The internal Fall 2025 meeting schedule is here. This page lists external/guest speakers’ talk abstracts.
November 21, 2025: Integrating Generative AI into an Undergraduate CS Curriculum (Eric Shaffer, UIUC)
Time and Location: Jarvis Auditorium, Grimes Engineering Center; November 21, 2025, 12:00-13:00The widespread availability and popularity of LLM applications is a critical issue for higher education. This talk will describe current efforts to adapt undergraduate Computer Science education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to the era of generative AI. I will describe changes to our core software development courses in both instruction and assessment. In addition, I will touch on plans for larger curricular changes and piloting the use of LLMs in support of pedagogy. While these changes are very new, I will go over some preliminary data we have gathered related to them. My hope is that this talk will generate an engaging discussion and exchange of ideas on how best to address generative AI educationally.
Speaker bio: Eric Shaffer is the Director for Undergraduate Programs at the Siebel School for Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is also an Associate Teaching Professor and the lead instructor for a number of courses involving visual computing, including Interactive Computer Graphics, Scientific Visualization, and Game Development. His research interests include education, visualization, and scientific computing.
Previous meeting schedules
- Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024 (different tabs on this spreadsheet)
Spring 2023 meetings (in person)
- Feb 3: new faces, project updates
- Feb 17: SIGCSE demo/talk dry runs #1
- Karim El-Refai and Daewon Kwon, Twincode pair programming framework
- March 3: SIGCSE demo/talk dry runs #2
- Fuzail Shakir: The effect of “flextension” policies on CS students’ self-efficacy and performance
- March 17: no meeting (SIGCSE 2023)
- March 31: no meeting (Spring Break)
- April 14: Fuzail Shakir [missed]
- April 21: Victor Huang, Fuzail Shakir, announcements from soon-to-be-alumni of ACELab
- April 28: Eliane Wiese, University of Utah: Human-centered design meets CS education
(Zoom link) How can we integrate ethics into technical courses in a meaningful and productive way? How can we help CS students write code that is more readable to other humans? What do these questions have to do with each other? I will present key principles of research on learning, and discuss how they relate to typical human factors research. I will present structure choices (patterns) that I found to be common in student code that affect a program’s readability and maintainability, and, in some cases, may also indicate shallow understanding of computing concepts. I will also present a second line of work on ethics. Ethics problems with tech are easy to find on the front pages of newspapers, resulting in calls to integrate ethics across the CS curriculum. But the topics in undergrad courses are far removed from the issues in the headlines. Even in AI, students are learning about A* search, not about making self-driving cars safer. I will present an instructional design approach that integrates ethics with this type of low-level technical content, show how the inclusion of ethics can deepen technical learning. After the talk, Eliane will be available for continued discussion (via Zoom) 1-on-1 or in small groups. A signup schedule will be posted here shortly. Bio: Eliane Wiese is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. She was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley, advised by Dr. Marcia Linn (with bonus mentorship from Dr. Armando Fox). Dr. Wiese earned her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where she was advised by Dr. Ken Koedinger and awarded an Institute of Education Sciences fellowship. As an undergrad at Columbia, she combined a major in computer science and teacher training. Dr. Wiese uses approaches from human-computer interaction and educational psychology to design new systems to support students in learning computer science, and in particular to consider the impact that technology has on other humans.
Summer 2022 meetings (Zoom link), every other Monday at noon Pacific time
2022-06-27 Summer checkin, who’s who
Who is new to the group/looking for projects, who’s working on what, set schedule for rest of summer2022-07-11 Aslı Akalin
Aslı will present highlights of results from the experiments about potential gender bias in pair programming conducted at UC Berkeley and the University of Seville, Spain. Paper to appear in ESEM 2022 (Intl. Conf. on Empirical Software Engineering & Measurement). Undergrads Karim El-Refai and Daewon Kwon (rising sophomores) have been heavily involved in this work recently and we’re looking for ideas for future work directions too.2022-07-25 SIGCSE 2023 plans (full-paper abstracts 12 Aug, deadline 19 Aug; posters/demos have later deadlines)
- Armando will talk briefly about the ACELab website, and give a few highlights from ITiCSE 2022
- Victor Huang has been CS375 GSI with Armando twice (Fall 22 will be 3rd time) and has run Summer CS375 “boot camp” for years. Victor and Armando are looking at reporting on CS375 for SIGCSE. Victor will present some possible threads/ideas around which to structure the paper; we’re looking for feedback on the topics/organization.
- [others – add your SIGCSE submission plans here – specify if paper, poster, demo, etc]