Grace Series (F25) Dr. Ravi Prakash - Fostering a Culture of Excellence in US Higher Education.... скачать в хорошем качестве

Grace Series (F25) Dr. Ravi Prakash - Fostering a Culture of Excellence in US Higher Education....

Speaker - Dr. Ravi Prakash - UT Dallas Computer Science Professor Talk title: Fostering a Culture of Excellence in US Higher Education: Yes to Risk-Taking and No to Bean Counting Brief summary of talk: US higher education made rapid strides right after the Second World War. US universities have become magnets for senior scholars and young students from around the world. This progress was enabled by generous support from federal and state governments, as well as the nurturing of academic freedom. Academic freedom has enabled professors, who have developed scholarship in their fields, to decide what to teach and how to teach it. It has also enabled them to study challenging problems for which a solution is not guaranteed. By allowing scholars to take big risks, we empowered them to make major discoveries and inventions. This culture of exploratory work, with no guaranteed returns, sets academia apart from industry. The same culture of academic freedom has empowered students to challenge dogmatism that can creep into areas of study, making US universities vibrant spaces of debate and intellectual exploration. Over the years, several attempts have been made to quantify scholarship and scholarly productivity. This, in my opinion, is a misguided exercise. If this exercise runs unchecked, the country and society stand to lose in the long run. This presentation will highlight the principles that have led to excellence in US higher education and also forewarn against well-meaning but ultimately harmful strategies that may lead to erosion of excellence. Biography: Ravi Prakash is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas. His areas of teaching and research include wireless and sensor networking, mobile computing, multimedia streaming, and distributed computing. His current research focuses on Field-of-View prediction, caching, and related solutions to optimize the streaming of 360-degree, immersive videos. He is the recipient of multiple research grants from federal agencies and industry, including the NSF CAREER award and the NSF Major Research Infrastructure award. He has served the technical and university community in his roles as an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, as the President of the IEEE Dallas section, technical program committee chair/vice chair of various conferences like ICDCS, SRDS, MASS, MSWiM, and as the Speaker of the UT Dallas Faculty Senate. He received his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. Previously, he has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Rochester and a visiting researcher position at EPFL in Lausanne.