Design Patterns and AI: Computer Science evolves at SOU

Design Patterns and AI: Computer Science evolves at SOU

/in ,

(Ashland, Ore.) — A new “Design Patterns” course in Southern Oregon University’s Computer Science program leans on artificial intelligence to perform coding tasks, allowing students to focus on the big picture and serve as architects rather than carpenters.

The course – an upper-division elective intended primarily for Computer Science majors – reflects an ongoing shift toward AI in software engineering by taking a deeper look at the structure of software, teaching students how to recognize recurring problems in programming and apply reusable solutions, or patterns.

“The main difference (from other coding courses) is the students aren’t doing much coding at all in this class,” said David Pouliot, an SOU associate professor of Computer Science and instructor for the course. “Instead they are designing the code, which is more like creating the blueprints and defining the functionality of the different pieces of software and how they interact.

“This approach lets different teams work independently, makes it easy to upgrade parts without breaking the whole system and keeps complex software manageable,” he said.

The Design Patterns course – offered for the first time this fall – acknowledges that tools such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot have become capable of generating short, functional pieces of computer code, and the role of computer scientists is moving from line-by-line implementation toward a higher-level of thinking.

AI can quickly generate snippets of code, but it still struggles with things that come more naturally to humans, such as design. Programmers still need the same core engineering skills to use AI effectively, as artificially generated code often contains bugs, logic errors or vulnerabilities that inexperienced developers may not recognize.

“Students analyze how programs are structured rather than the nitty-gritty details of the program,” Computer Science student Felicity Johnson said of the Design Patterns course. “You can think of it like how an architect creates blueprints for a building, but the builder actually makes the building itself.

“It teaches students how to structure software so that it’s flexible, efficient and easier to maintain.”

Students in Design Patterns learn how to think about structure, choosing between composition and inheritance, where to apply abstraction and how to design programs for scalability and flexibility. Those are decisions that require judgement, creativity and a good understanding of software architecture – traits that even the most advanced AI tools today don’t possess.

The course is intended to help students learn how to use AI as an assistant and increase their programming productivity. The field is moving in the direction of developers spending more time at the structural level, making design decisions and defining interfaces, while AI handles more of the low-level and repetitive work.

“First, they get experience designing large projects – something they don’t normally get until they have graduated and been in the industry for a while,” Pouliot said. “The other thing I hope is that this class will help prepare students for changing roles.

“It should help prepare students for any class where the students complete larger projects – primarily our capstone sequence where groups of students work on a real project over multiple quarters.”

-SOU-

SOU’s Small Business Development Center to close

SOU’s Small Business Development Center to close

/in ,

(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University’s Small Business Development Center, which has served Rogue Valley businesses for 41 years, will close to the public at the end of December after the university and state of Oregon were unable to reach agreement on a plan to maintain U.S. Small Business Administration funding for the center.

SOU has historically augmented the federal funding, but the university’s plan to rebuild itself as a smaller, more resilient institution reduces its ability to help pay for all services. The university submitted a joint proposal with Rogue Community College to combine SOU’s Medford-based Small Business Development Center with RCC’s Josephine County-serving SBDC, but the state office that coordinates Oregon’s 18 SBDCs rejected that plan.

“We definitely knew that the budget environment would mean less capability to subsidize the SBDC’s operations, but we did in earnest work with the state to find a creative solution to continuing services,” SOU President Rick Bailey said. “We went back-and-forth with the state in our effort to create a single center for Jackson and Josephine counties – despite our budget issues – but ultimately were unable to move our proposal forward.”

More than 11,000 entrepreneurs and small business operators have tapped the services offered by SOU’s SBDC, which is located in the RCC/SOU Higher Education Center in Medford. The center works closely with SOU’s School of Business to teach and advise students and collaborate with faculty. It offers help to anyone who operates or is planning to open a business and also runs a Market Research Institute that can offer in-depth, applied market research to SBDC clients.

“The Rogue Valley owes a sincere debt of gratitude to all the amazing staff at the SOU SBDC and Market Research Institute for their service to our community and our region,” President Bailey said. “They have been role models of dedicated, heart-centered service.”

Small Business Development Centers are operated by each of Oregon’s 17 community colleges. SOU’s SBDC in Medford is the only one managed by a university, after Eastern Oregon University closed its SBDC office a year ago. Oregon’s SBDC offices are part of a national network and provide advising, training, online courses and resources for businesses throughout the state.

SBDC offices in Oregon are associated with both the U.S. Small Business Administration and Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency.

-SOU-

SOU Ashland's Chandler Campbell and Jacob Nowack present research on artificial intelligence

Graduate and current student present SOU research at national conference

/in ,

(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University computer science graduate Chandler Campbell and current student Jacob Nowack attended a conference of research software engineers in Philadelphia last month to showcase their work on a pair of closely related projects that hinge on the use of artificial intelligence to simplify and organize highly complex research tasks.

Campbell presented a paper on his study of tacit knowledge in research settings – gathering, storing and retrieving the unspoken practices of academic teams that sometimes are lost when a project is disrupted or ends – and Nowack spoke about using a tacit knowledge tool to help UCLA astronomers rapidly expand their efforts to survey billions of distant galaxies. Both Campbell and Nowack work on their AI projects under Bernadette Boscoe, an SOU assistant professor of computer science who builds and researches infrastructures and tools to help domain scientists do their work.

Campbell and Nowack were presenters at the third annual national conference of the US Research Software Engineer Association, an organization that supports those who use expertise in programing to advance research. The association is a project of a California-based nonprofit.

“I got to meet a lot of really interesting people from all over the country, and learned more about cutting-edge AI technologies and software development techniques which I think will help me a lot in my future career,” Nowack said, describing his experience at the conference.

“I was a bit nervous initially going into it, but when the time came I had a great time presenting,” he said.

Nowack’s project is intended to help astronomers who measure the distances to far-flung galaxies so they can better understand how the universe has expanded and evolved. Spectroscopy, the traditional method of measuring those distances, is expensive and time-consuming.

“Our project uses machine learning to solve this problem,” Nowack said. “We trained an AI model on approximately 286,000 galaxies whose distances were already measured using spectroscopy. Once trained, (the AI model) can estimate distances over 1,000 times faster than traditional spectroscopy, making large-scale cosmic surveys practical.”

His work with the UCLA astronomers is based on a Large Language Model (LLM) of artificial intelligence that is used to archive the group’s protocols.

Boscoe’s research group at SOU has developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system – an AI framework that pairs an LLM with an information retrieval system to improve accuracy and relevance of resulting data. Her research has received grants over the past two years from the Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and Boscoe has worked with Campbell to build the project’s RAG-LLM tool – AquiLLM, which was the subject of Campbell’s presentation at last month’s conference.

“Our work on AquiLLM is part software development and part social research,” he said. “We’re investigating the potential for an AI-enabled knowledge repository to improve how academic research groups function.”

Tacit knowledge – which can include informal practices such as notes, meeting transcripts and group communications – can sometimes be lost when participants come and go from academic research groups.

“Our hope is that if we can ingest enough informal communication into the system, and give an LLM access to that information, it will be able to help group members access the tacit knowledge of the group,” Campbell said. “To do this, we’ve written a custom Retrieval-Augmented Generation tool (AquiLLM) specifically for researchers. We have a beta version deployed for astronomers at UCLA, and we’re currently working on fleshing out more functionality.”

The Philadelphia conference included representatives from several national research labs and dozens of top research universities, and Campbell said many were thinking about the same issues that his work addresses.

“I got a lot of valuable feedback on our work, and got to see how other researchers are trying to use AI to solve adjacent problems,” he said. “I was very proud to be there in the mix, representing SOU.”

-SOU-