Meet the Faculty - Daniel Kluver

Tell us about your journey to the University of Minnesota.

My journey to the University of Minnesota has been all about accepting opportunities as they arise. I am a local Minnesotan and I was involved with the Post-Secondary Entrance Options (PSEO) program in high school, and took a computer science class on a whim. During that class, Professor John Reidl mentioned that his research group works with undergraduate students and he thought I would be a good fit. I started working in the GroupLens Lab once I started at the U of M and helped maintain the MovieLens recommender system. That experience really sparked my interest in research, so when I finished my undergraduate degree, I got started on my graduate degree right away at the U of M.

As my PhD program was wrapping up, I started to think about what I wanted to do after I finished my courses and I was interested in pursuing teaching. I worked as a visiting professor at Macalester College for a few years when I saw that the U of M was looking to hire computer science instructors. I already knew the courses and department well, so I went for the position and was hired on to teach.

What drew you to computer science as a field?

I was always interested in making things, but I was not particularly useful with my hands. In high school, we were required to have the TI-85 calculator for our calculus courses, which has some very primitive programming abilities. I liked to tinker with that and would write silly little programs for it. I also participated in the FIRST Lego Robotics League in middle school. Computer science was an avenue where I could build things and that always appealed to me.

What do you enjoy most about teaching? What are your teaching interests?

I like when I make an assignment and it gets the students engaged and excited about the material. I like the moments in office hours when things start to click for a student. I love those moments of growth. In the more advanced course, I enjoy learning about the latest technologies and getting new opportunities to build and learn more as I teach. I enjoy building interesting lectures and in class activities that are engaging and exciting. I have historically taught our introduction courses, but recently I have been filling some gaps in our website development core curriculum.

Tell us about your work with GroupLens.

I still dedicate about 20% of my time supporting the work of the GroupLens Research Lab. My role is to onboard our graduate students to our technological resources, and to maintain the MovieLens system. I train the undergraduates who help maintain the platform. I also help graduate students put together experiments on the platform. Additionally, I am helping build out a new piece of software that is not quite live yet. It will be the next generation of our experiment platform that we run and maintain to help the research community conduct studies on recommender systems.

What courses are you teaching this fall? What can students expect to get out of that class?

CSCI 4131 - Internet Programming is a broad survey course on web development. The expectation is that students come in with some understanding of how computers can talk to each other, and then we go over broad coverage of the internet, web browsers, languages and the other fundamentals, and how they come together to make websites on the front and back end. Students will leave that class with the ability to build a basic website.

CSCI 5117 - Developing the Interactive Web picks up from that class and is a more targeted web development course. Students come in knowing how to build a basic website and we focus on working with more advanced tools. By the end of the course, students will have built two websites that they designed on their own. It is a very project oriented course and where students learn through practical activities. The websites they build are public and can be used in their portfolio or resume when they go out into the workforce.

What do you do outside of the classroom for fun?

I do a lot of 3D printing. I occasionally play video games and Dungeons and Dragons. I will do electronics tinkering to build small systems. I recently printed and designed a little lever that can report to a computer, but I’m not sure what I am going to do with it. I just enjoy making things.

Do you have a favorite spot in the city or on campus?

I really like the Anderson Design Labs in the Mechanical Engineering building. They have a lot of design tools, resources and parts needed to dip your toe into physical computing. It is a place to take all of the things we learn as computer scientists and bring it out of your screen into the real world. I definitely recommend that students check it out!

Anything else you would like students to know about you?

I’m always happy to talk about personal projects that students take on in their free time. If you are working on a website project, I am happy to talk and give unofficial advice. I love to see what students work on outside of the classroom!