Americas School on Agents and Multiagent Systems 2005
Teaching Style of Sven Koenig
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I enjoy interacting with students and believe that students are the most important asset of a university. My main objective is to ignite passion for artificial intelligence in my students. All of 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 teachers promote excellence. 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. Fourth, I believe that it is important that education encompasses more than teaching in the classroom. Finally, I believe that it is important that teachers encourage students to do research early in their careers.
My current teaching load is 3 classes per year and 2.7 classes per year from 2011 on. I teach the graduate introduction to artificial intelligence class (CSCI 561) on a regular basis. I teach the undergraduate introduction to artificial intelligence class (CSCI 460) and the graduate advanced artificial intelligence class (CSCI 573) from time to time, and have modernized the topics taught in all three classes. I have also developed two new classes in my research areas, namely the "Advanced Topics in Search and Planning" class and the "Decision-Theoretic Planning" class, and I am in the process of developing a new class for educational purposes, namely the "Designing and Implementing Games on Pinball Machines" class. I teach interactively, building on techniques that I learned in a CRA workshop on "Effective Teaching in Computer Science and Engineering." For example, I tend to go back and forth between prepared slides, the whiteboard and discussions with students (even with more than 100 students). This teaching style allows me to show my enthusiasm for the material (which students always comment on very positively) and, at the same time, to test to which degree the students understand the material. Two of my teaching assistants have won outstanding teaching assistant awards for CSCI 460, one in Spring 2004 and one in Fall 2007.
I consider class projects to be a cornerstone for learning, which led me to start the "Computer Games in the Classroom" project. I decided to use video games as motivation since students typically find video games fun to play and are thus curious about how to create them. So far, I have developed three complete project texts, each of which teaches a concept from artificial intelligence on about 10 pages in the style of a textbook and contains a variety of project questions, including easy questions, hard questions and open-ended research questions. These projects have not been used only in my own classes but at other universities as well, including the University of Nevada at Reno, the University of Central Florida and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I believe that it is important that teachers allow students to continue their learning experience outside of the classroom. For this reason, I co-organized the first to tenth USC Programming Contests for undergraduate and first-year graduate students from 2005 to 2009 and trained USC students successfully for the regional ACM programming competitions. For example, they placed 2nd out of 73 teams in 2006. I received a Mellon Mentoring Award for my effort in 2009. I also provide research opportunities for interested undergraduate and graduate students. For example, one of my undergraduate students at Georgia Institute of Technology won two of eight main awards at the UROC competition in 1999 and one of my undergraduate students at the University of Southern California received a Rose Hills Foundation Science and Engineering Fellowship in 2009. My "Programming Pinball Machines" project investigates how to teach concepts from computer science and robotics in a fun capstone class by letting students develop games on (actual) pinball machines. The class could be used to teach a variety of computer science topics (such as operating systems and human-computer interaction) and computer science skills (such as software engineering and programming). It could also be used to teach a variety of skills that are not taught in traditional computer science classes (such as design and teamwork skills). Finally, it could be used to teach students how to interface computers to the physical world (such as interface programming and embedded systems). The project is partially supported by NSF REU funds and has so far involved four undergraduate students, three Master's students and one Ph.D. student. Our first feasibility study resulted in a youtube.com video that has been viewed more than 5,000 times and in me teaching a small pilot class on "Designing and Implementing Games on Pinball Machines" in Fall 2008 despite me not being able to receive teaching credit for it.
When advising graduate students, I start out as a close collaborator and then allow students to become more and more independent, until I only give advice and provide quality assurance. I believe that it is important for them to choose their own research topics and for me to find funding for these topics. I encourage them to learn about related work in other disciplines and not to be afraid of making unusual connections. To further these objectives, I initially involve them in my interdisciplinary research collaborations as much as possible. My graduate students got rewarded with research awards from best paper awards to dissertation awards. My graduate student David Furcy became an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, and my graduate student Yaxin Liu became a research scientist at the University of Texas in Austin (now at Google). Similarly, my post-doctoral researcher Michail Lagoudakis became an assistant professor at the Technical University of Crete.
I am also passionate about helping students and young researchers to get a good start in their careers outside of USC. 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, present tutorials about my research at summer schools and conferences and was three times co-chair of the student abstract and poster program of AAAI.
Teaching Scores of Sven Koenig
Americas School on Agents and Multiagent Systems 2005