COLLOQUIUM
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina
 
Applications Quest: Computing Diversity

Juan E. Gilbert

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Auburn University

Date: April 14, 2006
Time: 1500-1600
Place: Swearingen 1C01 (Amoco Hall)

Abstract

Two landmark cases challenged the University of Michigan admissions
policies, one focused on Law School admissions and the other on
undergraduate admissions. In Grutter v. Bollinger, the case focused on
the Law School, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the Law
School. However, in the Gratz v. Bollinger, by a vote of 6-3, the
Court reversed, in part, the University’s undergraduate
admission’s policy to provide points for race or
ethnicity. Therefore, the Court decided that race could be considered
in admission’s decision, but could not be the deciding
factor. Although this decision appears to support affirmative action
efforts, it limits how race can be used to achieve diversity goals. In
summary, the Supreme Court ruled that diversity could be used in
university-based admissions, but did not specify how diversity should
be used. As a result, the University of Michigan and several other
academic institutions are spending large sums of money to holistically
evaluate admissions applications or simply exclude race/ethnicity as
part of the admissions process. In an effort to address this problem,
a software application called Applications Quest was
developed. Applications Quest uses clustering algorithms from computer
science and information retrieval to automatically compare admissions
applications to each other and place them into clusters or groups,
based upon a holistic view of their similarity (i.e., similar
applications appear within the same cluster). The clusters represent
diverse application pools with respect to a holistic view of each
application. For more information, see
http://www.ApplicationsQuest.com/.

Juan E. Gilbert is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and
Software Engineering Department at Auburn University. He directs the
Human-Centered Computing (HCC) Lab,
http://www.HumanCenteredComputing.com/. Dr. Gilbert leads research
projects in Spoken Language Systems, Multimodal User Interfaces,
Advanced Learning Technologies, Ethnocomputing/Culturally Relevant
Computing, Usability and Databases/Data Mining. Dr. Gilbert obtained
the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at the University of
Cincinnati (Ph.D. and M.S.) and earned his Bachelor’s degree in
Systems Analysis from Miami University.