CSC Colloquium: Elliot Koffman
When: Monday, April 28, 2008 at 04:30 PMThis presentation is part of our department colloquium series. Everyone is invited to attend.
Programming Languages for CS1: A Personal Odyssey
Dr. Elliot Koffman, Temple University - Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Abstract:
During the last 40 years as a student and faculty member in Computer Science I have been involved in teaching, learning, and writing textbooks for over ten different programming languages. Each new language was used because of a particular set of features it provided to solve today's critical problem in programming or software development. This talk will discuss these languages and the extent to which they succeeded in solving these problems.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Elliot Koffman, Temple University - Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Elliot Koffman is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at Temple University and has been on that faculty since 1974. Previously he was an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Connecticut (1969-1974). His early research was in Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Tutoring Systems. He has written textbooks for Computer Science since 1974, authoring or co-authoring textbooks with a problem solving emphasis for the introductory programming course for CS majors (CS1) in several programming languages including Fortran, BASIC, Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, C, C++, and Java. He has also written textbooks for the first Data Structures course (CS2) in Pascal, C++, and Java. He was the chairman of the ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) from 1987 to 1991 and also chaired the ACM task force to revise the CS1 and CS2 courses from 1983 to 1985.
Koffman received the SB and SM degrees in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. in 1964 and the Ph.D. degree in Engineering from Case Institute of Technology in 1967. After graduation, he served as a Captain in the United States Army until 1969, assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is currently the Program Director of the Undergraduate Program in Computer Science at Temple University.
Refreshments will be served in MSC 159 after the talk.
