NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 3675 Solving the Dual-Career Dilemma: Three Case Studies Susan L. Burkett, John C. Lusth, Laura A. Ruhala, Richard J. Ruhala, Susan Vrbsky, Brian Hyslop Boise State University/The Pennsylvania State University/The University of Alabama Abstract The objective of this paper is to share personal observations from science and engineering couples seeking suitable employment in academia. Dual-career couples have a number of obstacles to overcome in satisfying their career goals. It is difficult enough to find one tenure- track position and suitable professional employment for the spouse in the immediate geographic area. It is even more difficult to find two tenure-track positions, especially considering negative attitudes sometimes held toward married couples in the same department or college. However, couples with similar disciplines do have somewhat of an advantage - it is often easier to negotiate or coordinate two hires within a department or a college rather than within an entire university. Given the scarcity of women in engineering and science, often a college can add an additional position through a diversity hiring program. For this reason, some universities initiate formal programs for dual-career couples. Three married couples with degrees in science and engineering share their observations on the obstacles encountered in each couple's search for two tenure-track faculty positions. Each couple discusses the plans they made in searching for two positions, the short term plans they made in case the search was unsuccessful, and how they plan to deal with the long term possibility that two positions may not be obtainable. Each case study ends with a set of suggestions for others in similar situations. I. Introduction It should be apparent to most universities that recruitment and retention of good faculty members requires flexibility and understanding. Regardless of whether a university emphasizes undergraduate education, graduate education, or research, having the best people should be the primary goal. In order to achieve this goal, sometimes extraordinary measures are needed that go beyond the conventional hiring practices. While previous studies have reported statistical compilations, the amount of data is so limited that we believe anecdotal evidence remains important.1,2 This paper in particular will explore the challenges faced by dual-career couples through the stories of three couples faced with finding academic positions in science/engineering disciplines for each spouse. The format of the remainder of the paper is the following: each couple will tell their story and then answer a series of questions pertinent to the challenges faced by dual-career couples.3 For the purposes of this paper, we are referring to a dual-career couple as one in which both parties are looking for academic positions.

Integrated circuit (IC) fabrication principles is an elective course in a senior undergraduate and early graduate student’s curriculum. Over the years, the semiconductor industry relies heavily on students with developed expertise in the area of fabrication techniques, learned in an IC fabrication theory and laboratory course. The theory course gives importance to the physics of manufacturing techniques and is often attached to a subsequent semester laboratory curriculum. The pre-requisite requirement of the theory component for a laboratory course requires students to enroll for two courses in separate semesters and is not an option for all students. Hence, an innovative student project is intended in the theory curriculum to give hands-on experience on the processes. The IC fabrication course is usually associated with high enrollment of students, leading to fewer laboratory experiments. The physics of IC fabrication techniques is important, but few students may perceive the theory as important with no laboratory experience. To improve the course and give students hands-on practice with existing state-of-the-art processing facilities, a tailored project was added to the syllabus. A solder-based self assembly (SBSA) project was introduced in the curriculum for the first time at the University of Alabama in Fall 2011. The student projects were designed in a way to provide an alternative to conventional time-intensive, high cost, and highly tool dependent IC fabrication lab experiments. SBSA forms three dimensional (3D) structures when applied to two dimensional (2D) patterns. The schedule was designed to accommodate theory classes aligned with the fabrication steps and completed by students. The project involved a brainstorming session, a design stage to develop 2D patterns using AutoCAD software, a deposition process, a lithography step, a dip soldering step, a reflow process, scanning electron microscope (SEM) imaging, and a final project presentation. Other processes required to complete the project were performed by the instructor. In general, students showed interest in working in teams, completing the project, and recommended to continuing the SBSA project in future IC fabrication course work. The SBSA project is cost effective and less tool dependent for incorporation in a semester long course. In addition, the project is time effective from both student and instructor perspectives.

In the electrical and computer engineering (ECE) curriculum at The University of Alabama, freshmen are introduced to fundamental electrical concepts and units, DC circuit analysis techniques, operational amplifiers, circuit simulation, design, and professional ethics. The two credit course has both lecture and laboratory components that address these topics. The laboratory has been used, in this project, to provide students an experience in design. In one of the laboratory assignments, students work in teams to design and build products giving attention to both function and aesthetics. Creativity is an important attribute for engineers practicing their profession in a global society. The creative process was exercised in the design lab by progressively engaging students through various stages including: brainstorming, formation of a construction plan, producing schematic representations, and implementing their design. In a two- year period, four laboratory exercises were developed to provide design experiences in our introductory ECE course. Assessment results show that the majority of students enjoy several aspects of the laboratory on design and creativity. At the same time, they consider this lab to be one of the most difficult ones due to its open-ended nature. Students who experienced the creative lab were somewhat more likely to state they would continue in their major. Overall, the project team concluded that the creative lab was valuable and did raise awareness of the creative process.

Scam is a Scheme-like programming language designed for teaching a wide variety of programming language concepts. Scam, at its heart, is an impure functional language, designed to be modified and extended. There are no keywords in the language and every special form, including function definition, is a true function that can be overridden. Consequently, SCAM is ideal for introducing concepts such as object encapsulation and inheritance, aspects, and language subsetting. Both Implementations and applications of these concepts can be added to Scam via student programming projects. This paper introduces Scam and gives a series of projects and solutions that are appropriate for a Programming Languages course.

In the context of a research skills class for undergraduates, we find that providing students background on the scientific method, literature review, writing an abstract, etc. leaves little time for exposing students to actual research. Previously in this class, one assignment involved student teams of four brainstorming for a short time before conducting an experiment that could be performed over a 1-hour period. Some of the experiments included: counting the number of cars of a particular color to estimate an entire population, characterizing the skittish behavior of squirrels, monitoring coffee preferences at a local Starbucks, and estimating the chance of receiving a ticket while parked illegally on campus. While the students enjoyed designing and performing these experiments, we felt the experience did not reflect the rigor that research and experimentation demand. To rectify this situation, we supplemented the data collection activity with a new project; an educational kit was used to provide a systematic procedure for fabricating a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC). The kit presents an opportunity for students to fabricate devices as well as design a set of experiments for testing them with several options for controlled variables in a short amount of time.

Three instructional formats devoted to preparing STEM students for successful research endeavors is the forum for this project. All formats are intended to reach undergraduate students early in their academic careers. The three formats include: a semester long seminar, a one week faculty led "boot camp", and a 2 1/2 day peer mentor led short course. The investigators attempt to keep the main topics in each format the same, although time constraints do not allow thorough review of each topic in the latter two formats. The topical content and activities cover the following areas: resume building, finding a faculty mentor, reading and analyzing journal articles, understanding the different types of literature available, using campus library resources, performing a literature review, discussion of intellectual property, tips on effective presentations, and career guidance. This project is motivated by the need for students to acquire appropriate skills in order to be effective in conducting research under faculty supervision. This project is a collaborative effort between three institutions with experience in teaching preparatory research skills in the different formats. The investigators are teaching each of the course formats at their institution. Working together to develop the appropriate course modules for dissemination to interested institutions, the team is preparing a set of best practices and evaluating the costs associated with each format. A pre- and post-test, in the style of a concept inventory, has been developed that can be used to assess improvements in student understanding of research skills and concepts. Initial results show similar gains in conceptual awareness at each institution. This suggests that the educational models may be transferrable and easily adopted by other institutions. Focus group discussions indicate that students are pleased with the programs and consider them useful, especially for students preparing to conduct research. To date, the team has impacted over 250 students and a web site is under development for disseminating project information.

A novel way of three dimensional (3D) chip stacking has been designed in a view to improve heat dissipation across the layers. Solder-based self assembled (SBSA) structures have been designed as 3D posts on simulated through silicon vias to demonstrate the concept. The fabrication of SBSA structures using a low temperature solder alloy and dip soldering method is described. Previously, two types of soldering—face soldering and edge soldering—were studied to fabricate SBSA structures. Face soldering refers to deposition of solder on the complete metal face whereas edge soldering refers to selective deposition of solder on only the edges of the metal face. Mechanical grinding of the 3D structures shows that face soldered SBSA structures were void free and robust enough to be used as a connection post for chip stacking. Edge soldered SBSA structures collapsed when grinding was performed. This suggests the edge soldered 3D structure may only be partially filled. Face soldered SBSA structures provide a solder bump that serves as a connection path in the integration of dissimilar electronic technologies. Cylindrical copper posts, developed in a previous project, can be an effective approach to integrated circuit stacking. However, the SBSA post provides more variety in size and shape and can serve as a reservoir for solder to aid in chip bonding. The solder bumps are heat resistant, and uniform thicknesses were obtained across a large array of SBSA structures. The electrical durability of SBSA posts were determined by completing I-V measurements after thermal treatment. SBSA posts were subjected to thermal cycling with temperatures ranging from room temperature to 300 °C. The interconnected SBSA posts are shown to be stable until 165 °C with little variation in measured resistance.

Karaoke music has world-wide appeal, especially for non-professional singers. However, most karaoke-audio architectures involve separate text and audio data streams which run in different threads. Such an approach suffers from timing synchronization problems. Another drawback is the need for a karaoke system to process at least two different formats: one used for karaoke-text and other used for audio data. To reduce the existing complexity of karaoke generation and thus make it more accessible to beginning computer science students, a novel audio format is introduced in this paper. To produce a karaoke track, lyrics are embedded as textual comments within a readily-readable-audio (RRA) file. The RRA format is an uncompressed and textual representation of a sampled audio stream and can be easily read and written by first and second semester computer science students without the need of an audio library. It is designed to allow comments that serve as directives to post-processing audio filters, including music players themselves. A lyric-aware RRA player will display lyrics as the audio track is played while an non-aware player simply ignores the embedded comments. The new audio format and utilities were used in the introductory computer science sequence at the University of Alabama. This paper also presents a wide variety of RRA multimedia projects for students, including karaoke generation.

Recently, soldering has been used to assemble three-dimensional microscale structures. Solder is deposited on adjacent metallic faces of planar polyhedral patterns, bridging the small gaps between individual faces. When all but one face of a polyhedral pattern are freed from the substrate and solder is reheated to a liquid state (reflow), the free faces of the pattern fold upward, out of the plane, to form the desired polyhedron. The wetting of solder with regards to coverage of metallic faces has been described previously, but the lateral bridging between the metal faces remains relatively unexplored. The goal of this work is to characterize the parameters influencing the bridging and folding process for two different ways of dip soldering: face and edge soldering. Face soldering refers to the complete wetting of metal faces, whereas edge soldering refers to selectively applying solder on the edges of a face that come in contact with other faces when folded. Our work explores bridging yield for various gap spacings and face thicknesses for eight different polyhedral patterns. Experiments show that the thickness and gap spacing strongly influence successful bridging. Experiments also show that improved control over the bridging process increases the yield of folded structures. In particular, gap spacing is positively correlated to face thickness for successful folding. Moreover, face soldering results in higher yields than edge soldering for all patterns.

Dip-soldering is a crucial step in forming certain self-assembled metal structures. However, this particular use of dip-soldering is not well described in the literature. The goal of this work is to characterize the thickness and roughness of solder layers deposited by dipping metallic films into solder melt over a range of temperatures. Control of the solder thickness and roughness will improve the yield of structures whose self-assembly is driven by surface area minimization during solder reflow. Film thickness and overall film roughness for four solder alloys, each with different melting points, were measured on unpatterned and patterned copper films. Additionally, two variations in flux treatment were investigated: flux maintained at room temperature and flux heated to 98 °C. Findings include the determination of critical temperatures, particular to each alloy, above which the roughness and thickness of the deposited solder dramatically decreases. Preheating the flux improves the nature of the deposition below these critical points. Above the critical points, thickness and roughness of the solder vary little and heating the flux does not provide significant improvements. This study provides insight into designing a process flow that optimizes the folding characteristics of self-assembled metal polyhedra by controlling the volume and quality of the solder layer.

A dissatisfaction appears to permeate the process of educating computer science students. Both students and instructors seem uninspired in the classroom, resulting in many attempts to enliven, freshen, and improve the experience. These attempts show efficacy, but the pace of improvement is slow. 100 Problems (100P) is an innovative guided discovery curriculum in which students are freed from the classroom and instead work on 100 concept- and research-related problems throughout their undergraduate careers. The 100 problems guide the students to discover the fundamental knowledge and skills required of a graduate of the degree program. Each student is free to create an individualized mode of learning and discovery. As such, the curriculum fosters deep learning among students and challenges students' intellectual growth. In this paper we introduce the 100P curriculum, describe the 100P course format and our experiences offering courses in this format, and report our early findings.

A two credit hour introductory electrical and computer engineering (ECE) course is the forum for this research project. The course introduces ECE majors to the profession with a lecture component that emphasizes circuit analysis, simulation software, lifelong learning, and ethics. The laboratory component consists of five laboratories where students analyze an automobile lighting system to reinforce fundamental principles, use a breadboard to create a circuit with an operational amplifier, and assemble a radio from a kit. In addition, a laboratory where students design and build a functional product with attention to aesthetics has been introduced to exercise their creativity. The creative process is marked by progression through various stages such as brainstorming, forming a construction plan, drawing schematic representations of the product, and implementation of the design. This project is motivated by the need for creative thought in engineering undergraduate students to enable enhanced product design. Each semester the product changes and to date, three laboratory modules have been developed. The three variations include: designing a lamp from musical instruments, designing the housing for a low power computer, and designing a solar powered wind chime. The students are tasked to design and build the products within a three week time period. The major components for each product are supplied with budgets in the range of $25-50 per group for additional items. Assessment results show that the majority of students enjoy several aspects of the "creative" laboratory. At the same time, they consider it to be one of the most difficult laboratories.

The self-assembly of microscale polyhedra driven by surface-tension constraints has been previously described in the literature. Lithographic techniques were used to fabricate two-dimensional structures that, when freed from the underlying substrate, folded into polyhedral shapes. In this article, a modified technique is described in which one face of each polyhedron remains attached to the silicon substrate. The advantage of this new approach is that precise arrays of polyhedra can be formed. Five different polyhedral shapes were fabricated and their corresponding yields are given. The yield values show that the success of the autofolding process depends on the shape of the three-dimensional structures. Truncated shapes appear to be the most readily assembled.

Guy L. Steele Jr., in the paper "Growing a Language," makes a strong argument for languages that can be easily extended. Just as importantly, one should be able to shrink a language as well. Two important areas wherein one might wish to restrict language features are education and coding under style guidelines. There are a number of ways to implement restrictions, many of which depend upon reparsing the source code. An alternative approach exists if the language in question has a rich enough set of features for reflection and overloading. If so, these features can be used to detect violations, both dynamically and statically. The latter methodology has the advantage that restrictions are implemented in the very language that is being restricted and do not depend upon parsing source code. This paper explores using overloading and reflection to enforce restrictions in such a way that enforcement is turned on simply by including a library. An example library is developed that is suitable for students taking an introductory programming course.

Quantum dot cellular automata (QCA) show great promise for fast computation with larger integration density and lower power consumption. Unfortunately, previous research has shown that QCA are likely to be extremely sensitive to placement error. During an investigation into placement sensitivity, it was discovered that completely random quantum dot structures have the ability to compute simple binary functions. In this paper, we further explore the random structures in an idealized way, looking for higher-order functions; an example of one-bit full adder is shown in the paper. Moreover, a new structure, the semi-random structure, is introduced to alleviate some, but not all, difficulties in connecting disparate random structures; the difficulties arise from the fact that inputs and outputs to and from a purely random structure may not reside at the edges of the structure. In the semi-random structure, the inputs and outputs are localized to the edges. It is demonstrated that semi-random structures, like random structures, can almost assuredly compute simple Boolean functions.

The first language computer science students learn, more often than not, is a common production language such as C++ or Java. A minority of curricula, however, begin with a language, such as Scheme, assumed to be a better framework for teaching about computation. SWAY is an experimental teaching language, as expressive as Scheme, but provides an easier transition to production languages. It is a functional language at its core, but adds assignment and a simple object system. One of the goals of SWAY is to incorporate C-style syntax, but to vary from that syntax when pedagogical or ease of programming needs arise. One such area that SWAY differs from languages with C-like expressions is in the selection of items from homogeneous and heterogeneous aggregates. Much like the overloading of the plus operator to add integers as well as reals, a single operator is used for selection in SWAY, regardless of the aggregate structure. It is shown that taking such an approach naturally eases the burden of moving from arrays to objects to lists, in any order, both in teaching and programming.

We describe a version of QCA we call 'restricted minima quantum-dot arrays' (RMQDA). This design methodology attempts to reduce timing and input energy requirements by using clocked QCA cells only at isolated locations where gain is necessary. Where passive QCA cells are used, asymmetric spacing eliminates the existence of local minima configurations and allows the ground state to be reached. Separation of clocked regions also provides tolerance to clock distribution delays.

Quantum-dot cellular automata are a method of computation using a small number of electrons. This paper explores the use of quantum-dot cellular automata as logic devices and proposes a way to increase the reliability of these devices. By manipulating their architecture, the energy difference between the ground state and the first excited state can be increased. A larger difference allows for higher operating temperatures at the same reliability level or increased reliability at lower temperatures. The architectural changes explored in this paper include limiting the number of quantum dots accessible by an electron within a cell and the addition of a secondary layer of quantum-dot cells.