Triumph of the Toolmakers

Posted on Sept. 8, 2015

Missing its engineering school for 77 years, Carolina is not the most likely place for computer science to thrive. Yet it is booming with solutions to real problems — and jobs for its students.

by Jack Betts ’68

Gary Bishop ’84 (PhD) was walking across campus one day, pondering one of his long-term goals: He wanted to use his expertise in computer science to help people who are physically challenged.

“Here comes this blind guy with a service dog. Well, I didn’t want to be rude and say, ‘Hey, I see you are blind,’ so I went on by. But he said, ‘Where am I?’ ”

Turns out the dog had taken a wrong turn; the man was a graduate student on his way to Davis Library to do research on ancient Roman maps and to explore the possibility of making maps for blind people to use.

Bishop, who is associate chair of UNC’s computer science department, was struck by the idea of using computer technology to make maps for the sight-impaired. He put five of his students to work on it, and, using a tool called the Blind Audio Tactile Mapping System, they devised a map showing Britain during the days of Roman rule.

“Later, one of my students said, ‘This is the first thing I’ve done in college that mattered.’ ” It was one example of what Bishop calls “geeks doing good,” and it helps explain the huge popularity of his department: Its focus on finding solutions has made computer science one of Carolina’s most attractive majors.

The department has an astonishingly broad reach in its work — and this on a campus that has no engineering school. Think of technology as a toolbox and computer scientists as toolsmiths, using both hardware and software to solve problems in medical diagnosis procedures and treatment, virtual and augmented reality, graphics and robotics, animation techniques for the entertainment industry, applied serious gaming technology as a learning tool and security technology.

Besides putting his students to work on the tactile mapping system, Bishop had taken a course at UNC’s Center for Literacy and Disability. He learned about the dearth of books for people with motor or cognitive impairments who never had a chance to learn to read. The typical first-grader has access to 1,000 books, he said, but a typical motor-challenged kid has none.

So Bishop began writing a program that has resulted in the Tar Heel Reader, an online library of simple books using pictures and short sentences about a variety of topics. The program Bishop developed also enables anyone to write short online books, using pictures from Flickr that are in the public realm, tailoring content to young readers. By 2010, there were a million books available. By 2014, users of Tar Heel Reader had read more than 7 million books in 193 countries and 52 U.S. states and possessions.

“We didn’t ask anybody’s permission. We never talked to a lawyer,” Bishop said. “We just did it, and kids on the other side of the world are learning to read.” Not just kids, as it turns out: A lot of adults are using Tar Heel Reader to learn English as a second language. There are translations into any number of other languages, spreading the benefits of learning to read to people in other countries who may never learn a word of English.

“People think it is crazy that we give it away. But I feel like it is the most important thing I have done.”

Collaboration across disciplines

Diane Pozefsky ’78 (PhD), a research professor and director of the department’s undergraduate studies, has pursued ways to use serious games to improve learning for students who have not done well in traditional learning situations. “There are standards in every state on what has to be taught but not how to teach it,” she said. “Maybe a student who is a troublemaker suddenly starts shining when he plays a serious game where he learns something.”

These games can be used, for example, to teach diabetic or asthmatic children how their behavioral choices may result in a visit to the emergency room. “We choose to work on things that will make a difference,” Pozefsky said. “That is what is so appealing about this place.”

Professors Stephen Pizer and Henry Fuchs collaborated on medical imagery research, which led to the development of 3-D ultrasound images of fetuses in utero — the computer screen pictures that allow doctors, mothers and family members to see how a baby is developing in the womb. Pizer’s research interests began to focus on medical imagery display — how to tease out better images and more specific information that would help doctors, for example, diagnose medical conditions and help specialists treating diseases.

Those advances continue every day in the minds of faculty and students. The department has done considerable work in the area of robotics — research that results in tiny devices used in medical treatment, says department Chair Kevin Jeffay, such as minute steerable, bevel-tipped needles that can maneuver around anatomical obstacles to reach targets inaccessible by traditional straight needles. The same navigational algorithms can be applied in the use of personal robots to help the elderly and the disabled with tasks in daily living.

Collaboration across disciplines — medicine, statistics and others — has been a hallmark of computer science research at UNC.

Stephen Pizer and two other professors interested in research and collaboration, Ed Staab and R. Eugene Johnston, founded the UNC Medical Image Display and Analysis Group 40 years ago. Their research has led to new techniques in, for example, treating cancer. When a patient is diagnosed with cancer in any part of the body, improved medical imagery display is critical to oncology radiologists knowing precisely where the cancer is. That allows them not only to focus radiation on the affected body part but also to avoid irradiating other vital organs.

It is not simply a matter of shaping a radiation beam to the tumor. Because patients also continue breathing, their organs move during surgery — and thus can move in and out of the radiation beam. Internal gas also can move organs. So it’s essential to know how organs move in real time to avoid killing or damaging other vital organs.

Work by Pizer and other researchers, including UNC oncologist Dr. Julian Rosenman, led to a 3-D radiation treatment planning system that facilitates directing radiation to kill the cancer and avoid damaging other body parts. Pizer’s research has led to development of procedures involving computer-assisted intervention in surgery as well as psychiatric research, including early diagnosis of autism. He has played a leading role in bringing together researchers who have pioneered medical diagnosis and treatment.

“The things I am proudest about in my research are the teams from many disciplines within UNC-Chapel Hill and in fact the 3-D work done by many collaborators in computer science,” he said. It is why he came to Carolina, and it is the reason many of his colleagues remain there: They fix things.

As Henry Fuchs put it: “It is an honorable thing to help somebody solve their problem. That makes me feel good.”

Not everybody in Sitterson and Brooks halls is curing disease or helping people learn to read, but the department has built an enviable record for moving its students into work across the span of professional, medical, scientific, social, legal, cultural and other academic pursuits.

Theodore Kim ’03 (MS, ’06 PhD) and Lawrence Kesteloot ’95 (MS) have parlayed their studies into Academy Awards — Kim for technical achievement in special effects in films, including Avatar and Hugo, and Kesteloot for his advances in graphics lighting at DreamWorks.

Another graduate, Kelly Ward ’02 (MS, ’05 PhD), helped transform animation techniques at Disney Studios in the depiction of Rapunzel’s hair in the hit Tangled, figuring out how to create 70 feet of naturally moving, golden hair. The result, one critic wrote, is “a visually stunning, thoroughly entertaining addition to the studio’s classic animated canon.” The department sent its “RoboThespian” robot to New York last year for a role in The Uncanny Valley, a play about the negative human reaction to a robot as it becomes nearly, but not quite, human.

Computer science graduates have written operating system software for satellites and devised a user-friendly program allowing sports fans to synchronize televised images with radio commentary.

An ambience of cool

Pizer had completed his doctorate at Harvard, writing the first dissertation about medical imaging, and was looking for a place where he could pursue his work. A colleague advised him that Fred Brooks, an IBM superstar who had helped develop the company’s groundbreaking System 360 computer and had a hand in IBM’s move to the Research Triangle Park in the 1960s, had set all that aside to form a computer science department at UNC.

“I was a Northerner and had not been out of New England for more than a week in my life,” Pizer said. “This Yankee was not about to go live where all this segregation had been. But Fred said, ‘Don’t stay up North and complain. Come down here and help fix it.’ ” Now, 48 years later, he says, “I’m from Chapel Hill.”

Carolina had to give up its School of Engineering in 1938. But it has, to many people’s surprise, what Kevin Jeffay calls an engineering department on a liberal arts campus. “There is a bona fide thread between the research that went on here and what’s in that smartphone. … The foundation we laid here eventually became part of the technological advances of the time,” said Jeffay, who carries an Android phone and an Apple iPad on his daily rounds.

Fuchs’ resume sparkles with research accomplishments. He was a pioneer in what today is called virtual reality, and he also did groundbreaking work in computer graphics architecture and the development of what once was called the Supercomputer.

Fuchs came to Carolina because of its emphasis on practical solutions. “I thought this was really a great place from the start,” Fuchs said. “The major thing was, I got the impression that not only was it really good, but it was also motivated by solving real problems — intentionally motivated to solve problems, such as Stephen Pizer working on physical science, or how to build really complicated software that works. Fred [Brooks] wasn’t interested in playing games. He wanted to figure out how to solve problems, and that appealed to me.”

There was a time when computers were thought to be a sanctum mostly for geeks and nerds. Today, the department enjoys an ambience of cool. One reason may be the department’s reputation, established in its infancy by Brooks, for encouraging collaboration as well as solving problems. Now 83, Brooks influenced the adoption of key computing principles and brought about a high level of cooperation among the three research universities in the Triangle.

“I was convinced to start with that we really wanted to be toolsmiths,” he said. “At the time, very few thought that what computer scientists did was any use to the average person.”

The department has honored Brooks, who officially retired this year, with a Toolsmith Endowment Fund to support undergraduate student projects, graduate student fellowships, course development, and other needs.

Said Brooks, “A toolmaker succeeds as, and only as, the users of his tool succeed with his aid. However shining the blade, however jeweled the hilt, however perfect the heft, a sword is tested only by cutting. That swordsmith is successful whose clients die of old age.”

His vision was broader than focusing on problem-solving. He fostered the department’s tradition of collaboration. “I was convinced early on that we were never destined to become a big department,” he said. “And if we were going to put a big star on the map of computer science, it would be because of the close collaboration with the computer science departments at Duke and State.”

A booming demand

Launched 50 years ago, computer science is relatively young compared with other UNC departments and schools; it did not offer undergraduate degrees until 2001. As recently as 1973, the department declared it was “educationally unsound to have undergraduates specialize in an area as young and undeveloped as computer science.”

For years, there were relatively few undergraduates; now there are 700 students who say they want to major or double major in computer science. Since 2004, enrollment has soared — not just in undergraduate majors but also in students from every academic discipline who have found that prospective employers appreciate resumes showing a proficiency in computer science. It is among the top five undergraduate majors in enrollment.

“If you are a graduate in physics but you don’t know coding,” Jeffay said, “you do not have the skills you need.”

The department has become so successful in its approach and so popular with students that for a while in 2014 no one was sure whether it would be able to provide every class to those who needed them.

“The major has grown fantastically (more than tripled in size),” Jeffay wrote in an email last fall, “and yet going into this year we had the same teaching budget as we had 10-plus years ago.” A story in The Daily Tar Heel warned of insufficient seats in classes and an inadequate number of teaching assistants. It was beginning to look like a “disaster,” Jeffay added.

It wasn’t. Just as the fall semester was ending, the department and the College of Arts and Sciences found resources to meet most of the demands for the spring’s classes. The college came up with more money, and the department raised funds to provide most of the courses in demand. But the resolution of the problem came late in the semester — too late to arrange for as many lecture halls as needed and too late to hire all of the lecturers needed. This fall, Jeffay said, the story is similar. “It’s still tight. We are not quite able to meet the full demands for classes.”

“The lesson I think we learned is that we have to be more proactive in how [computer science] is growing,” Jeffay said. In a time of financial restraints and high demand from other departments for their share of the pie, the department realized it needed to tell its own story better. With all of the recent challenges facing the larger University, Jeffay said, administrators didn’t have their attention focused on the dramatic surge in interest in computer science. There were no bad actors, he thought, but “the University is not good at dealing with shifts in student preferences.”

The increase in students brings several challenges — not just where to find space for more classes, for example, or stretching resources to keep up with fast enrollment growth, but also whether the department should have more autonomy. Professional schools have flexibility in raising money, planning for enrollment demands, retaining slots when faculty and staff retire, forming partnerships beyond college boundaries, pursuing innovations and responding faster to changes in technology.

Growing demands for computer science courses will require more faculty. While the department’s physical space is adequate, Jeffay said, its teaching ranks have shrunk because of some unexpected retirements.

“We have to grow,” he said. And he believes UNC officials also should recognize that the computer science department eventually should become a professional school rather than a department in the College of Arts and Sciences. “That is pretty much the dominant model,” Jeffay said. “It’s the way to go, and those campuses that have done so have been very successful.”

He said that many students take the department’s courses for basic education about computers and that he “would like to see the department and campus embrace computer science as more of a data literacy emphasis” — under the same theory of general education that requires liberal arts students to take, for example, certain history courses. “It’s the right thing to do for the campus and for the state.”

Every computer science major gets a job and contributes to the economy, Jeffay said, adding that the department’s majors have the highest average starting salaries in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Plus, it’s a fun and consequential major.”

Students with bachelor of science degrees in computer science average starting salaries of $72,000, about a third higher than the state’s median family income. Even during the Great Recession that began in December 2007, virtually every graduate found a job. Today, jobs find them. “Now it’s just insane,” Jeffay said. “It’s a feeding frenzy for our grads.”

Jack Betts ’68 of Meadows of Dan, Va., is a former associate editor of The Charlotte Observer and a past member of the GAA Board of Directors.