E Lewis asked his 30 computer science students a question at the beginning of class yesterday. "Willie Aames is best known for his role on what mid-'80s sitcom?" No one knew. "No, Mr. Belvedere is not the answer," the young, clean-cut professor said. "Guys, I don't know if I can continue with this class." The course, in fact, is about advanced computer programming. But this dynamic new professor tries to brighten each class with daily trivia "preludes," lively discussion and debates. (The answer, incidently, is Charles in Charge.) Lewis is the most recent addition to the Engineering School's faculty, part of an ongoing effort to build the Computer Science Department and broaden the school's teaching style. While the course's subject matter may be a bit sterile, Lewis' students find him a refreshingly dynamic lecturer. "Usually, professors can be kind of stiff and dry," one senior Computer Science major said. "[Lewis] seems to have a lot of energy -- he's excited to teach the course." "Programming Language Implementation" is the first course Lewis has taught since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. His research involved compilers -- programs that convert complex, human languages into a language the computer can understand -- and high-performance computing. Or, as Lewis described it, "getting the most out of the big fire-breathing machines." In class, Lewis prefers discussion to pure lecture, a practice that is foreign to some of his students and rarely employed by his fellow professors of Computer and Information Technology. "They're geeks," Lewis confessed about the typical CIS professors he has encountered in his field. "They're all geeks." Lewis' teaching style falls in line with the Engineering School's plans for restructuring the undergraduate curriculum, another step in the Agenda for Excellence, University President Judith Rodin's five-year strategic plan. The new curriculum will stress information technology with an emphasis on communication and entrepreneurship. As a graduate student, Lewis developed a programming language called "Advanced ZPL." The language enables computers to perform enormous computations -- such as those used to test nuclear weapons or forecast the weather -- that would take a desktop computer a thousand years to run. The secret is what Lewis calls "exploitation of parallelism," or enabling the computer to execute many functions at the same time, much as a manager delegates responsibility to several employees at once. Despite his highly technical field, Lewis has achieved "a sense of balance and spirituality" in his life. "I'm doing exactly what I want all the time," he said. Over the next five years, the Computer and Information Science Department will acquire 10 new professors and lecturers, as articulated in the Agenda for Excellence. In addition to the augmented faculty, the department will also gain a new chairman, Fernando Pereira, later this year.
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