At the beginning of each semester, CSE hires a number of Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) as graders, lab supervisors, and instructors. The department needs to assign the GTAs according to their abilities and availability to execute these academic tasks. We believe that a motivated GTA serves the class better, which is beneficial to the students themselves and the faculty teaching the course. Typically, there are 70 different academic tasks each semester and less than 35 GTAs are hired. The problem is often very tight, and the constraints are too numerous for a human to keep track of. In an effort to improve the quality of our program and streamline the managerial operations of our department, we are building a system that enables students to input their academic record and their teaching preferences while providing a human manager with both interactive and automated problem solving capabilities. This poster describes the graphical user interfaces. The algorithmic aspects are described elsewhere.

An Interactive System for Hiring and Managing Graduate Teaching Assistants at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering

http://csce.unl.edu/~gta/Ryan Lim and Berthe Y. Choueiry

The front-end of the system consists of two web interfaces for data input: one for the students and the other for the manager. The back-end consists of the search algorithms, which are controllable by the manager’s front-end. A MySQL databased links these three components.

Constraint Systems Laboratory • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln • (rlim|choueiry)@cse.unl.edu

Motivation and Goal of the GTA Project

This work is supported by NSF grant #EPS-0091900, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Constraint Systems Laboratory.

An interactive system

Integration of the back-end and front-end

Web front-end

Future work

References

1. R. Glaubius and B.Y. Choueiry, Constraint Modeling and Reformulation in the Context of Academic Task Assignment. In Working Notes of the Workshop Modeling and Solving Problems with Constraints, ECAI 2002.

2. H. Zou. MS Thesis. ConSystLab, CSE-UNL. In preparation.3. H. Zou and B.Y. Choueiry, Multi-agent Based Search versus Local Search and Backtrack

Search for Solving Tight CSPs: A Practical Case Study. Submitted.4. V.P. Gudetti. MS Thesis. ConSystLab, CSE-UNL. In preparation.

GTA Web front-endA candidate TA can securely register on the system anywhere from the Internet. Once logged in, the TA can enter his/her academic record (Figure 4) and edit his/her course selection and teaching preference (Figure 5):

At any point, the student can examine course descriptions and fill out a survey on the flexibility and ease of the interface.

Manager Web front-endThe manager login’s is secure. He/She is offered the following options:• Access, edit, and print the data of a particular student applicant (Figure 6)• Access, edit, and print the data of the courses offered (Figure 8)• Hire or remove GTAs and specify their working load (Figure 7)• Assign interactively GTAs to courses• Launch and monitor problem solving by search

Figure 2 Figure 3

Figure 4 Figure 5

Figure 6 Figure 7

Figure 8

Search (Lisp) back-end

The system links the manager’s interface to a portfolio of search engines being developed by the Constraint System Laboratory. These encompass systematic backtrack heuristic search (implemented), random systematic search (on-going), heurisctic local search (implemented), multi-agent based search (implemented), market-based search (on-going).

The search is performed on the data set obtained from the GTA in the database and is fed to the search engines written in Lisp.

The front-end consists of a web based interface where the GTA and department could logon to change and view their settings.

Figure 1

GTA webfront-end

Manager webfront-end

Search (Lisp)back-end

MySQLdatabase

Has two components: the GTA (Figures. 2, 3, 4, 5) front-end and the manager front-ends to register and login (Figures. 6, 7, 8).

This system has 3 main components. Currently, GTAs are able to register and set their preferences. The manager’s access is partially complete. The search components have not yet been integrated but are operating as a stand-alone module.

• Complete the integration of the 3 components.• Enrich the manager’s interface with a capability to run various search

engines in parallel and allow them to communicate and cooperate.