Read the recap here.

Read the recap here.

Read the recap here.

Click to read Dr. Woods reflections on this Opening Event.

Written by Laura Mansfield

The finale of the 2012 Innovation Forum included a distinguished panel representing thought leaders from academia and industry.

Panelists were:
UW President Michael Young.
Dr. Fariba Alamdari, Vice President of Marketing and Value Analysis for Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
Dr. Anoop Gupta, Distinguished Scientist for Microsoft Research. Gupta also serves on the UW Bothell Advisory Board.
Dr. J Rogers Hollingsworth, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and History at the University of Wisconsin.

UW Bothell Chancellor Kenyon Chan opened the evening by recognizing the success of UW Bothell’s inaugural Innovation Forum.  “This event demonstrates that the University of Washington Bothell is a hotbed of innovation and creativity,” he said.

President Young: Reimagine higher education

In his opening remarks, President Young remarked that it had been an “extraordinary” week at UW Bothell.  “This week has been a reflection of what I have sensed about this campus. There is a spirit of imagination and innovation that is healthy and thriving. That spirit has never been more important than now. It is imperative that we reimagine higher education.”

Young reflected on the role of the University of Washington to society. “We do extraordinary things at this university. We receive the second-most intramural funding in the United States.  We constantly strive to translate our work into things into what will make people’s lives better.”

“We have a capacity to organize ourselves around a simple but profound concept: the notion that a great university thinks about ideas and moving those ideas into the world in a way they have impact.”

Young called for an auditing of higher education. “We examine everything but ourselves,” he observed. “Technology has transformed everything that makes this kind of transformation needed.  Students are different, but we haven’t transformed our thinking in instruction to respond.”

“We have a “Bismarckian” notion of what a university should like look like,” he said. “Knowledge is created on the edge of disciplines. There is a tremendous need for people who work across boundaries and look at the grand challenges.”

Dr. J Rogers Hollingsworth: The ‘Global University’ could be here

“We currently think of the modern university in terms of local and global. We need more longitudinal thinking,” he said. “Where did we come from and where are we going?”

The pace of change in the university is accelerating, Hollingsworth noted. “Fifty years from now, universities will be very different than they are today.”  By 2050, Hollingsworth envisions a global university, in which faculty will be recruited from all over the globe and engaged in a narrow range of research.

“My fantasy university is relatively small and engaged in rich interaction,” he said. “It has relatively few faculty, but they are teaching tens of thousands of students. In my model university, the faculty changes every five to 10 years. This ensures a constant change of ideas.”  Hollingsworth noted that such models are already in place, citing the Howard Hughes Research Institute and the European University Institute.

Hollingsworth says UW Bothell is at a turning point.  “I think this campus has enormous potential,” he says.  “This is a wonderful environment in which to live.  I walked around the campus today and found some land … the global university could be located right here.”

Dr. Fariba Alamdari:  “If everybody thinks the same, no one is thinking”

Alamdari noted the strong relationship between the university and the economy, calling for greater investment in research and development.  “The U.S. is not at the top of list in terms of quality in math and engineering,” she said. “This is so important for global economic growth. We have to help universities achieve high education and research. How can we do that?”

Alamdari, who worked for more than 25 years in academia, says her dream is to “go back to the basics.” Universities have moved towards processes and layers at the expense of basic skills, she said. “People cannot write, cannot communicate, and they worry when you show them math. We have to make sure no one leaves the university without these basic skills.”

Turning to the notion of innovation, Alamdari said real innovation comes about through diversity of thought. “We all talk about diversity, but we have to concentrate on diversity of thought. We need people who think differently. We like like-minded people, but that doesn’t aid innovation,” she said. “If everybody thinks the same, no one is thinking”

Dr. Anoop Gupta: Scale changes everything

Technology has transformed all aspects of education, but the university has not changed in fundamental ways, he said.  He speculates great change on the horizon with the growing adaptation of online education.  “Scale changes everything,” he says.  “Now we have institutions offering courses with tens of thousands of students,” he said, noting Berkeley, Stanford, MITx and the Khan Academy as examples.

“There is lots of evidence that the traditional lecture model is not a great model of learning, he says.  “Today we have embedded quizzes, electronic textbooks, and social tools that permit us to scale large but allow us to assemble in small communities. “  Gupta said technology provides a great opportunity to meet the needs of many people who cannot access education through traditional methods.

Written by Stacy Schultz

On this last day of UW Bothell’s Innovation Forum, current and former UW provosts, along with university professors and a local business leader came together to discuss the future of scientific innovation in the age of globalization. In his presentation, J. Rogers Hollingsworth, a Professor Emeritus of Sociology and History at the University of Wisconsin, discussed the value of researchers working together across disciplines.

Often scientists in different fields do not recognize they are addressing similar problems, he said. For example, researchers across disciplines are exploring the structure of complex networks. This is the case in work on neural networks, genes, transportation hubs, and international banking. It is also the case in research focused on properties of binding, which have implications from chemistry to nation building.

“There are these central problems,” he said. “We can use these common models and methods and really work together across different fields to generate new knowledge.”

To better facilitate communication across disciplines, Hollingsworth favors small research institutions that work alongside larger universities. “We need a new kind of research institution that is truly global,” he said.

UW Provost Ana Mari Cauce said she thought UW Bothell has an opportunity to be innovative in ways that more long-term established university campuses may not. “To me what is exciting about UW Bothell is that it is able to develop without an infrastructure that has been inherited,” she said.

She said one exciting area is the interdisciplinary use of campus buildings. “The crossroads are where innovations happen,” she said. “We are thinking about buildings in terms of function, not discipline.”

UW Bothell Interdisciplinary arts and sciences professor Alan Wood noted that when organizations get bigger, they develop less tolerance for risk. Thomas Clement, CEO of both Cardiac Insight Inc., and Aqueduct, agreed that with growth comes a reluctance to fail. “As organizations grow, they do get risk averse,” he said. “When you get bigger, big mistakes can be fatal.”

Former UW President Lee Huntsman offered some benefits of large universities. “We go to a lot of trouble to hire individuals who are brilliant, highly motivated, and hard to manage,” he said. “We give them the keys to the institution and then we get out of the way. In the macro sense, that works well.”

He also said there are advantages to the “greater menu of disciplines” within a large university. “I think of a university as a collection of small organizations,” he said. “It is like a holding company.”

Hollingsworth cautioned that future research programs should invest in basic science as well as applied research. “Many of the major innovations that we have today didn’t exist 40 – 50 years ago,” he said. “There were fundamental discoveries in science done decades ago that no one anticipated their impact.”

One audience member asked about the challenge of involving students in innovative research when many come to the classroom unprepared for high level science and math.

Cauce said that students are crucial to trans-disciplinary work. “They are like the bees that cross-pollinate,” she said. At the same time, she acknowledged that introductory science classes are often not engaging enough to students who are required to take the courses, but may not see why they need to know the material. This is an area where the university could do more, she said.

Clement suggested allowing people to learn in different ways. “It can’t be a cookie cutter approach,” he said. “You have to figure out how to get people curious.”

Hollingsworth said new technologies are going to revolutionize education. In the future, he cannot imagine that instruction will be like it is today, especially with the use of video. “Courses can be shared across the globe,” he said. “I can imagine a professor teaching hundreds of thousands of students.”

Written by Laura Mansfield

Jin-Kyu Jung
Santiago Lopez

Jung and Lopez are both assistant professors in the UW Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.

When talking about geographic information science, Jung prefers the abbreviation “GISci” to communicate the philosophy that GIS is “not just a tool, but a science.” Jung said GIS “helps us understand the procession of place. We are living in a completely new era. We have unprecedented power to map anything, anytime. What does that mean?”

Jung’s work focuses on qualitative GIS, which he said provides a new way to collect and analyze information. To illustrate the power of GIS, he described a research project he is working on that explores how children perceive their community. Jung and his colleagues interviewed children about the places they visit in their community and then used GIS technology to show the community on a visual basis.

“When you show the community on a visual basis, it provides different truths about that neighborhood. It also makes it possible to visualize barriers and opportunities.” Jung said. As he compared children who live in cities to children who live in suburbs, it became apparent that children in in the city have a smaller “activity space” than those in the suburbs. Jung defined “activity space” by the amount of space children have to move and walk around.

The SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is using GIS technology in Rome, Italy. To visit that site, go to : http://senseable.mit.edu/realtimerome/.

Santiago Lopez: “GIS – A spatial approach to addressing global environmental change”

Lopez said he uses GIS “to help ask important questions about the space we live in, and to visualize that information.” There is an unprecedented amount of data being created,” he said. “How do we incorporate all the information to create knowledge?” Specifically, he is looking at changes in the landscape and what factors triggered those landscape changes. There is an unprecedented amount of data being created,” he said. “How do we incorporate all the information to create knowledge?”

Lopez described his research project which involves visualizing changes in physical systems in the tropical Andes region. “The human aspect of climate change in tropical Andes is larger than in Antarctica,” he said. “By the end of the 21st century, the region could experience a change in temperature from 4.5 to 5 degrees. The effects include the shifting of grasslands and recession of mountain glaciers.” Glaciers are important to regulate climate and to provide water to human populations, he noted.

Lopez uses thematic mapping to illustrate his data. “With thematic mapping you can start asking questions and visualize changes,” He said. “GIS allows accurate longitudinal characterizations of landscapes. We need to find innovative ways to find linkages between spatial data and human behavior.” Ultimately, he hopes to determine the key factors to environmental change.

In the novel, one of the distinguishing features of the main character is that he wears a chair upside-down on his head — both an absurdist gesture and a creative horizon from which the story itself unfolds.

For the project, students were challenged to take a picture of someone wearing a chair, incorporating the spirit of engagement into the process. The intent was to initiate dialogue among participants – as a space for whimsical speculation and creative rethinking of performance and representation.

Written by Stacy Schultz

On day two of the four-day UW Bothell Innovation Forum, professors from the university presented cutting edge research related to increasing students’ engagement and learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). “We are trying to imagine new ways of designing learning environments for STEM education that takes learners’ prior knowledge, interests, and identities into account,” said Carrie Tzou, assistant professor of education.

As members of the audience ate lunch, Tzou along with Kelvin Sung, professor of Computing and Software Systems, and Robin Angotti, associate professor of Education each took the stage to share their work.

Tzou discussed her research as a science educator working with elementary and high school students. Her goal, she said, is to bring what is important and culturally relevant in students’ lives into the classroom while at the same time expanding scientific inquiry into students’ everyday lives outside of school.

She said young students who are given a chance to identify with STEM-related projects in school are more likely to pursue higher education degrees in those fields later on. “They learn to participate in science and have that identity formation as someone who can do science,” she said.

Her projects have included fifth grade students who learn about microbes through a scientific examination of how their families maintain healthy habits at home. Another project involved high school students who studied the effect of pollutants on fish in Puget Sound and how their own use of personal care products might be contributing to the problem.

Sung reported on his work with faculty and students using video games. The conventional thinking, he said, is that students like to play video games so educators should find ways for students to learn by playing. Actually, he said, many students want to learn how to build games.

Sung saw video games as a potential tool for faculty to teach basic computer science skills. The goal of his project is to give faculty some expertise in game programming so they can incorporate games in their lessons. “I’m interested in giving professors a tool to teach what they want to teach, but not for it to take over the entire class,” he said. “We are teaching computer science coding concepts through building simple games.”

The logic behind the coding is the same when you are making changes to the front end, or user experience. “The professor doesn’t need to know so much about gaming,” he said. Still, many professors are not “gamers” he pointed out, so he offers two-day workshops for teachers to learn how to build their own games.

Robin Angotti, who focuses on math education, says that 21st century students need to know more than just how to compute numbers. “There’s a shift in math education to more critical thinking skills,” she said. Students need to do creative problem solving, they need to develop flexibility in thinking, and the ability to question, she said.

Her research has focused on implementing a technology called “Kinect” that uses infrared laser tracking, voice recognition, and face recognition to teach math principles. The technology allows teachers to incorporate movement into math lessons. Angotti calls it “gesture-supported learning.”

Using volunteer members from the audience, Angotti demonstrated how it works. Students come to the front of the room and stand a short distance from the Kinect device. The device tracks motion as they move their bodies, either walking back and forth or moving their arms. Software created by programmers at UW Bothell display the results in graph form on a large screen and then students are asked to describe in mathematical terms, what the graph shows.

“Everything I used to write up on the board, I can have students demonstrate by moving their bodies,” Angotti said. There is not research yet to show whether gesture-supported learning improves students’ understanding of math concepts, she said, but it does seem to increase the interest of students who are not otherwise excited about math class.

One member of the audience wondered if gesture-supported learning could be used to help students gain insight about the Roman Empire. Another audience member talked about using the technology for teaching physics. Angotti agreed there are many possibilities. “There’s so much more that I could do with this,” she said.