Computer Science Professor and Software Engineer

I just got IEEE Spectrum (April) - they are talking about Green Supercars. Well - interestingly i thought may be autos can make less environmental pollution than humans. In that case from the point of view of earth friendlyness being a measure of survival in our evolution process - should greener machines or humans beat others? Eventually then in the evolution of things - will machine that are green survive over humans?

Computer Science has changed our way of life, changed economics and business in a significant way. The example I like to cite is that of how today’s Science is done. We do computational science in clear contrast with “experimental” science. Our modern experiments are very data centric and we deal with large amount of data that are often gathered from many experiments in various collaborating organizations. These data are then subjected to analysis, synthesis and modification followed by analysis and synthesis. All these are possible due to the great advancement of Information Technology that has happened due to the enrichment and progress of Computer Science.

Today there is a drop in Computer Science enrollment. The reason is simple – the curriculum is no longer provocative as it used to be in the 70’s, 80’s. There is an urgent need to revise Computer Science curriculum.

This does not mean that we will add more products based “technology” in curricula just to make it “marketable” today. We need to be very careful to maintain the role of Computer Science education as a generator and facilitator of innovation.

The signs we see is that Computer Science education can greatly benefit by adopting and collaborating with other fields. It can collaborate with Science and Engineering , Arts and design, in fact any or all disciplines. There is a huge role of Computer Science education to energize and help other disciplines to benefit from the enormous advancement of information technology. Frankly we are still at the tip of the iceberg and there is a lot of industry and work yet to come out.

An interdisciplinary approach to Computer Science will possibly create new departments such as Computational Biology, Bio-informatics, Digital Art and so on. If you add the enrollments into these new departments as enrollment in Computer Science my belief is that it will grow and grow. Note however, that the interdisciplinary activities that result in these new departments will need traditional computer science professionals to be receptive to change and accommodate the new technology in the context of the new application domains. This is how Computer Science itself developed in the early to mid seventies and so did all disciplines. Remember those days when traditional Math, EE departments put so much resistance to change and allow Computer Science to develop as a separate field of study?

the simple point to point network technology has ushered in the massive communication explosion that we see today. this helps bonding people to common purpose and goal. we tend to creat a global mind via knowlege sharing on the Internet. Question is what is contributive to education? This leads to the question - what IS education. So far the purpose of education is something that enlightens one to be more productive in living - when we talk about education in the context of a village in a developing or underdeveloped country this means economic use of the environment to improve life; in a developed country this means harnessing the current resources and technology to improve ones life conditions. There is a common thread!  So education is global in enabling a human to be more productive and improve his/her life. This means he/she is more and more capable of using available resource and advance to a better life. What can technology do to help this????

 

 

folks: We inherit technology from our ancestors - we get the protection of a society - we follow the rules. Now how do we advance technology to be able to deal with newer problems in our life?

 

think about issues such as getting the humanity educated - think how expensive it is for someone to get a college education - think why he/she needs that education - think how technology may help in reducing cost - think how technology can help learn about technology - think how technology can be use....

 

Well we all learn from the web - we learn about whats happening in our world. we learn about where do we fit in...

 

what is happening in technology of the Internet - how do we learn about information from the Web?

 

How will ASP.NET technology help us do a more economic job of developing a web site, a web application to perform something on the World Wide Web on the Internet what traditional programs do on desktop.

 

let me knwo what you think...