CS&E Education Panel, March 4, 2009

From SIAG-CSE

Here are suggestions I heard during the panel discussion:

- SIAM should create a text book series in CS&E. This specifically means textbooks around which one could build a curriculum for CS&E, so they need exercises, examples, and so on (as opposed to research monographs). There is a definite shortage of textbooks suitable for CS&E, which places extra demands on a text because of the multidisciplinary audience and the need to thread a way through technical detail and breadth of coverage.

- SIAM should sponsor a public friendly workshop "How computational/applied/interdisciplinary mathematics and CS&E have changed the world" in a venue like the Library of Congress with national exposure. (Chris Jones can describe an analogous event that is being organized in computer science).

- There were specific calls for an updated Petzold report on CSE. This report should be very concrete in listing ingredients for a CSE program. It should also adress the "depth versus breadth" issue in graduate CSE education.

- SIAM should do much more to raise awareness in high school children about the career opportunities in computational science and engineering (with a rapidly growing future). One idea that came up: SIAM should organize (with NSF, DOE sponsorship) a summer camp in scientific simulation for juniors in high school. The model is an old NSF Physics program that ran in the seventies. An example of a three week summer camp in that program: the students would go to spend three weeks in a university to work on a specific research project mentored by physics faculty. An example would be to first build a gas chamber out of a beaker and measure the mean free path of electrons experimentally, then spend the second half of the camp doing a computational simulation to compute the same result using MC. There were many obvious ideas about how to do this in CSE.

- There were complaints that SIAM gives up leadership in many aspects of the profession of applied/computational mathematics. For example, letting AMS collect student and career statistics instead of collecting our own.