Megan Squire Wins Best Paper Award

Megan Squire, associate professor in the Department of Computing Sciences, has been awarded the Best Pedagogical Paper award at the International Association of Computer Information Systems 2012 conference, held Oct. 3-6 in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

The conference, in its 52nd year, offers an annual award for Best Paper in the pedagogical, research and technology categories.

The paper, titled “Outline and Exercises for a Novel Introductory Course in Data Science and Visualization” describes her work in creating a cutting-edge course that teaches techniques for visualizing large amounts of data in diverse domains. Following the conference, Squire’s paper will also be published in the journal Issues in Information Systems.

Abstract for the paper Outline and Exercises for a Novel Introductory Course in Data Science and Visualization:

Data Science is an increasingly popular term for the deliberate, methodological study of the principles and techniques involved in the storage, management, mining, and visualization of large amounts of data, as used to solve problems in diverse domains. This paper provides a working definition of Data Science and examines the relationship between this emerging field and other, more familiar disciplines already established in the undergraduate curriculum. We then provide an operational framework (“The Six Steps”) for an introductory course in Data Science and Visualization. We provide a comprehensive description of concrete, relevant example assignments that fit cleanly into this framework, and a rubric for grading these. We conclude with examples of how this course can achieve secondary pedagogical objectives in the areas of Writing and Information Literacy.