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.