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From a broad visionary perspective, this article examines three promising areas in which technology has the potential to revolutionize wayfinding for travelers who are blind: smart environments, smart consumers, and smart helpers. Its perspective is personal, based on the author's experience as the director of the Institute for Innovative Blind Navigation, and it is strongly influenced by the research and writings of popular futurists.

Projects in which students write a small compiler are common in compiler design courses, but even a small compiler can be daunting to students with no prior compiler-writing experience. When I recently taught compiler design, I developed a very small language with a highly modular compiler, focusing the project on implementing the core parts of a compiler without requiring students to build all the infrastructure from scratch. This paper describes the language and its compiler, and their successes (and occasional limitations) for teaching compiler design.

Proponents of "flipped" instruction offer a vision of class meetings devoted to active learning, in exchange for students spending time outside of class acquiring basic knowledge from readings or video lectures. The price paid for this vision is the need to create the readings or videos. However, such materials are becoming available as open educational resources, and if they become widely enough available it may be possible to flip classes without requiring each instructor to develop his or her own materials. In the spring of 2014 I flipped an introductory programming course for non-computing majors in an effort to see if freely available video lectures could support it. This paper reports my findings, notably that open resources can support such a course, but just barely.

Computer science and software engineering are young, maturing disciplines. As with other mathematically based disciplines, such as the natural sciences, economics, and engineering, it takes time for the mathematical roots to grow and flourish. For computer science and software engineering, others have planted these seeds over many years, and it is our duty to nurture them. This working group is dedicated to promoting mathematics as an important tool for problem-solving and conceptual understanding in computing.