The 2003 Southeastern Conference

SIGPC Vol. 7, No. 9 Nov. 28, 2003

by Tauhida Parveen

The 17th Annual Southeastern Conference was held November 7-8, 2003 at Georgia Perimeter College in Dunwoody, GA. The conference is sponsored by the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSC), in cooperation with the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). The conference theme was “Computing in Support of Teaching.” This was my first academic conference. I was very nervous about presenting my paper, but overall it was a great learning experience.

The Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges (CCSC) is a non-profit organization focused on encouraging effective use of computing in institutions, especially in the area of teaching. CCSC annually sponsors regional conferences nationwide. The Southeastern Conference is a regional conference sponsored by CCSC and is held in cooperation with the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). The 2003 Southeastern Conference, the 17th in its history, was held November 7-8, 2003 at Georgia Perimeter College in Dunwoody, GA.

The focus of the conference is to exchange information among colleges that are primarily focused on undergraduate education in order to enhance the use of computing in the academic environment. There were about 150 faculty and students from different colleges and universities present at the conference who were interested in topics related to this pedagogical theme. The conference proceedings were published as a special issue of Journal of Computing in Small Colleges, Volume 19, Issue 3, January 2004 by ACM Press.

The 2003 Southeastern Conference was the first academic conference that I’ve ever attended. I was not quite sure what to expect once I got there. However, what did surprise me was the difficulty I had just getting there in the first place. What should have been a simple flight from Melbourne, FL to Atlanta, GA turned out to be a travel headache of a delayed flight, lost luggage, and general annoyances. Now I know what people mean when they say the allure of travel is long gone. Thankfully, once I arrived in Georgia, I found a conference program that was well organized, talk sessions that were interesting, and Georgian hosts that were the epitome of Southern charm: friendly, helpful, and welcoming.

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TPphotoSuite

The main reason I was at the conference was to present my paper “TPphotoSuite: A Windows-Based Digital Image Processing Program” that I wrote while I was an undergraduate student at Georgia Southern University. TPphotoSuite contains features for image processing operations such as color conversions, intensity transformations, spatial filtering, and geometric transformation. It provides a user-friendly graphical interface that requires minimal computer literacy to use properly. It is a useful educational tool because it allows instructors to easily demonstrate image-processing operations to the students. In addition, the existing image processing operations can be modified, and the students or instructors can add more operations.

There are many image processing software packages available, including powerful commercial offerings such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, Jasc Paint Shop Pro, and Macromedia Fireworks and FreeHand. These software packages can perform many complex image-processing operations for both bitmap and vector graphics. However, students cannot learn much about the algorithms and their implementation in these programs, since the source code is not available. Open source programs such as Gimp do not have this problem, but they are still very large applications that can overwhelm the beginner.

TPphotoSuite is free, its source code is available, and it is much smaller in scope, making it an ideal platform for teaching elementary graphical concepts to undergraduate students.

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My Presentation

The second day of the conference, Saturday November 8th, will always be a significant day for me: it was the first time I’ve spoken in public to an intellectual audience. My presentation was at 9:00am. I was very nervous as I walked to the stage to give my talk. My voice was shaking as I introduced myself. Thankfully, I regained my confidence as I started the presentation.

A screenshot of TPphotSuite with an image loaded

I started my presentation with basic definitions and background in image processing. Then I moved onto talking about TPphotoSuite’s features, design and implementations, and its usefulness. I concluded by outlining some of the future enhancements that I’d like to add to the program. I also demonstrated TPphotoSuite to the audience, a simplified grayscale and blurring operations on image shown above.

The response from the audience to my presentation was very positive. Some of the questions that I answered concerned the image file formats that the program is able to handle, how the program handles edges while blurring or sharpening, and how the existing techniques could be improved. Several professors expressed interest in obtaining a copy of TPphotoSuite to use in their introductory graphics courses.

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Conference Highlights

There were about 37 presentations at the conference. Obviously I could not attend all of them (especially considering my late arrival due to the aforementioned travel problems). Nevertheless, I did sit in on several very interesting presentations.

At the conference dinner banquet, Dr. Irfan Essa from Georgia Tech gave a talk on “How Can Computer Science Help in Making Movies? OR, Digital Video Special Effects, a Computer Science Perspective.” He talked about a course on digital video that is geared towards teaching the techniques that are used to generate video special effects. This was a very interesting and informative presentation. Dr. Essa showed the audience an outline of his teaching methodology that makes the course successful. He also demonstrated some of his students’ making movie shorts that they are required to do as part of their assignments for the course. His presentation illustrated the use of computer science in the world of digital media. It also introduced tools and techniques that can help the students in extending their graphics and programming skills.

Another presentation that was very interesting was “Introduction to Media Computation: A New CS1 Approach that Addresses Women’s Interest” by Dr. Mark Guzdial from Georgia Tech. This talk was particularly useful for me since I am a member of the Association for Women in Computing (AWC Florida Tech chapter), and one of our ongoing efforts is to attract women in the field of computing. Dr. Guzdial’s strategy in motivating non-CS students, minority groups, and women was by taking the approach of learning programming and computer science within the context of media computation. This includes techniques in image processing (converting images to grayscale, negatives), splicing and reversing sound, and creating movies using Web-accessed content. I found the motivational speech that he uses to encourage his students very appealing: “… students often use the computer as a communications medium, all media are going digital, and digital media are manipulated with software, [therefore] knowing how to program is a communication skill.”

Other than the concurrent presentation sessions, there was a programming contest and a Web design contest that attracted students from several schools. Overall, the conference was very enjoyable. It was also extremely informative, since I gained valuable knowledge on the different ongoing strategies and thoughts in making the teaching of computer science more successful. I also gained presentation tips from attending the different sessions, and from the feedback on my own talk.

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Looking Ahead to 2004

The 18th Annual Southeastern Conference is scheduled for November 5-6, 2004 at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. As the previous years, the theme of the conference is “Computing in Support of Teaching.” More information about the upcoming southeastern conference can be found here.

I know that there are two other important conferences in 2004 related to computer science and software engineering education. The first is SIGCSE 2004, which will be held March 3-7 in Norfolk, VA. The second is CSEE&T 2004, which will be held March 1-3 in Norfolk, VA.

It is my hope that I will be able to participate in at least one of these events next years. If I am able to go, hopefully the trip to Virginia will be easier than the trip to Georgia.