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John Greiner

John Greiner

Assistant Teaching Professor of Computer Science

Computer Science

CONTACT

greiner@rice.edu

WEBSITE(S)| Profile | Research Site

SURF Mentoring

Potential projects/topics: This semester, I have a student creating an AI tutor specialized with my coursework. The SURF project would be to tweak and evaluate this tutor. This would involve a small amount of Python programming, lots of experimentation with various Generative AI models (Gemini, ChatGPT, etc.), record keeping of the results in a spreadsheet, and some simple statistical analysis. More specifically, the much of the tweaking would involve changing the "temperature" parameter and the textual instructions given to the tutor via prompt engineering.

Potential skills gained: Understanding how to use more sophisticated features of Generative AI models. Some Python experience calling external APIs. Calculating statistics in a spreadsheet.

Required qualifications:

  • Required skills: Some use of Excel or Sheets. Some basic knowledge of statistics (mean, variance, distribution). The ability to generate some ideas for the prompt engineering experimentation on their own.
  • Preferred course completions: Some Python programming experience comparable to COMP 140.

Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I.

Research Areas

John Greiner is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Computer Science in Rice's online Master of Computer Science program. He has taught a wide variety of computer science courses over more than twenty years at Rice with an emphasis on algorithms and introductory programming. He has been involved with online teaching since 2012. This includes Rice's first MOOC (massive open online course), the computer science department's first online course, and their first "flipped" course, combining online videos with in-person active learning. He is an academic advisor for the computer science department. He has helped develop new curricula for the department's undergraduate and graduate degree programs, and reviewed curricula for the university. He coaches the ACM/ICPC programming contest teams, and is the department's liaison with the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT). He is on the program committee for the Houston-area NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing.