Professor August's home page

Biography

Stephanie E. August is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University (CA) (LMU) where she teaches courses in artificial intelligence, database management systems, software engineering, first year seminar and introductory programming classes with Python and Snap! Her research interests include natural language understanding, analogical reasoning, interdisciplinary new media applications, and STEM education. She has authored papers on natural language processing, reasoning by analogy, and STEM education, and is principal investigator on two National Science Foundation Department of Undergraduate Education grants focused on making computing sciences accessible and engaging for a diverse range of students and underutilized groups. Stephanie is actively engaged in bringing computing topics to non-engineering majors and non-engineering topics to computing majors and one of the founding members of CREATE-STEM, an interdisciplinary group of LMU faculty aimed at advancing and promoting STEM education activities.

Dr. August has served as special assistant to the chief academic officer for graduate education, director of graduate studies for electrical engineering and computer science and the Seaver College representative on the LMU graduate council. She sits on the advisory boards for Systems Engineering and the Academy of Catholic Thought and Imagination at LMU. Her industry experience with the Hughes Aircraft Company (now Raytheon) includes software development and system engineering for several defense C3I programs and applied artificial intelligence research for military and medical applications, chair of the Los Angeles chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, and program committee for several conferences. She enjoys spending time with family, hiking, camping, traveling, gardening, and making sour dough bread. She would like to become fluent in Russian, play classical guitar, and visit every continent. Stephanie received the BA in Slavic Languages, and the MS and PhD in Computer Science at UCLA (1972, 1986 and 1991, respectively). She is a member of AAAI, ASEE, ACM, CCSC, IEEE, and the IEEE Computer Society.

Curriculum Vitae

Education

Ph.D., 1991, Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles
M.S., 1985, Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles
B.A., 1972, Slavic Languages, University of California, Los Angeles

Exploration

Virtual Environments and Game-based Learning in the Classroom
- National Science Foundation TUES PI Forum September 4 - November 18, 2013
- Teaching With Mobile Devices - Stephanie August, Todd Shoepe LMU Center for Teaching Excellence Teaching with Technology Day, January 18, 2013
- Virtual Environments and Games - Stephanie August, Michele Hammers LMU Center for Teaching Excellence Teaching with Technology Day, January 18, 2013
Operation STEAMroller: A Festival of Many Disciplines
- Exhibition
  - State of the Art and Mind Exhibition of the works by conceptual artist Jean-Francois Podevin, August 16 - October 12, 2012, Loyola Marymount University William H. Hannon Library
  - Opening Reception, 31 August 2012, 6-10 p.m.
  - Keynote address by Colin Gardner, Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara
- Panel discussions
  - (How) Are Interdisciplinary Studies Relevant to Academia and Industry?
  - (How) Are Interdisciplinary Studies Relevant to Graduate Studies?

Research

Rather than waiting for students to pursue STEM education, virtual worlds and games can be used to bring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to the students through engaging and socially oriented activities. One approach to this is to develop a virtual science museum and education center that provides virtual practice with basic engineering concepts and transforms an entertainment-based platform into a delivery vehicle for electrical engineering and computer science content. A second approach is to introduce AI algorithms with scaffolding in the form of a set of structured and graduated laboratory experiments as students play and develop a computer game or explore the creation of automated docents in virtual learning laboratory. Both approaches offer students autonomy and immediate feedback, and are designed to attract women and other diverse audiences to engineering and computer science. The Virtual Engineering Sciences Learning Lab (VESLL) and Teaching AI as a Laboratory Science (TAILS) projects implement these two approaches approaches.

Publications

August, S.E.; Hammers, M.L.; Murphy, D.B.; Neyer, A.; Gueye, P.; Thames, R.Q. (2015) Virtual Engineering Sciences Learning Lab: Giving STEM Education a Second Life. Accepted March 2015 for publication in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technology. dx.doi.org/10.1109/TLT.2015.241925
Doran, S.; August, S.E. (2013) Reddo: A Model Driven Engineering Toolset for Embedded Software Development. HILT '13 Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGAda Annual Conference on High IntegrityLanguage Technology.

Reddo: a model driven engineering toolset for embedded software development

Steven Doran, Stephanie August
HILT '13 Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGAda annual conference on High integrity language technology, 2013

August, S.E. (2013) Tsunami Warning System: A Case Study of Intelligent Agents.27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 4th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, July 14–18, 2013, Bellevue, WA. access
August, S.E. (2012) Enhancing Expertise, Sociability and Literacy through Teaching Artificial Intelligence as a Lab Science. 119th ASEE Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX, June 10-13, 2012. download
August, S.E.; Neyer, A; Murphy, D.; Shokrgozar, D.; Vales, J.I.; Hammers, M.L. (2011) Engaging Students in STEM Education through a Virtual Learning Lab. 118th Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education, June 26-29, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada. download
Neyer, A.; August, S.E.; and Hammers, M.L. (2011). Working together: words and math. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 26:4. download
August, Stephanie E. and Hammers, Michele L. IEECI: Encouraging Diversity in Engineering through a Virtual Engineering Sciences Learning Lab. NSF Proposal no.0935100, 2009.
August, S.E. (2008) The “Living” Room: A Case Study in Artificial Intelligence, Collaborative Systems, and Language Understanding. The National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science Case Collection.
August, S.E., and Johnson, C. Teaching AI as a Lab Science. Poster presentation, Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges First Annual Southwest Regional Conference, 18-19 April 2008.
August, S.E. Enhancing Expertise, Sociability, and Literacy through Teaching. Grant proposal submitted to National Science Foundation Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement - Adaptation and Implementation, May 2008.
Tatarinova, T., August, S.E., Kuleck G. Development of Integrated Data Mining Tools for Functional Genomics. Grant proposal submitted to National Science Foundation Advances in Bioinformatics, August 2008.
Dionisio, J.D.N., Dickson C.L., August, S.E., Dorin, P.M. and Toal, Ray (2007). An open source software culture in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin. 39:2, pp.70-74.
An open source software culture in the undergraduate computer science curriculum
John David N. Dionisio, Caskey L. Dickson, Stephanie E. August, Philip M. Dorin, Ray Toal
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 2007

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August, S.E. (2003). An Effective Interactive AI Resource?does more than teach AI. In Mehdi Khosrowpour (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2003 Information Resource Management Association International Conference. Hershey PA: Information Resource Management Association, pp.17-19.
August, S.E. (2003). Fire and Ice in the City. In M. McCullough Editor, FIRE and ICE: Imagination and Intellect in the Catholic Tradition. Scranton PA: The University of Scranton Press, pp. 149-156.
Whitley, L.C. (author) and August, S.E. (technical editor) (2003). Relational Databases: Design, Tools, and Techniques. Learning Tree International Course 382. Revision T. Los Angeles CA, Learning Tree International. [Notes distributed to all students attending Course 382 in the U.S., Canada, and worldwide.]
August, S.E., and Dolan, C.P. (1992) Hughes Research Laboratories: Trainable Text Skimmer for MUC-4, System Description. In Proceedings of the Fourth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-4). Mc Lean, Virginia, 16-18 June, 1992.
August, S.E. and McNamee, L.P. (1991). ARIEL: A refined model of analogy understanding. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems. Kauai, Hawaii, 2-5 June 1991, vol. II, pp.770-779.
August, S.E. and McNamee, L.P. (1990). Integrating analogical reasoning in a natural language understander. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, Charleston, South Carolina, 16-19 July, 1990. vol. I, pp.538.
Integrating analogical reasoning in a natural language understander
Stephanie E. August, Lawrence P. McNamee
IEA/AIE '90 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Industrial and engineering applications of artificial intelligence and expert systems - Volume 1, 1990

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August, S.E. and Dyer, M.G. (1985) Understanding analogies in editorials. 9th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Los Angeles, California, August 1985, pp.845-847.
August, S.E. and Dyer, M.G. (1985) Analogy recognition and comprehension in editorials. 7th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. University of California, Irvine, 15-17 August 1985. pp.236-241.