Richard A. Tapia - US grants

This award will support the Fifth US-Mexico Research Workshop on Numerical Analysis, to be held in Merida, Mexico in January 1988, organized by Prof. Richard A. Tapia of Rice University in cooperation with Dr. Jean Pierre Hennart of the Institute for Research in Applied Mathematics and Systems at the National University of Mexico, Mexico City. Researchers from both the United States and Mexico will present contributed talks on such subjects as the optimization of programming algorithms, methods for the solution of partial differential equations, computer graphics, finite-element techniques, etc.. Invited review talks and talks by experts on specific subjects will also be presented. This workshop will be the fifth in a series jointly conceived by the Mexican and U.S. investigators in 1977. These workshops have proven effective in bringing together US and Mexican researchers in this important field, and have resulted in the conception of additional cooperative research projects, both in the fundamentals and in applications of numerical analysis. Both countries will benefit from the exchange of ideas and research results to be presented.

This is a grant under the Scientific Computing Research Equipment for the Mathematical Sciences program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the National Science Foundation. This program supports the purchase of special purpose computing equipment dedicated to the conduct of research in the mathematical sciences. This equipment is required for several research projects and would be difficult to justify for one project alone. Support from the National Science Foundation is coupled with discounts and contributions from manufacturers and with substantial cost-sharing from the institutions submitting the proposal. This program is an example of academic, corporate, and government cooperation in the support of basic research in the mathematical sciences. This equipment will be used to support three research projects in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Rice University: Combinatorial Optimization, directed by Robert Bixby and Andrew Boyd; Nonlinear Programming, directed by John Dennis and Richard Tapia; and Computational Seismology, directed by William Symes.

0003147
Tapia

This U.S.-Mexico award will support 15 U.S. participants to the "Seventh US-Mexico Workshop in Numerical Analysis," that will take place in Merida, Mexico, January 2001. Organizers are Dr. Richard Tapia, Rice University, Houston, Texas, in collaboration with Dr. Jose Luis Morales, of the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM)in Mexico City. Participants will include academics, engineers and students.

The main themes of the workshop are nonlinear optimization, semi-definite programming, numerical linear algebra related to optimization, and application of optimization in network design, finance, and chemical engineering. This meeting follows a series of workshops organized during the 1980s and beginning of the 90s, which played an important role in the development of numerical analysis in Mexico. The themes of the workshop reflect emerging research areas with important practical applications. A volume of proceedings will be published thus ensuring dissemination of the results of the workshop.

Rice University and two University of Houston campuses are joining the Houston Independent School District to create an innovative program that teams master and novice middle school teachers with SMET undergraduate and graduate students, designated as GK-12 Fellows. Seven four-member teams are working together over a fifteen month fellowship period in an exchange of content knowledge and pedagogy.
The program includes the following major features:
* Fellows are introduced to K-12 education by participating in teacher enhancement programs at the participating universities. After spending an entire academic year working with their teacher team-mates, GK-12 Fellows serve as instructors in these same teacher enhancement programs during the last three months of their fellowship.
* Teams design a two-semester project that involves the middle school students of the participating teachers. Projects focus on one of three themes: curriculum development, learning processes, or integration of instructional technology into the K-12 science and mathematics curriculum.
* In addition to their time on K-12 campuses, Fellows participate in a weekly seminar on precollege science and mathematics educational reform.
* Fellows serve as role models for middle school students as they provide instructional assistance to their teacher teammates.
Our universities have a long history of working closely with the local school district to meet identified needs. This program strengthens and expands the already established relationships among the participating institutions, provides K-12 teachers with an exceptional professional development opportunity and their students with enriched instruction in science and mathematics, at the same time preparing graduate and undergraduate students to support K-12 education in their future careers.

Rice University engineering faculty, Texas Southern University education faculty, and Houston
Independent School District teachers and administrators, propose Engineering Bridges, a
planning project to develop a comprehensive program to systemically change science,
technology, mathematics, and engineering instruction and culture in high-minority high schools
in order to increase the number of underrepresented minority students excited and well-prepared
to enter engineering university (STEM) majors.

For over thirty years our nation has attempted to increase participation of African American,
Hispanic, and Native Americans in STEM fields. And even though there has been some growth
in engineering degrees granted to those groups over the last twenty years, that growth has not
kept up with those groups population growth in general. This program brings together a strong
and varied collaborative to develop a systemic, coherent plan to tackle this problem in a systemic
way.

To develop a plan that will

Prepare underrepresented minority high school students so they will succeed with
confidence and enthusiasm in university STEM courses;
Inform, excite, and motivate underrepresented minority high school students towards
engineering careers, and
Increase underrepresented minority students admission into university engineering
majors.

To meet these goals, the planning team will research and design engineering

. Curriculum materials with appeal to students of underrepresented groups;
. Career-driven professional development for teachers, principals, and counselors;
. Content-driven professional development for science and mathematics teachers; and a
. Multi-level (high school through university faculty/industrial worker) support
community that provides academic support and personal and professional role models.

Rice University, in collaboration with the Houston Independent School District, proposes the Computer Science Computing and Mentoring Partnership (CS-CAMP), a demonstration project to enhance the interest and persistence of female students in pre-college computer science. The proposed CS-CAMP is an ambitious yet realistic plan to develop a model that can be used across the nation to make systemic school change while providing enriched learning experiences for underrepresented groups.

Even though women are making strides in some areas of science, their participation in computer science is actually declining. Even in high schools, the vast majority of girls opt out of advanced high school computing courses. Through its 2-year program, CS-CAMP will provide high school girls opportunities to learn computing in a female-centric environment outside school and increase enrollment of girls in advanced computer science classes in their high schools. This should give girls in these high schools enough high-quality exposure to computing so that they can make informed decisions about whether to pursue computer science as a college major and a life career.

Program Goals are to:
-Prepare high school girls so that they will succeed with confidence and enthusiasm in computer science courses;
-Increase girls' admission and retention in pre-college computer science courses; and
-Improve the climate for girls and instructional experiences in high school computer science classes

The proposed program will target eight high schools in the Houston area who will make a strong, long-term commitment to improve their schools' computer science program with the goal that girls comprise 50% of the schools' most advanced computer science classes, and if they are not currently teaching an advanced computing class, to begin to do so. The selected schools will form an implementation team consisting of a counselor, administrator, and computer science teacher to meet bimonthly at Rice with the other schools' teams and CS-CAMP to develop and implement an action plan for their schools. CS-CAMP will seed the effort by engaging 16 girls from each of the eight schools in a two-year program consisting of 2-week summer computer camp and monthly follow-up sessions. Computer camp focuses on community building, computing-career awareness, mentoring, introductory computing courses, and lots of fun.

The program will provide professional development on gender equity in technology to the schools' principals, counselors, and computer science teachers. The participating computer science teachers will also facilitate at the girls' computer camp under the tutelage of master teachers. This will afford the targeted teachers (1) solid knowledge of computer science content and curriculum; (2) skill in a variety of approaches to instruction; and (3) the opportunity to plan and reflect on instruction together with other teachers.

CS-Camp will create a multi-level (middle school through university faculty/industry worker) community that provides academic support and personal and professional mentoring to girls in the targeted eight schools in the hopes that those eight will become some of the country's premier schools in participation of girls in computer science and provide a model for the nation in this regard.

The "Computational Grid", as described in The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure and demonstrated by many proof-of-concept applications, promises to connect computers, databases, and people in a network to solve problems in scientific research and other diverse fields. However, the complexity, unreliability, and overhead of low-level operations in today's systems obscure the Grid's potential. The five-year Virtual Grid Application Development Software (VGrADS) project attacks a fundamental part of this problem - how to more effectively program these highly complex and dynamic systems. It will develop software tools that simplify and accelerate the development of Grid applications and services, while delivering high levels of performance and resource efficiency. This improved usability will greatly expand the community of Grid users and developers. In the process, VGrADS will contribute to both the theory and practice of distributed computation.

To address these aims, VGrADS will explore, define, and implement a hierarchy of virtual resources and a set of programming models for Grid computing. It will conduct research in three key areas:
1. Virtual Grid (vgrid) architectures enabling a separation of concerns between high-level services and the Grid's inherent complexity.
2. Programming models, compilers, component libraries, and tools supporting creation of Grid applications.
3. Core software technologies, including performance-efficient scheduling, fault tolerance, and economic models for resource management, allowing scalable Grid computations.

VGrADS will pursue this agenda by collaborating with leading scientific applications to elicit key challenges, validate results, and disseminate technology. It will distribute software that it creates in open-source form for the research community. It will also build on its PIs' past successes in human resource development by using existing programs to attract and retain women and minorities in computational science.

This award funds a twelve-month planning effort to initiate development and distribution of a nationally available video series called "Math is Cool" that inspires students from kindergarten through the undergraduate university level (grades K-16) to understand and explore the importance and impact of mathematics on their daily lives. This pilot effort will build on the decades of experience and success of the principal investigator and the Rice University Center for Excellence and Equity in Education (CEEE) to develop programs that engage and excite students from diverse backgrounds. The video series will be designed to help students learn about basic physics and mathematics; discrete mathematics; number theory; differential and integral calculus; and differential equations.

Three mathematical sciences departments at Rice University, in partnership with Aldine and Houston Independent School Districts, are providing the Mathematics Leadership Institute (MLI) for high school mathematics teachers in the Houston area. MLI is a collaboration among two ethnically diverse school districts, the Departments of Mathematics (MATH), Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM), and Statistics (STAT) at Rice University and the Rice University School Mathematics Project (RUSMP). The MLI is developing a cadre of 80 lead teachers in mathematics and expanding teachers' knowledge in each of the important mathematics strands that form the core of the high school mathematics curriculum. Lead teachers on each high school campus provide mathematics content and pedagogical support for the entire mathematics department. In addition to developing mathematics teachers who are able to engage all students in challenging mathematics and ensuring all students have access to and encouraged to participate in challenging and advanced mathematics courses, the project is also impacting the instructional practices of college faculty, post-docs, and graduate students.

Each institute under MLI consists of two four-week sessions conducted over two consecutive summers and focusing on increasing teachers' knowledge of mathematics and pedagogy, leadership development, current research on mathematics education, advances in technology, diversity issues related to student achievement gaps and retaining and strategies for retaining a diverse teaching workforce. Lead teachers' academic year activities include collaborative planning, coaching, demonstration teaching, and co-teaching with high school mathematics teachers, monthly meetings for the Institute participants, colloquia, seminars, and opportunities to participate in discussion groups with mathematics faculty, post-docs and graduate students and to collaborate on the development of curriculum materials. The Institute also supports teachers as they prepare for Texas Master Mathematics Certification. Through their interactions with lead teachers, CAAM, MATH, and STAT faculty, post-docs, and graduate students are gaining valuable insight into successful teaching practices that will transfer to their own practice.

Rice-Houston ALLIANCE FOR GRADUATE EDUCATION AND THE PROFESSORIATE
(Rice-Houston AGEP)

Project Summary

Rice University, the University of Houston, Texas Southern University, the University of Houston-Downtown, Texas State University, Houston Community College, and San Jacinto Junior College, propose an exciting new alliance, the Rice-Houston Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (Rice-Houston AGEP). Situated in one of the nation's largest, most culturally diverse cities, the proposed Rice-Houston AGEP unites many of the city's research and teaching universities and community colleges in the common mission of significantly increasing the number of underrepresented minority students earning Ph.D.s and positioning them to become leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. The proposed Rice-Houston AGEP builds on and leverages the strengths of two highly successful programs - the Rice AGEP and the Houston Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (H-LSAMP) - to build a unified, multi-level, long-range alliance deeply committed to this cause.

In order to accomplish its mission, the Rice-Houston AGEP has established the following goals:

Increase minority undergraduate retention in STEM majors to the B.S.;

Promote and motivate more minority STEM undergraduates to pursue the Ph.D.;

Increase minority STEM graduate admissions; and

Increase minority STEM graduate retention to the Ph.D.

Program Strategies. The Rice-Houston AGEP will accomplish its goals by building a strong
community of scholars across the Alliance institutions creating unique opportunities for all
participating students including those from community colleges and other minority serving institutions, exposing them to the excitement of research and a career in the professoriate that they would never experience otherwise. Through the Rice-Houston AGEP community, students will develop personal and professional relationships with peers and professors and enjoy a supportive network where they are welcomed, encouraged, and supported to pursue Ph.D.s, while mentoring others as they attain their own goals.

Activities. Main activities within the Rice-Houston AGEP community include yearly: university faculty workshops, integrated undergraduate and graduate summer research and mentoring programs, student research/professional development conferences, extensive student/faculty conference attendance, and multi-institutional national and local graduate student recruitment.

Intellectual Merit. The Rice-Houston AGEP will test several new or adapted components of its
program. It will examine the effects of intensive and sustained faculty workshops on faculty
commitment to the promotion of STEM diversity; it will evaluate the effectiveness of a university-wide, faculty-led model of program direction; it will assess program effects on broader faculty and institutional culture, and it will assess the impact of multi-institutional community activities to encourage and promote STEM graduate education.

Broader Impact. The Rice-Houston AGEP has the potential to impact hundreds of underrepresented minority students - encouraging, preparing, and retaining them as they pursue STEM Ph.D.s. The Rice-Houston AGEP will provide a model for undergraduate and graduate education that effectively promotes careers in science and sustains students as they pursue careers as scientists.

0538934
Burris

This award is to William Marsh Rice University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF-05566).

Partners

William Marsh Rice University (lead institution) and National Instruments

The primary objective of the proposal is as follows: to revolutionize the way science and engineering are taught by breaking away from traditional textbook and lecture-based education in order to build a new framework, where communities of educators, students, and field practitioners continually interact, collaborate, connect, and explore active content. The specific objectives of the project are to 1) build a world-wide community of educators, students, and practitioners in DSP led by Rice faculty and NI technology evangelists which will develop and refine a critical mass of free Connexions DSP course materials; 2) enrich these materials with interactive LabVIEW visualizations to make the concepts come alive and encourage experimentation, exploration, and design; 3) develop semantic mathematics representations for displaying and exploring science and engineering concepts based on MathML--in particular a suite of tools for authoring, sharing, and exploring mathematics on the web; 4) translate the materials into a number of languages, including Spanish, to reach both local and worldwide audiences; 5). Study the marketing and business issues associated with growing and sustaining the project into a win-win for both the university and industrial partners; and 6) assess the projects impact and widely disseminate the lessons learned.

Potential Educational and Economic Impact

There is a crisis in engineering education today, with decreasing enrollments, less engaged and less prepared students, and pressure to cover increasing amounts of material. Curricula are increasingly stove-piped and disconnected, in spite of research indicating that for women and underrepresented minority students, the study of science and engineering is made meaningful by connections to other fields. Moreover, a leading complaint from industry regarding engineering graduates is their lack of collaboration and team skills and lack of hands-on design experience.

The intellectual merit of the project follows. A new approach has been identified for building and sustaining virtual educational communities around active content and applying the results to the spectrum of engineering education venues: university undergraduate and graduate courses, industrial training and continuing education, just-in-time learning on the job, and high-school laboratories. The research involves and balances education, community development, technology development, marketing and business planning, and impact assessment. The foundation for the project is provided by Rices Connexions Project (cnx.rice.edu) and by NIs LabVIEW (ni.com) DSP platform. Connexions is an open-access repository of free scholarly materials and an open-source software toolkit to help authors publish and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom courses, and learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. LabVIEW is a personal computer-based DSP system for interactively visualizing, processing, and interacting with multimedia such as audio, images, and video from a wide range of applications.

The broader impacts of the activity follow. This research include the development of people-resources and technologies that will substantially increase the performance and capabilities of engineering educators and that will open up education into underdeveloped parts of the State of Texas, the Nation, and the world. In particular, education in DSP and related technologies is critical to sustain the high-tech complex in Dallas, Austin, and Houston, Texas. Additional educational impacts include the training of undergraduate and graduate students involved in this project and two workshops that will bring together DSP educators and practitioners to share their knowledge and build communities.

Rice University, in an alliance with Boston University; the University of California at Berkeley; Southern Illinois University at Carbondale; the University of Colorado at Boulder; the University of Texas at Austin, and additional partners, proposes the Empowering Leadership: Computing Scholars of Tomorrow Alliance (EL Alliance). It will develop a national network of colleagues who share the common experience of being a minority student or faculty at a majority institution, and others deeply committed to the success of these students and faculty. The EL Alliance has enlisted many of the leaders in computing research to this network, including faculty, directors of national laboratories, leaders in industry, junior faculty, grad students, undergraduates, and professionals. The network will provide multiple, integrated, reinforcing programs and experiences to ensure that the few minority scholars in the computing disciplines at top departments matriculate and go on to make their mark in graduate education, research, industry, or national policy. These programs will include the national support network, local and online communities, and annual meetings, using technology to reach, inspire, and support isolated minority students. Furthermore the Alliance will be aligned with well-recognized programs such as AGEP Alliances, NSDL, CI-TEAM, the TeraGrid, and other Broadening Participation in Computing awardees. The EL Alliance will directly impact many of the finest underrepresented minority students in the country, encouraging, preparing, and retaining them as they pursue degrees in computing. In turn these students, as they take their places in the leadership of the community, will be in a position to impact additional students.

Rice University leads a collaborative proposal to extend the impact of the Empowering Leadership: Computing Scholars of Tomorrow Alliance (ELA) through partnerships with new institutions and regional collaboratives that will adopt and expand ELA's successful models of engagement. The goal of ELA is to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups who major in computing at the nation's research universities. Additionally, ELA supports these students in securing positions in computing following graduation. The premise of the ELA is that minority students at research universities face challenges that can be mitigated by a supportive community that provides academic, social, and personal support. National in scope, the ELA is developing a network of computing faculty and leaders dedicated to providing this support. In addition to Rice University, ELA originally included Boston University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas, Austin. With this proposal, the ELA will add the University of Georgia, Clemson University, Tufts University, and Stony Brook University as new lead institutions, along with several new partners including MentorNet, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), and the New England Computer Science Chairs (NECSC). The ELA uses three intersecting models of engagement, including the National, Regional and Local Models. The National Model seeks out and supports individuals across the country, building a virtual (and sometimes in-person) network; the Regional Model builds a support network among multiple universities within a region; and the Local Model builds a local support community within a single university. These three models serve to connect ELA students with each other and with tailored opportunities including internships, mentoring, conference participation, and summer research programs. The proposed extension will strengthen the three models at their current sites and test their scalability and transfer to the new lead institutions. It will also add programs developed under BPC demonstration projects to the suite of ELA offerings and test their scalability.

Rice University will lead an initiative of major southwestern research universities; Rice, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of New Mexico, The University of Arizona, the University of Houston, and Texas Tech University along with the states; partnering minority-serving institutions (MSI);to plan a next-generation alliance with the mission to increase the number of underrepresented minority (URM) students who pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) Ph.D.s and subsequently enter academic positions. Concentrated in the southwest is the nation's growing Hispanic population, Native Americans, and primarily in its cities, a significant number of African Americans. Schools in the southwest must increase participation to serve the needs of this citizenry.
The participating universities can make a difference. They represent thousands of URM STEM undergraduates. Key participating faculty and administrators also provide experience and expertise that will be shared across the alliance. For instance, Arizona, New Mexico and Rice U have faculty members who are former Rice AGEP graduate students. The proposed project leadership has learned much from its eleven years of AGEP participation, and this knowledge will inform the work of this next-generation alliance, including a) it needs to do a better job of systematically motivating and inspiring URM undergraduates at research universities to pursue graduate studies, b) it needs to more fully and systematically engage faculty members, critical to the success of the program, for functions such as evaluating graduate admissions, mentoring, role models, academic graduate advising, selecting research advisors, advocating for post-doc and faculty placement, to name a few, c) it needs a systematic way to produce new faculty members, for most, through a post-doctoral fellowship, d) it needs to integrate the broadening participation effort more fully into the mainstream research, and e) it needs a more systematic way of defining participation in the AGEP program so that it is indeed increasing participation of the nation's URM population rather than merely increasing international minority participation.
Alliance planning will be led by Rice University. Rice will begin this one year project by hosting an in-person meeting of participants from all universities to build understanding around a common vision and organize committees to continue planning from a distance. Subsequently, cross-institutional committees formed around strategic topics will meet weekly through teleconferences. Committee chairs will also meet weekly with the Project Director. To facilitate the planning, each committee will have staff support, and access to technologies that support distant collaboration. In addition to crafting a new alliance plan, the project will share through a report what is learned through this collaborative activity and disseminate it broadly.
Intellectual Merit: This project will bring together many of the nation's leaders in the area of diversity to develop a next-generation AGEP --one that is focused strategically on producing URM faculty leaders. It builds on a base of experience and builds towards new understandings and efforts.
Broader Impacts: No population is more critical to the health of the nation than that of the southwest, with its concentration of a growing Hispanic population, Native Americans, and concentrated in its cities, a significant number of African Americans, and because of this growth, none provides greater potential.

This Noyce Master Teaching Fellowship project seeks to provide activities for the development of 16 school-based leaders in mathematics, who are deeply grounded in sound content and research-based pedagogical, leadership, adult education, and mathematics advocacy skills. The master teachers will participate in coursework that highlights mathematics content and pedagogical techniques and complementary Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID) Path Trainings on classroom strategies that utilize writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading (WICOR) and culturally relevant teaching. The master teachers will have a variety of opportunities to take leadership roles such as performing mathematics demonstrations, co-teaching courses, and acting as district advocates in their high-needs schools. The project involves collaboration between the Rice University School Mathematics Project, Tapia Center for Excellence and Equity, and Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, AVID, and educators from the Houston Independent School District.

This Noyce Master Teaching Fellowship project will utilize Avid Path Trainings and complementary, content-rich graduate courses to develop master teachers ability to prepare college-ready, STEM students. The focus on WICOR and culturally relevant teaching are in response to an emerging body of research that recommends that training for instructional leaders integrate high-quality instructional methods in an equitable learning environment. A novel aspect of the project is the introduction to adult education skills that master teachers will receive, which they will then apply as they mentor other teachers. This work is grounded in the theory of andragogy, which has six principles that address adult learners' (1) need to know, (2) self-concept, (3) prior experiences, (4) readiness to learn, (5) orientation to learning, and (6) motivation to learn. Project evaluation will include assessment of the master teachers' effectiveness through Teaching for Robust Understanding of Mathematics classroom observation protocols, leadership through a modified version of the Survey for AVID Teachers, and adult education skills through the Andragogical Practices Inventory. The Diverse Disposition Index will be use to assess their understanding of diversity and equity issues. The results of the evaluation plan will be disseminated throughout the region through the Texas Education Agency, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas Regional Education Service Centers, and the Harris County Department of Education.