KeynotesSIGCSE TS 2026

TS 2026 Keynote Speakers

Amy J. Ko

Love, Learning, and Computing Education

Abstract: We live in a world that is increasingly full of hate, cruelty, and violence. These cultural forces are destabilizing schools, colleges, universities, libraries, and other places of informal learning, and every learner, teacher, and leader in them, threatening education and democracy in the U.S. and worldwide. What is our role, as computing educators and scholars, in resisting this hate? In this talk, I argue for love. A kind of love that shows up not as an abstraction in our values, but in the concrete ways that we teach computing, in the questions we ask about learning computing, in the technologies we create to support computing education, and in what we choose to teach about computing. To make this case, I examine my own experiences with love in computing education, then develop a conception of what love in computing education. I then deconstruct some of the fundamental tensions between love, computing, and computing culture. I then share several examples of loving computing education from scholars in our community, each showing us how we might reimagine our teaching, research, and institutions around love. Through this transformation, I hope we might inspire a generation of youth to help create both loving uses of computing, a loving society more broadly, and perhaps a more loving scholarly community for ourselves.

Bio

Amy J. Ko studies equitable, liberatory learning and teaching about computing and information, in schools and beyond. She draws upon computing, education, learning sciences, behavioral sciences, sociology, and more, examining and reimagining learning through a transdisciplinary lens. She is Professor and Associate Dean for Academics at the University of Washington Information School, with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science & Engineering, an ACM Distinguished Member, and a member of the SIGCHI Academy for her distinguished contributions to human-computer interaction research. She is also a proud biracial trans woman of color, mother, and community organizer for equity in regional K-12 education, which includes civil rights and sanctuary for transgender youth.

Titus Winters

CS and SE Education, post-AI

Abstract: CS educators teach programming. Generative AI tools can program. So we’re clearly wasting our time teaching CS to students in the AI era, right? There’s no need for junior programmers, enrollments are dropping, and we should all plan to be plumbers or apple farmers. Or perhaps there is a chance to use the AI crisis as an opportunity to do make some much-needed changes to our programs. For in computing education, as in so many other topics, AI is not an answer, it is only an accelerant. For topics with sound foundations, it’s a boon, reducing friction and toil. For topics with long-standing shortcomings, it’s adding fuel to the fire. In this talk I’ll give some industry perspective, identify what seems outdated in CS and SE pedagogy, and try to sketch out some more fruitful directions for revision to our assignments, classes, and overall curricula.

Bio

Titus is a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe, focusing on Developer Experience. He has served on the C++ standards committee, chairing the working group for the design and evolution of the C++ standard library. He has also served on the ACM/IEEE/AAAI CS2023 steering committee, helping set curriculum requirements for Computer Science undergraduate degrees, focusing on the requirements for software engineering. Titus was a thought leader at Google for many years, focusing on C++, software engineering practice, technical debt, and culture. He is the lead author for the book Software Engineering at Google. (O’Reilly, 2020).

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