Christelle Scharff
Pace University, Computer Science, Faculty Member
Research Interests: Environmental Science, Mobile Technology, Forest fire, Applications, Global Warming, and 15 moreMobile Application, Environmental Sciences, Educational, Environmental Issues, Fossil Fuels, Apps, Mobile Web, Mobile phone, Multidisciplinary Team, Human Interaction, Mobile Solutions, Multidisciplinary Teams, Heat Wave, Energy Source, and Computer Sciences
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ABSTRACT We consider the problem of efficiently building extended canonizers, which are capable of solving the uniform word problem for some first-order theories. These reasoning artifacts have been introduced in previous work to solve... more
ABSTRACT We consider the problem of efficiently building extended canonizers, which are capable of solving the uniform word problem for some first-order theories. These reasoning artifacts have been introduced in previous work to solve the lack of modularity of Shostak combination schema while retaining its efficiency. It is known that extended canonizers can be modularly combined to solve the uniform word problem in unions of theories. Unfortunately, little is known about efficiently implementing such canonizers for component theories, especially those of interest for verification like, e.g., those of uninterpreted function symbols or lists. In this paper, we investigate this problem by adapting and combining work on rewriting-based decision procedures for satisfiability in first-order theories and SER graphs, a graph-based method defined for abstract congruence closure. Our goal is to build graph-based extended canonizers for theories which are relevant for verification. Based on graphs our approach addresses implementation issues that were lacking in previous rewriting-based decision procedure approaches and which are important to argue the viability of extended canonizers.
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ABSTRACT We present a graph-based method for constructing a congruence closure of a given set of ground equalities that combines the key ideas of two well-known approaches, completion and abstract congruence closure, in a natural way by... more
ABSTRACT We present a graph-based method for constructing a congruence closure of a given set of ground equalities that combines the key ideas of two well-known approaches, completion and abstract congruence closure, in a natural way by relying on a specialized and optimized version of the more general, but less efficient, SOUR graphs. This approach allows for efficient implementations and a visual presentation that better illuminates the basic ideas underlying the construction of congruence closures and clarifies the role of original and extended signatures and the impact of rewrite techniques for ordering equalities.
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We present a concurrent Completion procedure based on the use of a SOUR graph as data structure. The procedure has the following characteristics. It is asynchronous, there is no need for a global memory or global control, equations are... more
We present a concurrent Completion procedure based on the use of a SOUR graph as data structure. The procedure has the following characteristics. It is asynchronous, there is no need for a global memory or global control, equations are stored in a SOUR graph with maximal structure sharing, and each vertex is a process, representing a term. Therefore, the parallelism
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In the university setting, global software development (GSD) projects involve teams of students distributed across several countries and working collaboratively on the development of software artifacts and software. Students are... more
In the university setting, global software development (GSD) projects involve teams of students distributed across several countries and working collaboratively on the development of software artifacts and software. Students are confronted with issues related to distance, time and culture. In 2014, students from the State University of Zanzibar in Tanzania and Pace University in the US united in the annual GSD project to develop mobile apps targeting the Tanzanian context. In this paper, we focus on the roles and experience with GSD of Tanzanian students. We describe their motivations for participating, the challenges they encountered, and what they learned. We explore how GSD can be used to speed up skills acquisition for both entrepreneurs and IT professionals in developing countries. The results we present are useful for academic institutions, tech hubs and capacity building organizations.
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ABSTRACT The term 'mobile instructional laboratory' refers to using mobile computing devices such as notebooks for transforming a classroom into a lab setting with the goal of enhancing the practical experience,... more
ABSTRACT The term 'mobile instructional laboratory' refers to using mobile computing devices such as notebooks for transforming a classroom into a lab setting with the goal of enhancing the practical experience, interaction and understanding. A major goal in all the computing disciplines is to provide students with hands on activities that will enhance their learning of concepts and their professional experience. As such, CS and IT programs require investments in dedicated laboratories that will support applied activities for most of the courses. Unfortunately, space and other resource limitations usually do not allow for permanent creation of such labs. In parallel, current educational philosophy suggests that increased student-student and student-faculty interaction and active learning in the classroom are helpful in increasing students' understanding of the topics. Consequently instructors are employing techniques that facilitate the interaction and self discovery and rely on technology for support. In both cases, mobile instructional laboratories are a valuable solution.
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The Billion Oyster Project and Curriculum and Community Enterprise for the Restoration of New York Harbor with New York City Public Schools (BOP-CCERS) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF) supported initiative and collaboration... more
The Billion Oyster Project and Curriculum and Community Enterprise for the Restoration of New York Harbor with New York City Public Schools (BOP-CCERS) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF) supported initiative and collaboration of multiple institutions and organizations led by Pace University. The NSF project, Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST), had generated a large amount of data through engagement with teachers and students throughout New York City public schools. One purpose of this project is to engage with middle and high school science teachers to assist them in using project-based learning and real-world data collection in their classrooms with their students through harbor restoration initiatives. It was found that Underrepresented Minority (URM) students reported having higher levels of interest in STEM and science than did the non-URM students. While this is a success, it was found that the URM students had lower expectations for...
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ABSTRACT Data Mining, as defined in 1996 by Piatetsky-Shapiro ([1]) is a step (crucial, but a step nevertheless) in a KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Data Bases) process. The Piatetsky-Shapiro’s definition states that the KDD process consists... more
ABSTRACT Data Mining, as defined in 1996 by Piatetsky-Shapiro ([1]) is a step (crucial, but a step nevertheless) in a KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Data Bases) process. The Piatetsky-Shapiro’s definition states that the KDD process consists of the following steps: developing an understanding of the application domain, creating a target data set, choosing the data mining task i.e. deciding whether the goal of the KDD process is classification, regression, clustering, etc..., choosing the data mining algorithm(s), data preprocessing, data mining (DM), interpreting mined patterns, deciding if a re-iteration is needed, and consolidating discovered knowledge.
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... http://atlantis.seidenberg.pace.edu/wiki/gsd2010. (Last accessed in March 2011). 4. ... Environment". Proc. of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2001), Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 12-19, 2001.... more
... http://atlantis.seidenberg.pace.edu/wiki/gsd2010. (Last accessed in March 2011). 4. ... Environment". Proc. of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2001), Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 12-19, 2001. 13. ...
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Our ITiCSE 2002 working group 'Materials Development in Support of Mathematical Thinking' identified the development of an on-line repository as the best mechanism for organizing and disseminating materials promoting mathematical... more
Our ITiCSE 2002 working group 'Materials Development in Support of Mathematical Thinking' identified the development of an on-line repository as the best mechanism for organizing and disseminating materials promoting mathematical thinking in computer science education.
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Developing mobile applications is a challenging endeavor where technology and creativity are essential. Agile methodologies seem to be particularly adapted to the development of mobile applications; mobile applications have a limited... more
Developing mobile applications is a challenging endeavor where technology and creativity are essential. Agile methodologies seem to be particularly adapted to the development of mobile applications; mobile applications have a limited scope and user interaction and time to market are particularly important. In this paper, we describe a study that evaluates the use of Scrum for software success in mobile
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We study the .NET platform, various .NET languages and their interoperability (with an emphasis on C# and SML .NET), compare C# and Java 1.5, and develop related educational material to be used in a Programming Paradigms course.... more
We study the .NET platform, various .NET languages and their interoperability (with an emphasis on C# and SML .NET), compare C# and Java 1.5, and develop related educational material to be used in a Programming Paradigms course. Introducing .NET - one platform supporting different paradigms - in such a course seems to be a unique experience in Computer Science Education. It may be a motivating factor for students to learn new programming languages.
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... 1 Guillaume Maillard, ILM Informatique, Abbeville, France, [email protected] 2 Loic Geeraerts, ILM Informatique, Abbeville, France, [email protected] 3 Christelle Scharff, Ivan G. Seidenberg School of Computer Science and... more
... 1 Guillaume Maillard, ILM Informatique, Abbeville, France, [email protected] 2 Loic Geeraerts, ILM Informatique, Abbeville, France, [email protected] 3 Christelle Scharff, Ivan G. Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Pace University, New ...
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ABSTRACT The software development process would benefit from computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools built on the Tablet PC technology. We developed an open source Tablet PC application called TabletERD. TabletERD supports the... more
ABSTRACT The software development process would benefit from computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools built on the Tablet PC technology. We developed an open source Tablet PC application called TabletERD. TabletERD supports the database design process, assists database designers in drawing entity relationships diagrams (ERD), and generating associated SQL and XML code and data dictionaries. TabletERD is available at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tableterd and will be used in a database design course starting in fall 2006
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This paper presents a study of mobile device literacy in Senegal within the context of the AppliCafé project. Research in this area has been mostly conducted in Anglophone countries. We designed a kiosk structure that we call AppliCafé... more
This paper presents a study of mobile device literacy in Senegal within the context of the AppliCafé project. Research in this area has been mostly conducted in Anglophone countries. We designed a kiosk structure that we call AppliCafé (derived from the term cyber café) that can move between locations and is equipped with mobile technology, including training videos and a mobile application. This project aims at teaching people on how to use their smartphones efficiently. We used a qualitative approach based on surveys and interviews to gather data from users on their mobile phone usage and their opinions on the structure, mobile app and videos. We also interviewed local developers and entrepreneurs to get their perspective on mobile app adoption, usage, and the issues they meet in promoting their apps and scaling their businesses. We outline interesting mobile device usage patterns including the use of web sites rather than mobile apps to save data. We demonstrate the importance of a physical learning environment for users to improve their mobile device literacy skills and for developers to engage with users to produce better quality and fitted apps.
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The number of downloads and overall usage of mobile apps remain low in developing countries, especially local apps. This is unfortunate for end users who would benefit from apps and local app entrepreneurs who are striving for downloads... more
The number of downloads and overall usage of mobile apps remain low in developing countries, especially local apps. This is unfortunate for end users who would benefit from apps and local app entrepreneurs who are striving for downloads and visibility. Promoting device literacy (including app literacy) is one of the goals and focus of this work. In this paper, we present the AppDock, a physical space working hand-in-hand with its digital counterpart to improve smartphone device literacy and increase interaction between users and developers. The design (physical building and digital interface), construction and prototyping of the AppDock have resulted through collaboration between computer science and architecture researchers and students and in partnership with a tech hub in Senegal. The paper outlines the testing, feedback and research phases that we will carry out with Senegalese immigrants in Little Senegal in New York City. We will repeat all phases with users and entrepreneurs ...
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Problem-based learning (PBL) has been proving its success in many areas of education that require experimental learning or ‘learning by doing’, especially in engineering, medical, dental and veterinary education. In a typical PBL... more
Problem-based learning (PBL) has been proving its success in many areas of education that require experimental learning or ‘learning by doing’, especially in engineering, medical, dental and veterinary education. In a typical PBL environment, students are assigned a real world problem to explore and then work collaboratively in groups to seek solutions to that problem. In PBL, problems are often tackled from a single perspective, e.g., from the perspective of a problem-solver. Therefore, less emphasis is given to the development of some other skills, such as communication skills, management skills, change management skills, negotiation skills, risk management skills, quality management skills, etc. These skills are, however, rather crucial in the context of the globalization of software development where the differences in culture and language must be resolved amongst a variety of roles and perspectives to reach a shared goal. This paper presents our view on evolving PBL through its...
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The impact of intense media and political spotlight on Information Technology Offshore Outsourcing on Computer Science education requires us as faculty to re-examine the skills and roles that our future graduating Computer Scientists will... more
The impact of intense media and political spotlight on Information Technology Offshore Outsourcing on Computer Science education requires us as faculty to re-examine the skills and roles that our future graduating Computer Scientists will need to employ and play in a global workplace and, perhaps more importantly, to prepare them for this. We have chosen to begin to do this by simulating an offshore outsourcing software development project scenario for our students in a capstone Software Engineering course for undergraduate Computer Science students. This project creates a globally distributed team composed of students from Pace University, NY, USA and from the Institute of Technology of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 1. Motivation Imagine what the impact of intense media and political spotlight on IT Offshore Outsourcing (ComputerWorld, 2005) has been on Computer Science students in this country (Ferguson, Huen, Henderson & Kussmaul, 2004; Ferguson, Kussmaul, McCracken & Robbert, ...
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Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) is known as one of the leading IDEs. The features designed explicitly to support the Java programmer include a code completion facility, options to define code shortcuts and enforce agreed Java coding... more
Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) is known as one of the leading IDEs. The features designed explicitly to support the Java programmer include a code completion facility, options to define code shortcuts and enforce agreed Java coding styles, navigation through the code and APIs, the automatic generation of Javadocs and, the real-time compilation of and feeback on the Java code. Eclipse is an open source fully extensible universal platform that provides a plugin facility through which one can add more functionality to the baseline set of features. Currently, there exist more than 800 plugins (http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com) that facilitate programming in many languages and support dedicated activities within the end-to-end software development process.
This paper describes the adaptation of an open-source web-based assessment system to support the teaching and assessment of programming fundamentals. WeBWorK is a system that has been used effectively in mathematics for a number of years... more
This paper describes the adaptation of an open-source web-based assessment system to support the teaching and assessment of programming fundamentals. WeBWorK is a system that has been used effectively in mathematics for a number of years and the nature of its underlying engine makes it particularly well-suited to the problems from this discipline. It is accessible for instructors to contribute problems and free for students to use. A community has built up around WeBWorK to share problem sets in mathematics. Within computer science, many of the web-based programming delivery and assessment systems are commercial initiatives; students pay to use them and problem sets are administered centrally. This paper describes a project that is adapting WeBWorK for use in computer science and presents initial findings from its use over one academic year. Our on-going and future work is summarized, and the broader potential highlighted.
This tutorial describes our five-year on-going Global Software Engineering teaching initiative involving universities in Southeast Asia, India and Africa and uniting eight instructors and 164 students to date. It presents and discusses... more
This tutorial describes our five-year on-going Global Software Engineering teaching initiative involving universities in Southeast Asia, India and Africa and uniting eight instructors and 164 students to date. It presents and discusses guidelines for instructors interested in embarking in similar initiatives. 1. Context In today's software industry, development teams are no longer co-located but distributed over locations, and problems associated with different time zones and cultures come into play. Software engineering education must reflect these industry scenarios and better prepare students to capitalize upon the opportunities and learn to address the challenges of this context. Pace University in the United States and the Institute of Technology of Cambodia in Cambodia partnered in 2005 to investigate models of working for students to develop software collaboratively. They were joined by the University of Delhi in India in 2006 and by Mahidol University in Thailand and the...
ABSTRACT We consider the problem of efficiently building extended canonizers, which are capable of solving the uniform word problem for some first-order theories. These reasoning artifacts have been introduced in previous work to solve... more
ABSTRACT We consider the problem of efficiently building extended canonizers, which are capable of solving the uniform word problem for some first-order theories. These reasoning artifacts have been introduced in previous work to solve the lack of modularity of Shostak combination schema while retaining its efficiency. It is known that extended canonizers can be modularly combined to solve the uniform word problem in unions of theories. Unfortunately, little is known about efficiently implementing such canonizers for component theories, especially those of interest for verification like, e.g., those of uninterpreted function symbols or lists. In this paper, we investigate this problem by adapting and combining work on rewriting-based decision procedures for satisfiability in first-order theories and SER graphs, a graph-based method defined for abstract congruence closure. Our goal is to build graph-based extended canonizers for theories which are relevant for verification. Based on graphs our approach addresses implementation issues that were lacking in previous rewriting-based decision procedure approaches and which are important to argue the viability of extended canonizers.
This paper describes a global software development project undertaken in an educational setting with students from Senegal, India and the US. Similar initiatives have been carried out for five years at Pace University, but it was the... more
This paper describes a global software development project undertaken in an educational setting with students from Senegal, India and the US. Similar initiatives have been carried out for five years at Pace University, but it was the first time that it adopted Agile Methodologies and Scrum for the development of a mobile application. Another novel aspect was that developers were distributed across three locations. The experience was considered as an inspiring self-knowing process by all the student participants. This paper presents the perspective of one of students involved in the project. It gathers observations and analyzes the educational value of “Knowing Yourself and Beyond” based on the accomplished collaborative work and interviews with student developers and professors. The relevant lessons learned from this project are summarized and recommendations for students are provided.
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In today's software industry, development teams are no longer co-located but distributed over locations, and problems associated with different time zones and cultures come into play. To reflect these industry scenarios, and to better... more
In today's software industry, development teams are no longer co-located but distributed over locations, and problems associated with different time zones and cultures come into play. To reflect these industry scenarios, and to better prepare computer science students to capitalize upon the opportunities and address the challenges, five institutions distributed across four countries and two continents have been collaborating to