Madalene Spezialetti, Ph.D.

A pack of wild wolves is roaming campus.  Everyone stay safely in your dorm rooms!

So there you are, anxiously looking out your window for the wolves.  But you see nothing.  You text your friends.  They see nothing out their windows.  And then, the wolves appear. You excitedly text your friends “They are outside my window!”.  But by the time they receive your message, the wolf pack has already run off (who knows where?), leaving your friends with erroneous information about the location of the wolves.

My research in distributed systems focuses on exactly this problem: How can computers, with an extremely limited view consisting of their own states, capture a picture of a state that spans multiple computers or an entire distributed system? And what guarantees can be made about such a picture given the continually changing states of the computers and the continual transfer of information among them? This work has been supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation.

Putting People in the Picture. Creative Thinking. Innovation in Problem Solving. My research in Computer Science Education uses a video scenario-based approach to developing skills ranging from requirements gathering and software design to innovation thinking and creative problem solving. The approach looks beyond coding to emphasize computing as people solving problems for people who are experiencing problems. By decoupling the analysis of computing problems and the design of potential solutions from implementation, video scenarios also provide a basis for equal-footing group exercises that enable the widest diversity of voices to participate in collaborative, active learning experiences. Experiences that develop the skills needed to take people-centered problems and create people-centered solutions.

As one student noted about their take-away from using the video scenario approach: “coding is much more than just the relationship between coder and the code – it’s also about the people who use it”

A collection of video scenarios and discussion prompts is freely available on youtube.com/virt-univeristy. This work has been supported by research grants from the ACM SIGCSE and Trinity College.

I only ever thought of computing as creating, and had the idea of making videos to help computer science students develop creative problem-solving skills in the context of computing…an idea I decided to pursue in spite of knowing nothing about filmmaking. But then, that’s how all filmmakers start becoming filmmakers…they have a perspective to share, a vision to realize, a story to tell. As the co-director of the Film Studies Program, I want to provide students with the guidance, and spaces, and knowledge and places to explore the multitude of ways to tell their own stories through film. And help them appreciate that each of them has completely unique stories to tell; stories that can’t be told by anyone else but them.

My own interest in filmmaking focusses on short narrative and biographical films, such as these films featuring two Trinity College honorary degree recipients: the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Bill Marimow, who was the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time the film was made, and social entrepreneur Nancy Lublin.

Email: madalene.spezialetti@trincoll.edu