In 1996 I began writing transforming my teaching materials into html
files. Most of the work was in association with a course
taught to UCLA seniors generally from the Computer Science Department,
but also from other parts of the
School of Engineering and Applied Science. The course CS 190 concerned
concepts and practices in design. My interests broadened the function of
the site to
Mathematics, particularly in relationship to
Computing and Computer Science, and to visual and auditory aspects of available technology, especially with regard to issues that came to my attention
through years of teaching graduate courses and students in Pattern
Recognition, Speech Processing, Biomedical Images, and related areas.
Many files had been placed on the site by early 1997. While I did most of the work, for scanning and cartoons I was aided by Gavin Wu; Eskandar Ensafi improved my ability to use HTML; other students in the Fall '96, and Winter '97 offerings of the CS 190 Computer Science Design Project Course contributed. The Fall course students comments that web use was superior to distributing hard copy in class led me to writing the files in html.
A version of this site that starts from files written for the
undergraduate course mentioned above is
CS 190 Main File;
other links to graduate and
undergraduate courses are at these urls.
For some of my travel sketches go to Drawings. Computer Science Department web files for
academic staff are
at CS & E Dept. Faculty.
All above links lead to files that show varied uses of HTML, visual
materials, animations, and sounds.
Interests
Curiousity about human/computer-interaction (cooperative or computer-mediated
work), the potential impact of wider use of images in
Mathematics/Computer-Science education (e.g., to improve access technical
studies), and general issues about representing and conveying
information, have shaped what appears now on these web pages.
Words, Mathematics and proverbs possess one common characteristic, and
share it with Physics, and I argue here and elsewhere, Art, and other
realms of knowledge. The characteristic is that they represent something
worth passing on to others, and do so in a concise, memorable, and
useful manner. In images the common terms beauty, balance,
harmony each describe something that we can say contribute to why that
entity is worth future notice. The same is true within Science where the phrase
Occam's Razor describes this minimal or concise aspect of
knowledge. F. Heylighen, says "one should not increase, beyond what
is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything" and
explains that:
"Occam's razor is a logical principle attributed to the mediaeval
philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham). The principle states that one
should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed. This principle
is often called the principle of parsimony. It underlies all scientific
modelling and theory building. It admonishes us to choose from a set of
otherwise equivalent models of a given phenomenon the simplest one."
In the communication dominated twentieth century the word information
came to have a mathematical foundational quality. Representation of
information is what we do whenever a sketch is drawn (and similarly when
a portrait is painted or a person photographed). What criteria are meaningful
when judging alternative forms of information representation? Visual
examples are seen and expandable at detail.
Education
Many sources led me to the interests described above. One important
source was my experience at The Cooper Union.
Recent stimuli - NSF: Broadening
Participation in Computing, Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation; and
Cisco: Social
Networking's Impact on Business Communication and Collaboration.
| 11/11/07 Version | http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~klinger/about.html |
| ©2007 Allen Klinger |