Don Blaheta

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Professional interests:
"Recently, my focus has been on the curriculum and pedagogy of computer science: how can we arrange our courses to most effectively teach all students---both CS majors and not---how to think and interact with information? In particular, it is time to rethink the disconnected paradigm currently in wide use, and take advantage of natural connections between the subfields of CS. Knox's CS 262 'Information and Knowledge Management' is an example of this, covering material that at other schools might be spread across four or five different courses, most of them elective; students report that this approach gives them a good understanding of the relationship and import of databases, artificial intelligence, and the other covered areas, and a better basis on which to chart their course through the advanced electives and an eventual career.

My more traditional research area is natural language processing, or computational linguistics. Specifically, I work primarily in sentence parsing, the annotation of sentence constituents with their grammatical and semantic roles. Most recently I've been working on parser evaluation, seeing what progress has been made on the parsing task and hopefully suggesting future research directions."

Years at Knox: Fall 2003 to present

Education
Ph.D., Computer Science, 2004, Brown University.
A.M., Linguistics, 2003, Brown University.
Sc.M., Computer Science, 1999, Brown University.
B.S., Computer Science and Mathematics, 1997, Quincy University.

Teaching Interests
Natural language processing, artificial intelligence, programming languages, graphics, linguistics

Recent Accomplishments
Publications
"Democracy in the classroom: an exercise for the first days of CS1." Proceedings of the 14th ACM-SIGCSE annual conference on Innovation and Technology in computer science education (ITiCSE), Paris, July 2009.

"CS262: A breadth-second survey of informatic CS." Proceedings of the 40th SIGCSE technical symposium on computer science education, Chattanooga, March 2009.

"Handling Noisy Training and Testing Data." Proceedings of the 7th conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Philadelphia, 111-116, 2002.

"Unsupervised Learning of Multi-Word Verbs." Co-authored with Mark Johnson. ACL Workshop on Collocation, Toulouse, France, 54-60, 2001.

"Assigning Function Tags to Parsed Text." Co-authored with Eugene Charniak. Proceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Seattle, Washington, 234-240, 2000.

"Automatic Compensation for Parser Figure-of-Merit Flaws." Co-authored with Eugene Charniak. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, College Park, Maryland, 513--518, 1999.

Presentations
"A Compressed, Breadth-Second Approach: Implementing CS262c 'Information and Knowledge Management.'" Poster, SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Com-puter Science Education, Portland, Oregon, 2008.

"Maze Solver". Panel, 'Nifty Assignments' at ACM-SIGCSE, Portland, Oregon, 2008.

Campus & Community Involvement
Faculty Secretary.
Member, Grievance Panel.
Advisor, Knox Ballroom Dance Team and Newman Club.
Advisor and participant in 2006 New Orleans service trip and Students Without Borders' 2009 Arizona service trip.

Reader and consultant, Advanced Placement exams in Computer Science.
Member, Association for Computational Linguistics.
Member, Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education.

Member, Board of Directors, Prairie Players Community Theatre.
Member, Galesburg Community Chorus.

What Students Say
"Don isn't interested in a mere transfer of knowledge when he teaches; he wants to share his passion for the subject. Each time he walks into the classroom, you can tell that he's going to enjoy today's lesson and, even more so, helping his students put this new information to work. Don Blaheta is not afraid to challenge his students because he always seems to know just the right questions to ask to help guide them in the right direction without handing them the answer; making each discovery that much more satisfying-for both Don and his students."
-Doug Porter, Psychology and Theatre Major

Contact
309-341-7956
dblaheta@knox.edu