Personal Statement

This is my thirtieth year of teaching -- eleven at the middle and high school level and nineteen at the college level. During that time I have experienced many changes, not only in how I teach and where I teach, but also in what I teach. The one constant that has remained throughout is the love I have for working with students. This continues to motivate me to teach. Although I have many short-comings as a teacher, there have been several things I have been able to accomplish over the past few years that are particularly important to me.

I have managed to remain current in my field. As you know, Computer Science is an ever-changing discipline, probably changing faster and more dramatically than any other field. I have spent the time and energy necessary to keep up with those changes, in order to make sure that our students are the best prepared they can be. The best example of this is the explosive popularity of doing business on the Internet. Although not a huge fan of the Internet, I realized that our students needed to know how to properly set up an online business and guard it against hackers. I learned all I could, and then tried out my newly acquired knowledge by offering to set up businesses online, including some real estate companies. In so doing, I learned that the business people themselves needed a tool that would let them update and change their business products (add new products, change prices, remove products, etc.) and the tool must be easy to use -- no knowledge of computing required beyond simply using the Internet. So I developed a course based on my experiences. CS3114 Special Topics in CS: Perl and CGI has been taught the previous two years and has been very successful. In the course the students must set up a business online that allows the user to search for products with specific criteria and buy online. They must also write the software that allows the business person to automatically respond to the purchase (delete from inventory, email reply, update databases, etc.). But more importantly, they must write the software that allows the business person to easily maintain the site from a web browser. This ability is highly desirable by clients, especially if they are not computer oriented. However, it is very unusual to find this offered with e-commerce software. The web design group that designed Transy's web site does not even offer this service yet, although they claim to be moving in that direction. An example of one of the student's business sites (Kevin Spicer's) may be found at http://www.cs.transy.edu/kspicer/business . The site administator's software may be demonstrated by using my user id (tgarrett) and the password: tterragt. As a footnote, there is a CS Masters' student at U.K. receiving an M.S. degree this fall for just such a project (minus the updating software!)

Computer Graphics is another area in which I have had to work very hard to keep up to date. Whenever the hardware has changed, it has directly influenced the algorithms that are used in graphics. Thus, faster processors, more powerful graphics' accelerators, and cheaper memory have all combined to change the content of both Computer Science I and II. Only about 30% of what I teach today is the same as what I taught even three years ago in graphics.

I have successfully worked with students ranging in age from elementary students through seasoned IBM employees. Even after moving to college teaching, I have spent some time each year working with public schools. Naturally it began with high schools, but during the past few years I have been working with elementary students, mostly fourth and fifth graders. I usually do a program on Fractals in conjunction with a school's Math Day. However, one school in particular, Meadowthorpe Elementary, began inviting me back on a regular basis. Last year I visited the school four times, teaching a two-hour session each time. My photo with the class was included in the yearbook! Click to see it. I also corresponded with some students via email even after school was out. At the other end of the student spectrum, I have had the opportunity to have many students in class who had been actively working in the computing field for many years, yet were returning to school to get a degree or to get more formal training in the area. It is a great source of pride to me that I have been able to work successfully with this group as well.

I have worked to develop a lab for Computer Science students and to update the Computer Science curriculum. Over the past three years, we have implemented a lab for CS students where they use the Unix operating system on workstations. This has allowed our students to gain much needed experience with another operating system, and has allowed us to use it as a teaching lab as well. The Computer Science program is able to offer courses dealing with timely issues in CS, in addition to maintaining a core curriculum of courses necessary for all majors. I have worked to have courses in various aspects of networking available for our students. This is the most important topic in CS today, and finding teachers for it is not easy. I am extremely happy that we will be able to offer Networking next semester, being taught by a '97 Transy graduate who now has a graduate degree in CS and works at IBM. I have also worked to provide networking and large scale distributed computing courses to our students through businesses in Germany. We spent May Term, 1995, in Munich working with persons from Siemens and Intelligent Communications Software. We are planning the same sort of experience for May, 2000. I have also worked to strengthen the curriculum with respect to preparation for graduate schools. We are trying to encourage more of our students to attend graduate programs rather than immediately go into the work force. We have added two courses to our major requirements to specifically help prepare our students for this possiblity: Discrete Computer Math and Senior Seminar: Algorithms.For more information, please see the Computer Science Program Review of 1998.

I have played a part in the Faculty Technology Initiative to Enhance Learning. One of my most rewarding experiences has been as co-director of Transy's Faculty Technology Initiative. This has allowed me to work directly with eleven faculty members during the summer of 1999. It has also given me the opportunity for input into what I think is important for faculty who are learning to use technology in different ways.

I have been able to keep up with research in my particular area of computer science. The area of my research deals with imaging (scientific visualization of data) and design. During the last two years especially, I have made significant progress toward a potentially valuable solution to a problem. The problem is how to accurately produce an image of something for which you have only partial data. For example, in medical imaging it is important to produce images for which it is only able to obtain scattered data points. The computer must be used to "fill in the blanks" in such a way as to make a usuable image. How the blanks are filled in is the role of the computer scientist. Curiously, the same algorithms can sometimes be used for design of objects as well. Recently, I was made aware of the fact that our algorithm may have even more important applications in the area of speech recognition. My software has proved very successful so far in accurately reproducing sound waves when only a few data points on the wave were saved. This could be important because audio files are very large, even after using compression algorithms. Our algorithm indicates that the actual points that need to be saved are much fewer than anyone thought. However, this research deserves more time than I am able to commit to it. Therefore I am in the process of turning over my software and findings to a professor at U.K. who has a huge grant and several graduate students to continue the work on it. He will be able to take it to the next level. Still, it is a source of great satisfaction to me that I have been involved with this research from the inception of the algorithm. There is a possiblity that I may continue working with it, although in a different capacity.

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