fOSSa 2011 Conference

To look at the future

Responsible: IRILL – Paris Diderot – Roberto Di Cosmo

Computers & software are becoming pervasive, and are having directly or indirectly a significant impact on almost all aspects of our modern life: it comes as no surprise that computer & software have an impact on education too. Academia has an important role to play at several levels…

• We need to educate the teachers,
• We need to teach all university students,
• We need to teach IT students how to work in an environment that is becoming dominated by Free & Open Source software.

In the Education track of Fossa 2010, we will try to advance the debate on all these levels, by bringing together people that have first hand experience gained during early experiments in the past years, as well as people working to improve on what is currently done. Instead of traditional technical conferences, the different presentations will follow a "lightning talk" style to allow a greater freedom of movement and exchange of ideas.
 

• Roberto Di Cosmo (http://www.dicosmo.org) holds a PhD in Computer Science and is currently Computer Science professor at University Paris Diderot, after teaching for almost a decade at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and spending a few years at INRIA.

• He has been actively involved in research in theoretical computing, specifically in functional programming, parallel and distributed programming, the semantics of programming languages, type systems, rewriting and linear logic.

• Following the evolution of our society under the impact of IT with great interest, he has been a Free Software advocate, contributing to its adoption since 1998 with the best-seller "Hijacking the world" (http://www.dicosmo.org/HoldUp/index.html.en), seminars, articles and software.

• He has created the Free Software thematic group of System@tin in October 2007, and coordinates the Mancoosi european project dedicated to improving the quality of GNU/Linux distributions.

Research & Innovation on Free Software

• Benjamin Nguyen is alumni from the ENS Cachan, and received his PHD from University Paris Sud in 2003.
• He is associate professor at the University of Versailles St-Quetin since 2004. He used to be a member of the Data Integration and Management team, led by Pr. Gardarin.
• In  2010, he joined the INRIA project "Secured and Mobile Information Systems", led by Pr. Pucheral.
• He also was associate director of the computer science department of UVSQ from 2006 to 2010, and organised the high school teacher training course in 2010, which is continuing this year.
• He is co-author of the book directed by Gilles Dowek "Introduction à la Science Informatique".

   

Training High School Teachers in Computer Science : A first experiment at University of Versailles St-Quentin
 

This presentations will describe the organisation of the first year of training of high school teachers in computer science.
The objective was for them to be able to teach the new computer science option in Terminale S in 2012. We detail the training course, the feedback from the teachers, and the lessons learned from this initiative.

• Thierry Stoehr works at the University Paris-Diderot where he is involved in free and open source software actions inside and outside the university.
• He is as well in charge of the C2i (Certificat informatique et Internet).
   

FOSS @P7 & @UNPIdF, or FOSS in action in universities

The talk will expose and give details about 2 actions in FOSS in universities :
- at the University Paris-Diderot where I'm in charge of promoting FOSS
- at the UNPIdF (a 18 parisian universities organisation in the digital fields) where I'm in charge of a FOSS training center.

• Olivier Ricou is a FLOSS educator.
• Founder member of Ecole Ouverte and Ecole Ouverte Francophone non-profit organisations, director of the research lab LRDE at the graduate school of computing science EPITA, he has a long experience of FLOSS as teaching material.
• He is also member of the Europeen project OpenSE, an open educational framework for computer science Software Engineering.
   

The Eof and OpenSE experiments

Free/Libre and Open Source Software programs are known for their technical and popular success in many domains. Today they constitute serious alternatives to their closed commercial counterparts.

Furthermore one of their main feature can be used to teach Computer Science: their collaborative development known as the Bazaar model.
Being member of an open project is a great experience for learning collaborative work and applying formal knowledge from courses. However it seems difficult to integrate such projects for regular students.Therefore l'Ecole Ouverte Francophone and OpenSE have tried to set up frameworks to help students to take full advantage of this large, open and friendly community. To do so they mix local open projects (exercices) to pratice and projects with organizations like Apache for real.

This talk provides some feedback on these two projects.
 

• Albert  is a senior research scientist at INRIA Saclay (Paris) and a part time associate professor at École Polytechnique, France.
• His research aims at scaling the performance of computational applications over generations of computer architectures, with an emphasis on optimizing compilers for high-performance and embedded systems, deterministic parallel programming, automatic parallelization, and parallel runtime systems.
• He graduated from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and received his PhD from the University of Versailles in 1999.

Preliminary Initiative for a Semester of Code (SoC)

This talk would address the challenges of demystifying the innards of computing systems to students with very little programming experience (based on Android). Then, for those specializing in CS or ECE, We will discuss/share our experience with the Google Summer of Code program (for GCC-related work) and how this approach could be adapted and integrated to current curricula.