Announcing: “The Cost of Teaching Operational ML”—A FOUNT Showcase at SC25 EduHPC

We’re excited to announce the publication of our co-PI Fraida Fund’s paper, “The Cost of Teaching Operational ML,” at the EduHPC workshop at SC25—marking a key achievement for the FOUNT project! This work explores what it really takes to teach the full operational lifecycle of machine learning systems—model deployment, automation, monitoring, and scaling—far beyond classic […]

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FOUNT Heads to Denver for 2025 NSF CSSI/Cybertraining/SCIPE PI Meeting

We’re excited to announce that the FOUNT project is attending the 2025 NSF CSSI/Cybertraining/SCIPE Principal Investigator Meeting in Denver, Colorado! As part of the program, FOUNT will be presenting a poster that highlights our work on hands-on and scalable data-centric education through interactive courselets. Our poster—“FOUNT: Scaffolded, Hands-On Learning for a Data-Centric Future”—showcases the project’s […]

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FOUNT at SACNAS NDiSTEM: Championing Inclusive Computing Education

Last week, the FOUNT project was proud to be represented at the SACNAS NDiSTEM Conference—one of the nation’s most significant gatherings for advancing diversity in STEM. This event brought together passionate educators, students, and innovators committed to expanding opportunities for historically excluded groups in science and engineering. For FOUNT, participating in NDiSTEM meant sharing our […]

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New Enhancements to Trovi Platform for Better User Experience

In August 2024, the Chameleon project team released a prototype version of the new Trovi platform, introducing several enhancements designed to improve user experience and facilitate greater engagement with our educational materials. Trovi serves as a critical repository for our courselets, making them accessible to educators and students worldwide. Key enhancements include an improved user […]

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Explore Our Newly Developed Courselets on Trovi

We are thrilled to announce the development and release of 25 courselets as part of the FOUNT (Scaffolded, Hands-On Learning for a Data-Centric Future) project. These courselets are designed to provide hands-on, interactive learning experiences across a wide range of topics in data systems and computer science. What Courselets Are Available? Our courselets cover the […]

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Evaluation Report Highlights Effectiveness of Courselets in Enhancing Learning

We are pleased to share the findings from our recent evaluation conducted by Blackstone Evaluation and Research, which assessed the effectiveness of FOUNT courselets in classroom settings. The evaluation focused on courselets incorporated into courses taught by Co-PIs Dr. Fraida Fund and Dr. David Koop during the Spring 2024 semester. Evaluation Overview Participants: Students from […]

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Insights from Our First Science Advisory Board Meeting

On December 20, 2023, the FOUNT project held its inaugural Science Advisory Board (SAB) meeting, marking a significant milestone in our mission to revolutionize data systems education. We were honored to have the participation of esteemed board members: Jeanne Century (University of Chicago) Abraham Matta (Boston University) Violet Syrotiuk (Arizona State University) Mary Thomas (University […]

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Webinar Digital Educational Artifact, autonomous vehicles at the edge

Join us on Tuesday, August 1st at 10 AM CT for a webinar that showcases how to teach machine learning using inexpensive and easy to find self-driving cars. We will present an educational module that allows students to configure an inexpensive off-the-shelf self-driving vehicle, generate training sets by driving the vehicle, and train models based on those driving sets, evaluate the quality of the training by observing the car in practice, and ultimately refine the training and watch the improvements.

The educational module is integrated with Chameleon resources; it leverages CHI@Edge to add the car to the testbed and used Chameleon’s GPUs to train the datasets. It includes notebooks that implement resource allocation and all the programming necessary to enact the exercises, as well as documentation — for students as well as teachers — on how to run class exercises and adapt them to student needs. It also includes a comprehensive set of instructions on what is needed to replicate the exact same class configuration.

The educational module is suitable for both educators and self-learners, open-source, and it can be highly configurable for specific classes based on individual or classroom needs. This webinar will demonstrate an end-to-end educational module that aims to bridge the gap between theory abstractions and practice in an easy-to-follow manner. – please, check the registration link here.

See you there!