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Steven Bogaerts

Contributor
PDC for Beginners
Associate Professor of Computer Science, DePauw University

Tell us a little bit about yourself
I am an associate professor of computer science at DePauw University. For several years I've developed introductory parallelism materials appropriate for low-level computer science courses. In upper-level courses and research, my focus is in machine learning. I greatly enjoy teaching and doing research in these areas with undergraduates.

Why do you think it's an exciting time for students to learn about parallel computing?
Why do you think it's an exciting time for students to learn about parallel computing? The world is naturally parallel, and so it is not surprising that parallel computation is essential for effective modeling of the world. With both advances and roadblocks in processor technology, parallelism has also become indispensable for computationally-intensive tasks. This is true from the most sophisticated neural network models down to basic tasks on a smartphone. Computer scientists and software engineers must leverage parallelism to meet modern computation requirements.