At present students are influenced by powerful economic and reputational incentives to keep a low profile, overspecialize, and ignore the big picture of how different research areas can be combined to solve real world problems. At many conferences they are largely ignored by established researchers and practitioners with the notable exceptions of the "Doctoral Consortia" in which they are treated to first rate mentoring in the conference's host discipline and encouraged to discuss their work with each other. But such opportunities don't arise until one is "locked into" a course of study and are accordingly oriented towards depth over breadth leaving little chance for cross pollination across disparate fields on inquiry. As a net result most grads tend to be rather timid and all to willing to accept the notion that theoretically superior technical solutions aren't really relevant in the context of the 'real world' of commercial development.

This leads to a serious disconnect between the commercial and academic sectors that is largely responsible for the instability, and attendant frustration factor, that bedevils our nation's IT infrastructure. In essence, students focusing on an academic career buy into a culture bias towards "doodling around the edges" of highly technical abstract issues cloaked in language and notation systems that make their work utterly inaccessible to those outside their specialization. Likewise, those planning to move into commercial development eschew such academic topics and avoid employing advanced techniques that do not reflect the toolset currently used in industry.

In both camps there is an unspoken assumption that nothing they do will materially change the shape of the market or the dominance of Unix and Windows. So nearly everyone uses the same fundamentally unsafe C and C++ languages for low level programming, on top of which they implement a plethora of other languages (some admittedly sharing common chunks of infrastructure like low level C Libraries or Microsoft's .Net & the Java VM). But even when they share such foundations, they don't work all that well together and their code is largely unintelligible to those programming in other languages. Indeed, all of these languages have deep historical roots and large self-sustaining communities of practice, which tend to value their positions of relative isolation and inaccessibility to non-programmers. In short, we have a tower of babble and fundamental system architecture that makes it very hard to transition research into practical applications. So year after year the most breathtaking of demonstration systems languish in the lab as students pick one or two languages of choice and tune out everything happening in other camps.

Moreover, these splits in the software community are nothing compared to the division between those working on hardware and software or between those on the technical and business sides of the IT industry.

The Institute for End User Computing has the potential to transform this environment by introducing the notion of a Grand Challenge project to develop a new end user platform, both hardware and software to unify all that we've learned in the past three decades and make the potential power of the computer fully accessible to people in all walks of life. For students who haven't even chosen an undergraduate major, this bold step will reopen the frontier and make technical studies far more attractive than they are in the face of a stagnant buggy technological equilibrium in which product release specific vendor certifications are more highly valued by employers than the deep understanding needed to devise truly creative solutions.

Indeed, it is this perceived lack of potential for major departures from the status quo that lies at the core of our inability to attract students to technical disciplines. It is why pragmatic students see no opportunity to make their fortune in computing and why many want to jump into biotech after the .com meltdown.

We can change this by building a movement among the public and private sectors to demand computing systems that work. The Institute will then serve as a vehicle to let people and organizations put their money where their mouth is and through us create the economic incentives to make the dream a reality.

The new end user computing platform that we champion will be a common forum to get people talking and to encourage the kind of radical innovation that we need to bring our IT infrastructure up to meeting the challenges of the new millennium. Building this future will take time and initially the platform will be more of a pedagogical device than a commercial reality. It will provide a focus for bringing different technologies together and more importantly for opening up lines of communication among now isolated disciplines.

In terms of operations, this can take several forms. We might, for example, seek corporate sponsorship for a peer reviewed "Big Picture" writing competition in which computer science undergrads would be invited to look at today's systems, delve into the academic literature (a sorely undervalued resource that many computer science undergraduate majors never tap), and posit alternatives. An even more valuable approach might be to organize "virtual study groups" linking students with similar interests at different schools and at different points in their academic careers. Such peer-to-peer networking is an incredibly powerful way of knitting together geographically distributed communities.

Interestingly the most powerful ways to motivate students are likely to be reputational rather than direct economic incentives. This is to say, that while one can spur some work with financial rewards, creating opportunities for multiple students to distinguish themselves in the eyes of graduate schools and perspective employers would have far greater indirect economic value to them than a one-time cash award.

This suggests another possible project, the development of a major student authored survey text that could be used as the basis for an "Introduction to End User Computing" courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels that would look at the full range of technologies making up our IT infrastructure. This could translate into a textbook and a companion reader with student authored commentaries on key papers. The key element here is that the project would have the power to make the careers of its participants while promoting the new platform project and user centric perspective.

Likewise, as hinted at above, a PBS series on End User Computing would not be entirely unrealistic if we could team up with a media/communications school and collaborate with established organizations like the ACM and IEEE.

Of course, there are just a few the many ideas that The Institute could explore and use as a basis for grant applications!

In order to be granted an advanced degree from a University, graduate students are required to demonstrate their ability to make original contributions to their discipline. This takes the form of a Thesis or Dissertation, which is a monograph to book length treatment of a novel topic, often describing and evaluating a major research study or technology implementation project.

Most of these documents have limited value outside of their immediate discipline, but over time a few have proven to hold significant promise for advancing the state of the art in End User Computing. In this section we will provide you with links to these key texts.

If you know of a thesis or dissertation that ought to be presented herein, please don't hesitate to Contact Us! Also, we should note that we are more than happy to provide server space to host theses and dissertations that have not previously been available online. In the case of particularly meretricious offerings, we may also be able to arrange to have your work digitized or be able to develop an electronic edition of it in-house.

The Institute for End User Computing will compliment the work of disciplinary societies and their SIGs by focusing on The Big Picture.

This is to say that we encourage modes of inquiry that don’t necessarily fit into today’s dominant model. You see, if you read a lot of conference papers from the research community you can't help but notice how narrow most of them are. Mostly, they will describe systems that provide fairly narrow functionality that can be readily evaluated in a formal way. Such a paper might describe a system that generates breathtaking visualizations of simulated library collections when supplied with carefully hand-crafted data sets or it might offer a detailed proof that one solution to a problem is marginally faster than another given the worst possible configuration of input data (which sheds little light on real world behavior). Other papers document user studies in which undergraduates perform some artificial task using alternate tools or systems. Most have a smattering of screen shots and describe some new feature added to, or some modest change in, previously reported work.

They are incremental and appeal almost exclusively to the literature of the conference to which they are submitted. When they have a theoretical component, it tends to be a feature graph comparing a number of reported projects and perhaps offering some new or alternate terminology to contrast them; it may also offer some modest hypothesis along with a call for research prototypes to test the proposal. In any case, they close with an obligatory column describing future work that will form the basis of the authors’ next round of grant requests.

The format itself is a brutally short one of around ten pages for full papers and a scant two for short ones that precludes deep discussions of the bigger picture and makes it nearly impossible to address how multiple technologies can be integrated in broader contexts. Instead, reviewers look for a concrete research contribution with a narrow focus that demonstrates an in depth mastery of their area of specialization backed by a working implementation.

Conferences organized along these lines are a very good way to meet the needs of their stakeholders and will continue to play a vital role in advancing research. We can offer members of these vibrant communities a forum in which to come together and take steps to shape the future. We can provide a home for important work that doesn’t fit the traditional mold.

Thus where a CHI paper might explore a new scrolling affordance, an EUC paper could survey the range of scrolling affordances presented in “the literature” in the context of their historical development and discuss which subset of them should be incorporated in The New Platform. By focusing on the design of a next generation End User Computing Platform, we can cut across disciplinary lines and address issues that are “too diffuse” or “too thinly implemented” to make the cut in a traditional conference. This will enable us to create a dialog between researchers and practitioners, in such areas as CHI, Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Security, GRID Computing , and the myriad of other technical specializations while also engaging those interested in the History of Computing , Technology Transfer, and Innovation Management.

We are currently looking for colleagues interested in volunteering to participate in our conference pre-planning process. If you would like to have some input into how we set things up, please Contact Us!

Despite the fundamental shifts in hardware capabilities over the last twenty years many of us teach computer science as if innovation in the personal computing area were all but at an end. What was once a field of endless possibilities is thus perceived by the canny undergraduate as more of a trade school offering where they will pick up UNIX and learn how to kludge together ebiz apps with the latest W3C standards and C-based language.

Alas, the magic of the 80’s is gone; students no longer see computing as offering a chance to achieve the American Dream of earning wealth and recognition while changing the world for the better. Instead, if one takes University major-works projects as any indication, Biotech is the new golden discipline with new multi-million dollar facilities going up across the country, leaving computing researchers in a race to recast their work under the Bioinformatics umbrella to angle for shifting funds. However, Biotech Researchers are only One Class of End Users and the underlying enabling technologies that we can offer them have applications across the board.

One of the most important things that The Institute can do will be to work with advanced undergraduates and graduates to shape their thinking.

Moreover, we aren’t just interested in reaching promising computer science majors. All classes of end users need to learn what computing can do for them. This means future librarians, lawyers, doctors, scientists, politicians, and MBA’s. Courses need to be introduced at the undergraduate and graduate levels to reach these populations so everyone in society will be able to benefit from information technology and have a real understanding of how it is developed and used so they can contribute to an informed debate over its regulation.

We have educated many computer professionals since the dawn of the information age, but we still haven’t managed to realize the full potential of our innovations. Some of our best ideas persistently resist transfer out of the lab and commercial IT infrastructure is plagued by unreliable code.

Thus it is safe to conclude that we aren’t doing some things as well as we might in terms of computer science education. This is do in large measure to institutional inertia in synching up academic and industry trends that flows in both directions, as the academy may be late in preparing new courses to target fast moving industry standards like XML, while industry may need to wait for sufficient turnover of personnel to support technological changes advocated by researchers. Moreover, there is a serious gap between the graduate and undergraduate CS educational experience. We look upon our Masters and Ph.D. candidates as researchers in training, but at the undergraduate level our students quickly grow weary of large sections (that don’t engage them as individuals) and toy problems (for which the internet is an all to tempting source of canned solutions). All to often this first taste of computing leads them to question the value of advanced study over test prep for ‘industry certification exams’

The net result of these forces is that we are failing to realize our potential as a discipline, we are failing to provide our students with a complete set of skills, and we are failing to provide our nation and allies with the brainpower needed to ensure the future prosperity of western civilization while helping all regions of the globe to achieve a sustainable high quality of life.

The Institute for End User Computing’s Educational Initiatives will directly address these critical issues!

We need to rediscover our past to recapture our future!

We live in a time of flux when traditional notions of career and job security often feel like fond memories of a bygone age. In an earlier age a college diploma would all but guarantee a comfortable if not lavish existence. Those days are no more - the college or university student has to ask him or herself, "What do I want to get from my education? How can I differentiate myself from the crowd? What path should I follow."

There are no easy answers to these questions and if you don't have well positioned relatives to help you make your way in the world the decisions you make now will be even more crucial.

Assuming you have found this page out of an interest in computing, we can perhaps illuminate a few of the choices you will face with more clarity and less bias than you may find in other sources.

Regardless of which school you are attending or how far along you are in your program of study, you should look at joining one or more professional societies as a Student Member. Organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery have deeply discounted dues for students and online Digital Libraries that can give you access to a body of technical literature with vastly broader coverage and greater depth than you will find in all but the top rated University Library Collections.

Another invaluable way to advance your academic career and figure out what you want to do with your life is to attend a major conference or two as early on in your studies as you can. You see, each year there are dozens of international meetings sponsored by scholarly societies in which leading researchers assemble to discuss the work they are pursuing in their government, university, and corporate labs. You can find master conference calendars in the backs of most academic journals.

In the course of three or four days attendees share stories of life in their home institutions, present form papers, and demonstrate their work. Conference rate for students are heavily subsidized and you may in some cases be able to find funding to cover your travel and lodging - particularly if you are willing to volunteer to help at the registration table or run errands behind the scenes.

Attending as a volunteer can be a mixed bag. At some conferences, student volunteers are all but ignored by participant and organizer alike. At other conferences, everyone does yeoman work to welcome new students into their communities. The bottom line is to ask around and try to find someone who has been the conference you are interested in before and ask them what sort of reception students are given.

If you can't find someone, try to look over a copy of the prior year's meeting to decide if your interests might fit in with those of past attendees. Indeed, even if you have talked to enthusiastic past attendees, look at a past year's proceedings to see if you will be able to make heads or tails of the notation used by the community; in some disciplines a slavish adherence of modified mathematical formalisms can serve as an impenetrable barrier to all but the most persistent newcomer. (If you need to crack such codes, you'll have to spend a few months working your way back through the literature until you can find the 'early papers' in the discipline that introduced its notational quirks in the first place.)

Now assuming you have found a conference that you do wish to attend, there is one key piece of advice that we can't emphasize enough. Talk to people, be outgoing, it won't take you long to figure out which participants do and don't mind engaging in serious conversations with students. You may be pleasantly surprised by how open even some of the world's most famous researchers can be when approached in a polite manner by a student with genuine interest in their work. But do your homework first and be familiar with at least some of the work going on in the community.

You should also pay careful attention to the possible presence of strongly competing schools of thought and start to think about which position you might want to align yourself with. Look closely at the kinds of research that is presented - are there rigorous statistical analyses, qualitative obserservational studies, descriptive accounts of working demonstration systems, etc. At some conferences you will also find mentorship programs and special colloquia for graduate students to discuss their dissertation work. Scholarly publishing houses make appearance at larger events and you can start to build a personal library by picking up a few titles at steep discounts up to around 40% off list prices.

When you get back to your own department think about getting involved with your favorite professor's research. Many faculty members regularly co-author papers with their students and this is by far the easiest way to get your work published. But even if you write a joint paper with an established academic leader there is no guarantee that a given conference will accept it. If your work is rejected, take heart and remember that the first paper on the World Wide Web was rejected by the ACM's hypertext conference. The lesson here is that the established academic community isn't the last word and your ideas can change the world even if you can't convince the old guard of their merit.

If you are still at the stage to deciding where to pursue advanced studies you are particularly fortunate, because you have time to attend a conference or two and talk to grad students at your prospective schools of choice. This can be key to avoiding programs that sometimes exploit students as cheap labor and to finding departments that will nurture your ability to think independently and pursue your own projects.

So far this advice as focused on the perspective academic, but let's assume for a moment that you aren't interested in becoming an Oxford Don and seek instead to make your mark as an entrepreneur or corporate type. What should you study?

If you want to maximize your short-term employment prospects you can play the certification game pursuing certificates in the most widely used commercial development environments. You would want to take courses in Java Programming, C#, and Microsoft Server technologies. You should look for Coop and volunteer opportunities as well to prove that you have the ability to work in a commercial setting. The downside to this strategy is that your skills will be fungible and you will see downward pressure on your salary as more programmers match your certifications. You will also have to be re-certified with each major product release cycle.

The alternative is to hone a unique skill set based on where you see technology going in the years ahead. It will then be harder for you to find work, but when you do you will be worth more to your employer and less likely to be replaced in the long term. Also, if you want to organize a high tech startup or join a top lab in government or industry in industry, this is the way to go.

As The Institute pursues its mission, select students will be permitted to participate in its activities. Drawn primarily from Doctoral programs at leading universities, successful candidates for this program will be given opportunity to collaborate with Institute personnel and Board Members in a number of Institute Program Areas.

While we are not offering financial support at this time, successful candidates will be formally recognized for their individual contributions to The Institute's activities, receive personal mentoring particularly valuable to first generation academics, and enjoy rare opportunities to forge lifelong collegial relationships with peers at other institutions.

Our goal in setting up this program is nothing less than the identification and development of the next generation of high-impact scholars -- to find and nurture the champions of tomorrows radical breakthrough technologies that will in time take End User Computing in exciting new directions that today we can only begin to imagine. Accordingly, we are open to work with students in any number of substantive areas from AI to Operating Systems, provided that they can make a compelling case to us showing a nexus between their research interests and the multidiscipline of End User Computing.

We are not just looking for warm bodies to churn out some web pages so if a semester or two goes by without anyone's being admit to the program, we see that as preferable to a lowering of Institute standards.

IEUC Research Associates are an Elite corp committed to helping everyone achieve their full potential.

We accept applications from highly motivated students each semester. Proof of Good Academic Standing and US Citizenship is required of all applicants.

This is not a residential program and participants will be required to provide their own computing hardware and email access, as well as to make their own arrangements to purchase or borrow copies of any assigned readings that are not downloadable from the net.

Contact us to learn more.

It is our belief that End User computing skills, particularly an appreciation of the public policy questions raised by pervasive IT, should be regarded as a critical component of both K-12 and Undergraduate instruction.

While we don't have the resources to develop our own Lesson Plans at this time, we would like to offer this space for Faculty members to contribute and share their own materials.

Just Contact Us if you have a syllabus, unit, or set of exercises that you would like us to link to or host, we will be happy to review it and perhaps suggest an improvement or two. It will then be made available here with full credit accruing to you for your contribution!

If you need help finding resources to use in End User Computing related curriculum develop, we are here to help!

Moreover, if you are a student majoring in Education or Computer Science who would like to volunteer to help us develop materials for classroom use, we promise that your contribution would be prominently recognized.