fiction, whether on a personal, academic, or pedagogical level, come join us in this BoF and discuss one or more of the two books and short story. We'll provide potential topics and discussion questions targeting how to incorporate these books into a CS course, but the discussion will be open. The BoF will close with a discussion of potential books for the 2018 conference.

A common refrain from Senior Exit Surveys and Alumni Surveys is the desire to work on "real-world," "practical" and "hands-on" projects using industry-ready tools and development environments. To assuage this, institutions have moved towards adopting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as an avenue to provide meaningful, applied learning interventions to students. Through these experiences, students benefit from engagement with various communities including: the community of contributors to the FOSS project; the community of local software developers; the community of citizens who reside in the local area; the community of students at their institution and others; and, the community of people impacted by the FOSS project. These engagements motivate students, enhance their communication and technical skills, allow them to grow and become more confident, help them form professional networks, and provide the "real-world" projects they seek. In this panel, we will discuss our experiences in engaging students with five different types of communities as part of incorporating FOSS into our courses, focusing on how other educators can provide the same benefits to their students as well. In order to satisfy the time constraints of the panel, the last two authors will present together.

Are you interested in incorporating some of your favorite science fiction in your classes? Did you know it can help improve student interest in the technical topic? Come join us as we talk about ways to connect SciFi to artificial intelligence, robotics, networking, intellectual property, and other topics. We'll start with overviews of how we've used SciFi and have plenty of time for discussion of new works and old that connect to the material we need to cover, while drawing students into the content and the field.

Retaining students in computer science majors has been a persistent topic among computer science educators for almost two decades. Researchers have examined the relationship between belonging and engagement, self-efficacy, retention and persistence. Our quantitative research suggests that a student's sense of belonging is related to a student's perception of his ability, possibly more so than to actual performance. Our qualitative analysis further suggests that feelings of belonging can influence students' attitudes toward the mutability of ability, based on conversation and support from their academic and non-academic communities. Supporting a student's sense of belonging both to the discipline and their supportive communities can improve the academic resilience of computer science students, thus improving retention.

Responses from open-ended survey questions regarding undergraduate students' connections to community were collected from five different institutions, ranging from a large research institution in the Pacific Northwest to a small teaching college in the Northeast. Our results show that, regardless of institution or U.S. geographical location, STEM students felt connected to family more than any other community in their undergraduate experience. At institutions where faith plays a role in the institutional mission and culture, connections to religious organizations (especially church) were a close second in the strong connections to community that students reported in their lives. Across institutions, friends played a strong role in the communities in which students participated, and traditional extracurricular activities (non-academic clubs within the institution itself) also provided a significant source of connection for many students.

Recent studies have shown that the Tonal Center of Gravity is a better classifier than F0 Turning Points for at least two contrastively timed pitch accents in American English intonation contours. Within this framework, a binary F0 weighting function derived from the F0 contour can be used instead of the natural F0 contour without a degradation in discrimination performance. This success has important implications for speech synthesis. Just as we can capture the functional equivalence of a multitude of auditorily distinct F0 contour shapes in terms of their mapping to a single parameter (the TCoG) via a set of binary weighting functions, this same mapping could be run in reverse as a source to generate natural-sounding variability in speech synthesis.

The use of science fiction (SF) to engage students in computer science learning is becoming more popular [1-6]. There is ample material available to help both undergraduate and graduate students make connections between technical content and human experience, from Star Trek to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to 2001: A Space Odyssey to I, Robot and many others. Fiction can be included in technical courses or used to draw students into the field in introductory classes. The panelists, who represent a range of schools, perspectives and classes, will present brief overviews (5-8 minutes) of how they have used science fiction to engage students in technical topics as well as ethical and societal issues related to computing. After the overviews, there will be plenty of time for discussion of examples used within the community and ways to make connections between science fiction and particular classes or topics. We will be gathering additional examples from the discussion and making them available online.

Retaining students in computer science (CS) majors has been a persistent topic among CS educators for almost two decades. Discussion and research has largely focused on improving student engagement in the academic experience in order to provide a more welcoming and compelling introduction to the field. Research has identified a wide variety of factors affecting student engagement in general, which in turn affects key outcomes including academic achievement, retention and persistence. Feeling connected to a community and sense of belonging can substantially influence student engagement. Our study suggests that this sense of belonging can also help mitigate student perceptions that influence them to be discouraged, especially about their ability to succeed, and leave computer science. In particular, support from extra-curricular as well as academic communities may lead students to perceive that ability is not a binary, fixed constraint, but a malleable gradient that can be influenced by factors within the student's control.

Recent studies of the acoustic correlates of various prosodic elements in American English, such as prominence (in the form of phrase-level pitch accents and word-level lexical stress) and boundaries (in the form of boundary-marking tones), have begun to clarify the nature of the acoustic cues to different types and levels of these prosodic markers. This study focuses on the importance of controlling for context in such investigations, illustrating the effects of adjacent context by examining the cues to H* and L* pitch accent in early and late position in the Intonational Phrase, and how these cues vary when the accented syllable is followed immediately by boundary tones. Results show that F0 peaks for H* accents occur significantly earlier in words that also carry boundary tones, and that energy patterns are also affected; some effects on voice quality measures were also noted. Such findings highlight the caveat that the context of a particular prosodic target may significantly influence its acoustic correlates.

In this paper, we explore acoustic correlates of pitch accent and main lexical stress in American English, and the interaction of these cues with other factors that affect prosody. In a controlled study, we varied presence or absence and type of pitch accent (L ∗ vs H∗), boundary-related tone sequence (L-L % vs. H-H%) and gender of the talker, for the sentence “Dagada gave Bobby doodads”. The measures were duration, F0 (fundamen-tal frequency), H∗1−H∗2 (related to open quotient), and H∗1−A∗3 (related to spectral tilt). Contour approximations were used to analyze time-course movements of these measures. For “Da-gada ” we found that, consistent with earlier literature, a) H∗ and L ∗ pitch accents showed different F0 contours, b) pitch-accented syllables were longer than unaccented ones, c) stressed “ga ” syllables had lower H∗1 −H∗2 values than surrounding un-stressed syllables, and for male talkers, lower H∗1 −A∗3 values, indicating lesser spectral tilt. Unexpectedly, F0 maxima asso-ciated with an H ∗ accent occurred most of the time later in the accented syllable than F0 minima associated with L∗. The cues to lexical stress were consistent with or without pitch ac-cent (e.g. lower H∗1 −H∗2), but they sometimes interacted with gender and/or boundary tones: for example, lower H∗1 − A∗3 in stressed “ga ” syllables was only found for female talkers in unaccented cases, and some cues of both accent and stress were less pronounced in the final word “doodads”, which also carried boundary-related tones. Index Terms: voice source, prosody, voice quality 1.

The relative size and location of prosodic phrase boundaries provides an important cue for resolving syntactic ambiguity, and can be used to improve the accuracy of automatic speech understanding. This paper describes an approach to scoring candidate sentence hypotheses and associated parses using prosodic phrase cues. Specifically, for each hypothesized parse, prosodic breaks are automatically detected and the probability of these breaks given the parse is computed based on a stochastic model of the prosody/syntax relationship. The parse probability can be used to rank sentence hypotheses and associated parses, optionally in combination with other scores. Both the prosodic break recognition algorithm and the prosody/syntax model can be automatically trained and can therefore be designed specifically for different speaking styles or task domains, given appropriate labeled data. We have demonstrated the potential of this approach in experiments with a corpus of ambiguous sentences spoke...

A simple computational model for predicting phrase boundaries from text is described. The hierarchical structure of the model is based on linguistic theory, and the model itself is probabilistic. The probabilistic component is important for several reasons: it can capture the fact that the same sequence of words can be produced with a variety of prosodic contours (some more likely than others), it allows for automatic training of the model, and it provides a mechanism for combining a prosodic component with other knowledge sources. Results are presented for the model, trained and evaluated on a database of FM radio news.>