 Computer Science Department Carnegie Mellon University Office: GHC 9101
Executive assistant: Jessica Packer, jpacker@cs.cmu.edu, 412-268-2565, GHC 9006
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I am the architect of the Diderot project and lead its development. Diderot offers an online platform for improving the quality and accessibility of education. Diderot rests on two pillars---people and knowledge---and revolves around highly interactive, online books, tools for creating and publishing books, running and auto-grading code, and discussions. The key technologies behind Diderot include the following.
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ResourcesDiderot is currently not publicly available. The GitHub repository for Diderot is available for feedback and other resources.A brief history of DiderotDiderot's development has intertwined with the development of an undergraduate course (15210) that I have developed with Guy Blelloch. When I started teaching the course in Fall 2012, I started writing lecture notes and building a code auto-grader for the course. To streamline the development of the notes I wrote them in a style that structured the text as a sequence of colorful "blocks". For example, plain paragraphs would be in grey blocks, theorems would be in blue blocks, examples would be in yellow blocks, etc. This structure allowed generating different versions of the notes, for example, one for the instructor and for the student automatically from the same sources. My initial goal was to improve the readability and accessibility of the material, while also making it easier to prepare for lectures. Over time, I realized that this style can serve as a foundation for an "interactive book" that allows the readers to discuss specific blocks of text. This would be like a social network that revolves around books, rather than, for example, cooked asparagus pictures. By that time, publishers were interested in making a book out of the notes, and I asked them if they could make an interactive book as I had imagined. The publishers didn't know how to do that...So as a hobby, I started learning about web development and developing a concept version of an interactive book. In Fall 2016, I developed a basic concept running on my laptop. But, I didn't know how to scale it to several hundred students in my class. During the thanksgiving holiday in 2016, I stayed home to take care of our new two-month old puppy Gustav, while my wife visited family on the west coast. During that holiday, I learned about cloud computing and after ten days of hacking interspersed with Gustav playtime, the concept was running on the cloud. This was a light-bulb moment for me. With the cloud, an interactive book can serve thousands and even millions of people economically and anywhere on earth, connecting people and knowledge in entirely new ways. Furthermore, the vast compute resources could open up entirely new ways of instruction and learning, e.g., books could contain runnable code, grading could be done on the cloud, and algorithms may be employed to improve learning. The possibilities were exciting. So, I wrote a proposal and submitted to Eberly Center for Teaching at CMU, hoping that I could hire a developer. The proposal was rejected (perhaps rightly so, because it really wasn't about "teaching"). That was a bit discouraging but I continued learning and hacking slowly in my free time. The project picked up steam when Anil Ada joined in 2018 and Rohan Yadav joined in 2019. Diderot now has several components (the compiler, the interactive books, and a cloud-based autograder and code-runner) and is evolving rapidly.I am grateful to our students and fellow faculty members for trying Diderot and to the SCS community for their support.Funding and AcknowledgmentsDiderot is generously supported by Amazon Web Services. In the past, it was supported by Google Cloud.
15897: Parallelism and Concurrency (Fall 2019)Class times: Mon-Wed 10:30-11:50
Place: Gates 4303
Diderot: Please see Diderot for the course schedule and course materials.
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