Teaching Computer System Courses with an Online Large-Scale Method

Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs) and hardware-software co-design are greatly emphasized in the CS community, which demands a significant number of participants with Computer System (CSys) capabilities and skills. Conventional CSys courses in a lecture-lab format are limited in physical resources and inherently difficult to cultivate talents at a large scale. Online teaching is a potential alternative to instantly enlarge the face-to-face class size. Unfortunately, simply putting the lecture contents in CSys courses online lacks 1) personal attention, 2) learner-instructor interactions, and 3) real-hardware experimental environments. To tackle the above challenges, we introduce a four phase online CSys course program and the related teaching methods for a cloud-based teaching platform. The four-phase course program included two basic/required stages and two advanced/optional stages to promote students' knowledge and skill level with appropriate personal attention. We studied if online interaction methods, such as in-class chat and one-on-one online grading interview, can strengthen the connections between teachers and students in both lectures and labs. We created a heterogeneous cloud platform to enable students nationwide to reliably conduct labs or projects on remote programmable hardware. We believe that our proposed course design methodology is beneficial to other CScourses in the post-COVID-19-era. © 2021 IEEE.

Pandemic Panic: The Effect of Disaster-Related Stress on Negotiation Outcomes

Prior research often finds increased altruism following natural disasters. One explanation is the social heuristic hypothesis: humans are prosocial by nature but become self-interested when they have the opportunity to deliberate. As the stress of a disaster lowers people's ability to engage in effortful deliberation, their heuristic prosocial tendencies emerge. However, this link has often been explored with very simple tasks like the dictator game. Here we study the impact of COVID-related stress on outcomes in multi-issue negotiations with a computational virtual agent. These tasks are interesting because they share some of the characteristics of dictator games (some pot of resources must be divided) but they also involve presumably effortful perspective taking (that can grow the size of the pot). Furthermore, the interaction of humans with virtual agents allows us to explore the extent to which humans apply the CASA (computers as social actors) paradigm to negotiation when under considerable stress. In two experiments with a virtual negotiation partner, we provide evidence for two distinct pathways for how COVID-19 stress shapes prosocial behavior. Consistent with the social heuristic hypothesis, COVID-stress increases giving, mediated by heuristic thinking. But COVID-stress also seems to enhance information-exchange and perspective taking, which allowed participants to grow more value which they could give away. Our results give new insights into the relationship between stress, cognition, and prosocial behavior. © 2021 ACM.