Prof. Yale Patt will give a talk about "The CORRECT first course for serious students of computing" in OzU.

Prof. Yale Patt will give a talk about "The CORRECT first course for serious students of computing" in OzU EF-510 at 11:30 AM on October 10th.

Abstract

After 50 years of teaching computer science and computer engineering students, I am convinced that the traditional method of introducing computing to students via a high level language course (and worse yet an object-oriented course in JAVA) is a mistake.  Students have no understanding of how a computer works and so they are forever memorizing patterns and hope that they can apply those patters to the application at hand.  Unfortunately, memorizing is not learning and the results have been as expected.  I believe the correct approach is my "motivated bottom-up" approach which I introduced at Michigan in 1995, and have been continually teaching and refining ever since.  I start with the switch level behavior of a transistor and build from there.  From transistors to gates to muxes, decoders, gated latches, finite state machines, memory, the LC-3 computer, machine language programming, assembly languge programming, and finally C programming.  Students continue to build on what they already know, continually raising the level of abstraction.  I have taught the course eleven times over the last 18 years at Michigan and Texas, and an accelerated version of the at USTC in Hefei and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou at the invitation of the Chinese.  In this talk, I will describe the course, why it makes sense,
how it affects the rest of the curriculum, and my experiences with it.

Bio

Yale Patt currently works on problems for the microprocessors of the year 2018, when technology promises each chip will contain more than 30 billion transistors. His research focuses on breaking the abstraction layers that separate the problem statement in natural language from the circuits that execute the program. Some of his current projects include (1) ACMP, a heterogeneous multi-core microprocessor, where many of the cores are reconfigurable either for high-performance ILP or for high-throughput, (2) improving the interface between the processor core and the DRAMs, (3) GPUs for non graphics processing, (4) effective prefetching in a multi-core environment, and (5) more effective use of the run-time system for
performance.

Much as he enjoys research, Professor Patt's first love is teaching. The focus of his teaching has always been on understanding the fundamentals. At Michigan, he overhauled the introductory computer organization course, the intensive computer design course, and (with his former colleague Kevin Compton) the first required computing course for undergraduate EE, CS, and CE majors. Their motivated bottom-up approach is the subject of the textbook, "Introduction to
Computing Systems, From Bits and Gates to C and Beyond," McGraw-Hill, 2001, ISBN: 0-07-237690-2, which he co-authored with his former PhD student Sanjay Patel, who is now a tenured Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The 2nd edition was published in 2004, ISBN 0-07-246750-9, and the 3rd edition is in progress.

He has also taught more than 5000 engineers in industry, -- in ACM/IEEE conference tutorials and in short courses at company sites.

Yale Patt earned his BS at Northeastern University and his MS and PhDat Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. He received the 1995 IEEE Emannuel R. Piore Medal "for contributions to computer architecture leading to commercially viable high performance microprocessors," the 1996 IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award "for important contributions to instruction level paralelism and superscalar processor design," and the 1999 IEEE Wallace W. McDowell Award "for your impact on the high performance microprocessor industry via a combination of important contributions to both engineering and education." In 2005, he received the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award "for fundamental contributions to high performance processor design." In 2011, he was selected as the inaugural recipient of the annual IEEE B. Ramakrishna Rau Award "for significant contributions and inspiring leadership in the microarchitecture community with respect to teaching, mentoring, research, and service." In 2013, he received the IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Award "for nearly half a century of significant contributions to information processing, including microarchitecture insights, a breakaway textbook, and mentoring future leaders." He is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM.

For his teaching, he has received several awards, most notably the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for 2000. He was inducted in 2011 into The University of Texas Academy of Distinguished Teachers, a body charged with advising the President of the University in matters of undergraduate education. He also received the 2002 Texas Excellence Teaching Award for the College of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Also, the 2002 Dad's Centennial Fellowship for his commitment to teaching freshmen. At Michigan, hewas named Outstanding Professor of the Year by the Michigan Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu in 1992. He received the Teaching Excellence Award of the EECS Department at Michigan in 1995 and the College of Engineering of Michigan in 1996. In 1998, he was named an Arthur F. Thurnau professor at Michigan for his commitment to undergraduate education. In 1999 (for the academic year 1998-1999), and again in 2001 (for the academic year 2000-2001), he was named the National ACM Lectureship Program's
Outstanding Lecturer of the Year.