Americas School on Agents and Multiagent Systems 2005
Teaching Style of Sven Koenig
I enjoy to interact with students and believe that it is a very important part of being a professor because students are the most important asset of a university. Consequently, I tend to spend a lot of my time on teaching and advising, which includes several volunteer activities both on campus and elsewhere. My educational activities build on the following beliefs: First, I believe that it is important that teachers be able to both motivate and challenge students. Second, I believe that it is important that they be able to communicate difficult material in a way that allows students to easily understand the material. Third, I believe that it is important that teachers provide students with a firm foundation of the basic material in a field but also expose them to recent research results early on. Fourth, I believe that education encompasses more than teaching in the classroom. Finally, I believe that teachers should encourage students to do research early in their careers.
In 1998, I participated in the CRA workshop on "Effective Teaching in Computer Science and Engineering" and from then on tried out different ways of teaching introductory material in artificial intelligence. Overall, I love to teach interactively and tend to go back and forth between prepared slides, the whiteboard, discussions with students and - occasionally - problem-solving in groups of two students. This teaching style allows me to show my enthusiasm for the topics and, at the same time, teach difficult material without leaving the students behind (because I observe right away whether the students have been able to follow my presentation). My students often praise my classes and comment very positively on my interactive teaching style and my enthusiasm for the material, and two of my teaching assistants have won outstanding teaching assistant awards. It is also important to select appropriate topics for classes. I have taught several topics in undergraduate artificial intelligence classes since Fall 1998 that only later showed up in the standard textbook.
I also believe that it is important that teachers allow students to continue their learning experience outside of the classroom, for example, by involving them in research. It is, of course, expected that graduate students do research. I am fortunate to have a group of graduate students that are very productive and frequently got rewarded with research awards (from best paper awards to dissertation awards) and summer jobs at research laboratories such as IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, AT&T Shannon Laboratory, Yahoo Research or NRL. Several of my graduate students then took their first jobs in academia (for example, Yaxin Liu as research scientist at the University of Texas in Austin and David Furcy as assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh). However, I strongly believe that pre-graduate students should already be exposed to research. Not only does it motivate and challenge them but it also helps them to acquire problem solving skills and become critical thinkers. Consequently, I have involved several undergraduate students in my research projects, one of whom won two of eight main awards at the UROC competition in 1999 and one of whom received a President's Undergraduate Research Award for attending the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 2002. I co-organized the first to sixth USC Programming Contests for undergraduate and first-year graduate students from 2005 to 2007 and trained USC students for the Regional ACM Programming Competitions, where they placed 5th out of 66 teams in 2005, 2nd out of 73 teams in 2006 and 6th out of 63 teams in 2007.
Overall, I am passionate about helping students and young researchers to get a good start in their careers. On the high-school level, I repeatedly represented the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) as a judge at ISEF, which brings together over 1,400 high-school students from more than forty nations. On the university level, I frequently serve as external member on dissertation committees, participate as panelist or mentor in doctoral consortia of artificial intelligence conferences and present tutorials about my research at summer schools and conferences. I was three times co-chair of the student abstract and poster program of AAAI. One of my goals was to ensure that students and their advisors knew about the program and took advantage of it, and I managed to increase the number of paper submissions by 50 percent in 1999 and by an additional 20 percent in 2000.
Americas School on Agents and Multiagent Systems 2005