John F. Dooley is the William and Marilyn Ingersoll Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Before returning to teaching in 2001, Professor Dooley spent more than 16 years in the software industry as a developer, designer, and manager working for companies such as Bell Telephone Laboratories, McDonnell Douglas, IBM, and Motorola, along with an obligatory stint as head of development at a software startup. He has written more than two dozen professional journal and conference publications and seven books to his credit, along with numerous presentations. He has been a reviewer for the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium for the last 36 years and reviews papers for the IEEE Transactions on Education, the journal Cryptologia, and other professional conferences. He has created short courses in software development and three separate Software Engineering courses at the advanced undergraduate level.
Dr. Vera A. Kazakova is a Computer Science educator and researcher, with expertise in artificial intelligence, experiential learning, and collaborative methodologies. With a PhD in AI focused on nature-inspired computation and emergent division of labor, her research spans CS Education, Evolutionary Computation, Narrative Generation, Decentralized Multi-Agent Systems, and Cyber Social Science. Dr. Kazakova also has extensive experience as a CS educator, having taught programming, artificial intelligence, research, and software development courses. Dr. Kazakova has coined the term "Soft-Aware Development" to encapsulate a holistic approach for building software, building stakeholder relationships, and building up each developer along the way. An ardent proponent of experiential learning and agile methodologies, Dr. Kazakova champions a multi-sprint learning architecture that enables students to adapt and iterate, fostering a shared environment of continuous growth. Her passion for collaboration, from simplistic autonomous agents to human developers, and members of large online communities, sets her apart as an advocate for a more interconnected, empathetic, and empowering approach to CS research, education, and software development.
