Steven A. Wolfman

Instructor, UBC Computer Science

In fall 2004 I started as a tenure-track instructor in the CS department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The instructor position is an unusual one in that it is a full faculty position on the tenure track but does not entail research duties. My primary obligations are teaching, service, and curriculum development.

I've included the public portion of my job application packet below. Other job hunters, feel free to use this for inspiration if you'd like. (If you'd like help with formatting, I can e-mail you LaTeX source (Word for the CV) on request.) Job hunters may also be interested in UW's Job search information wiki, including a good collection of URLs for finding CS academic positions. (The site is password protected, but read the popup's prompt carefully!)

Research

 I'm currently investigating educational technology. My interest is in creating technologies for education that support a collaborative, student-directed learning environment, targetting the most challenging educational venues: e.g., large or distributed classes.

Technology has long held the promise of distributing the learning process: allowing centralized instructional resources (teachers, curricular materials, hardware, labs, etc.) to reach out to a broad student base under resource constraints due to geography, time commitments, or financial resources. Unfortunately, the "clasroom" environments that develop in current distance-learning scenarios often reflect (even more severely) the problems inherent in large, service courses: impersonal instruction, lack of direct student control over material, and slow or low-quality feedback.

An excellent lecturer is supposed to be able to gauge her students' understanding as the lecture progresses and adapt her presentation to suit their needs. Realistically, however, it is extremely difficult to gauge the comprehension of a large class as a whole during a lecture, even using active learning techniques such as Cross and Angelo's Classroom Assessment Tools (CATs) [Cross, 1993]. Students feel pressured not to speak by the size of the class and their previous experiences in large classes often reinforces this hesitation.

My research project is to develop and study systems to address these problems. We have developed Classroom Presenter, a presentation system that enhances instructors' flexibility in giving presentations by allowing writing, easy navigation through a presentation, and untethered movement about the classroom. Classroom Presenter forms the basis for two more systems: the Classroom Feedback System, in which each student uses a laptop or tablet PC to annotate lecture slides with feedback for the instructor, and the Structured Interaction Presentation system, in which an instructor can build interactive exercises into a presentation in much the same way that she would normally design passive PowerPoint content.

Teaching

This is a new section of this page (as of the fall of 2003); so, I expect that it will take a while for the content to fill in. You can learn all about my teaching experience, awards, publications, and whatnot from my C.V.; so, here I'm mostly just talking about my philosophy of teaching and resources I've created. Eventually, I'll link in my currently-in-progress teaching portfolio. For now, check out these random teaching resources I've collected over the years.

Prior Research

 Previously, I have worked on intelligent user interfaces (IUI) and planning. For my IUI work, I investigated collaborative intelligent agents in the context of Tessa Lau's SMARTedit programming by demonstration system. For more on that current research, check out the Adaptive Interfaces for Machine Learning page. My planning research focussed on metric planning using compilation to enhanced satisfiability form. I presented a paper on the subject at IJCAI'99. I have posted some resources related to the LPSAT metric planning system (described in the LPSAT papers below).

Milestones

 The Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of Washington involves three milestone papers/presentations: Quals, Generals, and Thesis. As I pass these milestones, I'm going to post my paper and presentation slides here in case they might help others. As of July 30th, 2004 (Rachel's and my 4th anniversary), I have passed my defense and completed my dissertation!

MilestonePaperPresentation
Quals PDF Powerpoint
Generals PDF (Charge) Powerpoint
Dissertation/DefensePDF Powerpoint (use Presenter's PowerPoint add-in to toggle instructor notes or see the PowerPoint public view)

Publications

A study of diagrammatic ink in lecture
Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Crystal Hoyer, Craig Prince, Jonathan Su, Fred Videon, and Steven Wolfman. "A study of diagrammatic ink in lecture." In Computers & Graphics 29:4, pp 477–638, August 2005.
Speech, Ink, and Slides: The Interaction of Content Channels [BibTeX]
Richard Anderson, Crystal Hoyer, Craig Prince, Jonathan Su, Fred Videon, and Steve Wolfman. "Speech, Ink, and Slides: The Interaction of Content Channels." In Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, New York, NY, USA, October 2004. ACM Press. To appear.
A Study of Digital Ink in Lecture Presentation [Word] [BibTeX]
Richard J. Anderson, Crystal Hoyer, Steven A. Wolfman, and Ruth Anderson. "A study of digital ink in lecture presentation." In Proceedings of CHI'04: the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 567–574, Vienna, Austria, April 2004. ACM Press.
Experiences with a Tablet PC Based Lecture Presentation System in Computer Science Courses [Word version] [BibTeX]
Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Beth Simon, Steven A. Wolfman, Tammy VanDeGrift, and Ken Yasuhara. "Experiences with a Tablet PC based lecture presentation system in Computer Science courses." In Proceedings of SIGCSE'04: the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 56–60, Norfolk, VA, USA, March 2004. ACM Press.
Kinesthetic Learning in the Classroom [KLA wiki]
Andrew Begel, Daniel D. Garcia, and Steven A. Wolfman. "Kinesthetic Learning in the Classroom." In Proceedings of SIGCSE'04: the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 183–184, Norfolk, VA, USA, March 2004. ACM Press. Special session.
Programming by Demonstration using Version Space Algebra [PostScript version] [BibTeX]
Tessa Lau, Steven A. Wolfman, Pedro Domingos, and Daniel S. Weld. "Programming by Demonstration Using Version Space Algebra." Machine Learning, 53(1–2):111–156, 2003.
Automatically Personalizing User Interfaces
Daniel S. Weld, Corin Anderson, Pedro Domingos, Oren Etzioni, Krzysztof Gajos, Tessa Lau, and Steve Wolfman. "Automatically Personalizing User Interfaces". Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Acapulco, Mexico. August 2003.
Research on Statistical Relational Learning at the University of Washington
P. Domingos, Y. Abe, C. Anderson, A. Doan, D. Fox, A. Halevy, G. Hulten, H. Kautz, T. Lau, L. Liao, J. Madhavan, Mausam, D. Patterson, M. Richardson, S. Sanghai, D. Weld and S. Wolfman, "Research on Statistical Relational Learning at the University of Washington". Proceedings of the IJCAI-2003 Workshop on Learning Statistical Models from Relational Data. Acapulco, Mexico. August 2003.
Classroom Presentation from the Tablet PC [poster (PPT)]
Richard J. Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Tammy VanDeGrift, Steven A. Wolfman, and Ken Yasuhara. "Classroom Presentation from the Tablet PC". ITiCSE 2003 poster: Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. Thessaloniki, Greece. June-July 2003.
Lecture Presentation from the Tablet PC [Word version] [BibTeX]
Richard Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Crystal Hoyer, Beth Simon, Fred Videon, and Steve Wolfman. "Lecture Presentation from the Tablet PC". Workshop on Advanced Collaborative Environments (WACE). Seattle, USA. June 2003.
Activating Computer Architecture with Classroom Presenter [Word version] [BibTeX]
Beth Simon, Richard Anderson, and Steve Wolfman. "Activating Computer Architecture with Classroom Presenter". Workshop on Computer Architecture Education (WCAE). San Diego, USA. June 2003.
Promoting Interaction in Large Classes with Computer-Mediated Feedback [PPT Slides (public view)] [PPT Slides (instructor view)] [BibTeX]
Richard J. Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Tammy VanDeGrift, Steven A. Wolfman, and Ken Yasuhara. "Promoting Interaction in Large Classes with Computer-Mediated Feedback". In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning 2003 (CSCL 2003), pages 119–123. Bergen, Norway. June 2003.
Reputation Enhancement for Felis Domesticus [PPT Slides]
Rachel Pottinger, Steve Wolfman, and Fauna NMI Xerxon. "Reputation Enhancement for Felis Domesticus". In Web Proceedings of PoCSci'03: the Third Annual Potentially Computer Science Conference. Seattle, Washington, USA. May 2003.
Interaction Patterns with a Classroom Feedback System: Making Time For Feedback [poster (PPT)][poster (PDF)] [BibTeX]
Richard J. Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Tammy VanDeGrift, Steven A. Wolfman, and Ken Yasuhara. "Interaction Patterns with a Classroom Feedback System: Making Time For Feedback". CHI 2003 Interactive Poster: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. April 2003.
Making Lemonade: Exploring the Bright Side of Large Lecture Courses [PostScript version][PPT Slides (feel free to disable the macros)] [BibTeX]
Steven A. Wolfman. "Making Lemonade: Exploring the Bright Side of Large Lecture Courses." SIGCSE 2002.
Mixed Initiative Interfaces for Learning Tasks: SMARTedit Talks Back [PostScript][HTML version][Slides][HTML slides] [BibTeX]
Steven A. Wolfman, Tessa Lau, Pedro Domingos, and Daniel S. Weld. "Mixed Initiative Interfaces for Learning Tasks: SMARTedit Talks Back." In Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pages 167–174. Santa Fe, USA, January 2001.
Learning Repetitive Text-editing Procedures with SMARTedit
Tessa Lau, Steven Wolfman, Pedro Domingos, and Daniel S. Weld. "Learning Repetitive Text-editing Procedures with SMARTedit," in Lieberman, ed., Your Wish is My Command: Giving Users the Power to Instruct their Software, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001.
Combining Linear Programming and Satisfiability Solving for Resource Planning [PostScript version] [BibTeX]
Steven A. Wolfman and Daniel S. Weld. "Combining linear programming and satisfiability solving for resource planning." The Knowledge Engineering Review, 16(1):85–99, 2001.
Cleaning Data with Bayesian Methods [compressed]
Sarah Schwarm and Steve Wolfman. "Cleaning Data with Bayesian Methods." Final project report for CSE574, Winter 2000.
Automatic Discovery and Exploitation of Domain Knowledge in Planning [compressed]
Steven A. Wolfman. "Automatic Discovery and Exploitation of Domain Knowledge in Planning." In completion of the requirements of the generals exam.
The LPSAT Engine and its Application to Resource Planning [PostScript version][Mostly complete HTML version] [BibTeX]
Steven A. Wolfman and Daniel S. Weld. "The LPSAT Engine and its Application to Resource Planning." In Proceedings of IJCAI-99.
The LPSAT Engine and its Application to Resource Planning TR 99-04-04 [compressed]
Steven A. Wolfman and Daniel S. Weld. "The LPSAT Engine and its Application to Resource Planning" TR 99-04-04. University of Washington Technical Report 99-04-04. (contains more information on minimal conflict set discovery)

Presentations

 Note: presentations associated with publications (such as conference papers) are listed in the previous section.
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