About

This Site

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