Leanne  Wu

Leanne Wu

PhD
Pronouns: she/hers

Positions

Associate Professor (Teaching)

Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science

Contact information

Web presence

Location

Office: ICT713

For media enquiries, contact

For media related inquiries, please contact Owen Stockden, Director of Marketing and Communications, at owen.stockden@ucalgary.ca

 

Background

Educational Background

Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2020

M.Sc. Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2010

B.Sc. Computer Science, University of Calgary, 2003

Research

Areas of Research

Activities

My research interests fall into three main areas:

  • Data privacy and contextual integrity. (particularly as technical definitions of privacy intersect other ways that disciplines outside of computer science can and do define privacy)
  • Computer science education. I am curious about the impact of curriculum, course, instructional and assessment design choices on learners in computer science and data science. I am currently working on various projects probing academic integrity, project-based learning, authentic assessment, and meta-cognition in computer science.
  • Data science-adjacent projects. I may work with selected partners to support experiential learning for undergraduate and professional graduate capstones as my expertise allows. 

Participation in university strategic initiatives

Courses

Course number Course title Semester
DATA 604 Working with Data at Scale Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Winter 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024
CPSC 393 Metacognition in Self-directed Learning Methodologies Winter 2023
DATA 608 Developing Big Data Applications Winter 2021, Winter 2022, Winter 2023, Summer 2023, Fall 2024
DATA 601 Working with Data and Visualization Fall 2019, Winter 2022, Fall 2023
CPSC 219 Introduction to Computer Science for Multidisciplinary Studies II Winter 2021, Winter 2024
CPSC 233 Introduction to Computer Science for Computer Science Majors II Winter 2018, Winter 2020
ISEC 611 Private Data Management Fall 2022
DATA 221 Introduction to Data Science. Winter 2024

Projects

Academic Integrity in Computer Science

I am currently leading a research team surveying both students and faculty members about their attitudes and behaviours around academic integrity in computer science. This work is supported by a Teaching and Learning Grant.


Nuclear in the News

My colleague Jason Donev and I co-supervised a DATA 695 capstone project consisting of a NLP analysis of news clippings about nuclear initiatives in Saskatchewan.


Privacy and Older Adults

I supervised a CPSC 502 project by Hannah Ku focused on privacy, technology use, and older adults. The project primarily consisted of a survey whose primary audience were seniors in Calgary. 

Awards

  • Anita Borg Memorial (now Google Women Techmakers') Scholarship (Canada), Google . 2012
  • Grace Hopper Celebration Faculty Scholarship, anitab.org. 2021

Publications

  • "I am not alone in this": Experiences of Common Humanity and Social Connection from a Computer Science Course on the Metacognition of Learning. Teale Masrani, Leanne Wu, Helen Ai He, Lora Oehlberg, Anika Achari, Ali Hazari, Syeda Zainab Khaleel, Samuel Osweiler, and Nathaly Verwaal. Western Canadian Conference for Computing Education 2023. (2021)
  • Spot the Learning: Heatmaps for Learning Java. Leanne Wu. Western Canadian Conference for Computing Education 2019. (2019)
  • Analysis of social networking privacy policies. Ken Barker; Maryam Majedi; Kambiz Ghazinour; Leanne Wu. International workshop on Privacy and Anonymity in Information Society. (2010)
  • Quantifying privacy violations. Leanne Wu; Rosa Karimi Adl; Mishtu Banerjee; Ken Barker. Secure Data Management: 8th VLDB Workshop. (2011)
  • Workload characterization of a large systems conference web server. Aniket Mahanti; Leanne Wu; Carey Williamson; . Communication Networks and Services Research Conference. (2009)
  • Automatic database configuration for DB2 Universal Database: Compressing years of performance expertise into seconds of execution. Adam Storm; Eva Kwan; Sam Lightstone; Berni Schiefer; Leanne Wu;. BTW 2003, Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web. (2003)

More Information

Please note that I do not accept thesis-based graduate students for supervision.

Many students may approach me for projects focused on various expressions of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, etc. Please be warned that I do not usually pursue these unless there is a primary component dealing with massive data which I find interesting, or there is some other compelling aspect of the project.