Bridging the gap between theory and practice by promoting a partnership between industry and academia

A new computer science course is being developed in a collaboration with faculty at three universities and industrial partners, the purpose of which is to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to promote a partnership between industry and academia. Industrial partners provide requirements statements for real problems from their own workload. Students use their knowledge to design solutions by applying research ideas. The course differs significantly from standard industrial project courses in that the case-studies are used both for instructional as well as project purposes and are carefully chosen and designed a priori. The course has the following broad objectives: to expose students to a variety of prototypical real-world projects; to apply, in a noncompartmentalized manner, a combination of formal and theoretical concepts, techniques and results in real situations; to illustrate recent theoretical research results in the context of a chain of applications leading to the solution of a real-world problem; and to involve students in design and implementation of one or two subsystems while being conscious of the subsystem role in the overall system being developed.