Experiential Learning
Faculty Statistics Seminar (Texas State University)
PTF Layla Guyot gave an invited presentation at the weekly statistics seminar at Texas State University, to an audience of primarily faculty. In her talk Guyot discussed promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects.
An Internship Takes a Village & U.S.-China AI Race and Global Professionals (Texas Global)
Dr. Chen presented PTF project insights on the topic of internships at the following venue:
Chen, W. (2024). U.S.-China AI Race and Global Professionals. Panel on GPT Asia, Texas Global, UT Austin.
Applications of Data Science with City Datasets: Poster Session at UT Austin
On April 30, 2025, Guyot hosted a public poster session showcasing student projects focusing on datasets from the City of Austin Open Data Portal, held at the University of Texas at Austin. Projects ranged widely in focus, from environmental data to transportation and public safety, demonstrating the breadth of student inquiry and analysis.
Publishing in the Interdisciplinary Fields (UNT Dallas)
Dr. Chen presented PTF project insights on the topic of internships at the following venue:
Chen, W. (2024). Publishing in the Interdisciplinary fields. Invited Talk at the School of Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of North Texas at Dallas.
Podcasting, Performance, and Pedagogy (Sententiae Antiquae)
PTF Deborah Beck and her PTF Initiative were featured as a guest post of Sententiae Antiquae, a scholarly Classics blog with over 27,000 readers.
In the post Beck describes some of the reasons for and benefits of using podcasting as a tool for learning in Classics courses:
Promoting the use of open data for data science projects (Open Data Day)
PTF Layla Guyot presented a session at Open Data Day in March 2024, hosted by the Austin Public Library. This event was part of International Open Data Day, which celebrates open government data with events hosted around the globe. Guyot presented about promoting the use of a local open data portal for data science projects with her collaborator, former student/current UGCA Dustyn Ransom.
Additional Grant Funding (Cockrell School of Engineering)
Alongside Dr. Berkin Dortdivanlioglu, PTF Krishna Kumar received a grant from the Cockrell School of Engineering to use AI for persoanlized tutors in their introduction to programming course. They have since built a personalized tutor for this course, which is available for students privately. They are now in the process of making the tutor public through the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
City of Austin DIVE Meetup
Nine students from PTF Layla Guyot's Elements of Data Science course were selected to virtually present the insights gained during their coursework to the Data, Impact, Visuals, and Exploration (DIVE) meetup organized by the City of Austin.
Bridging the Internship Gap: Preliminary Findings from the Internship Project (International Communication Association)
PTF Wenhong Chen presented a paper at the International Communication Association 2023 Conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in June 2023.
Bearing and Sharing the Burdens of Mentoring in the COVID-19 Pandemic (TAPA)
PTF alum Deborah Beck authored this invited paper as part of a group of six articles on "rupture and repair" in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was published in Transactions of the American Philological Association, the journal of the professional organization for American Classicists. In the article, she explores the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic's social isolation and "New Normal" on faculty peer mentorship and how the landscape of academic mentorship has changed since the onset of the pandemic.