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Increasing the Undergraduate Study of Programing and Software

Posted on June 12, 2011  Comments (2)

There is a role for computer science. It also seems to me there is a much larger role for some study of computing (programing, databases, software, technology) that isn’t actually computer science. Where exactly this should go into an undergraduate school, I am not sure. But it seems to me, an understanding of computing is extremely important to those that want to lead in the next 40 years and we should be able to put more of that into undergraduate studies.

Computer Studies Made Cool, on Film and Now on Campus

The number of computer science degrees awarded in the United States began rising in 2010, and will reach 11,000 this year, after plummeting each year since the end of the dot-com bubble in 2004, according to the Computing Research Association, which tracks enrollment and degrees. Enrollment in the major peaked around 2000, with the most degrees — 21,000 — awarded four years later. The number of students who are pursuing the degree but have not yet declared their major increased by 50 percent last year.

To capitalize on the growing cachet of the tech industry, colleges nationwide, including Stanford, the University of Washington and the University of Southern California, have recently revamped their computer science curriculums to attract iPhone and Facebook-obsessed students, and to banish the perception of the computer scientist as a geek typing code in a basement.

Even universities not known for computer science or engineering, like Yale, are seizing the moment. The deans of the Ivy League engineering schools recently started meeting to hatch ways to market “the Ivy engineer.”

The new curriculums emphasize the breadth of careers that use computer science, as diverse as finance and linguistics, and the practical results of engineering, like iPhone apps, Pixar films and robots, a world away from the more theory-oriented curriculums of the past.

I think the basic thrust of this move is good. I am not sure if it is really right to expand computer science to make it more attractive or to instead create something else. Computer engineering would seem to be one option, but I am not sure that is really right either. We do need computer scientists, but frankly we need maybe 100 or 1,000 times more programmers. And we need many other UX designers, program managers that understanding technology and programing, database administrators, system administrators… and really these people don’t need computer science backgrounds.

On a separate topic we also need better ways for everyone to understand technology better. We need good course for those majoring in economics, business, philosophy, English, political science… Understanding technology and how it works is fundamental to managing in the world we live in today and will live in.

Related: Programming Grads Meet a Skills Gap in the Real World – How To Become A Software Engineer/Programmer – Engineering Again Dominates The Highest Paying College Degree Programs – Want to be a Computer Game Programmer? – software programming posts on my management blog

Webcast on Finding the Missing Memristor

Posted on April 30, 2010  Comments (0)

Very interesting lecture on finding the missing memristor by R. Stanley Williams. From our post in 2008:

How We Found the Missing Memristor By R. Stanley Williams:

For nearly 150 years, the known fundamental passive circuit elements were limited to the capacitor (discovered in 1745), the resistor (1827), and the inductor (1831). Then, in a brilliant but underappreciated 1971 paper, Leon Chua, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted the existence of a fourth fundamental device, which he called a memristor.

Related: Demystifying the Memristor – posts on computer science – von Neumann Architecture and Bottleneck

HP Makes Progress on Revolutionary Memristors

Posted on April 9, 2010  Comments (0)

H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip

Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains, Dr. Chua said.

“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”

In an interview at the H.P. research lab, Stan Williams, a company physicist, said that in the two years since announcing working devices, his team had increased their switching speed to match today’s conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them in the laboratory, he added, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of reads and writes.

That is a significant hurdle to overcome, indicating that it is now possible to consider memristor-based chips as an alternative to today’s transistor-based flash computer memories, which are widely used in consumer devices like MP3 players, portable computers and digital cameras.

“Not only do we think that in three years we can be better than the competitors,” Dr. Williams said. “The memristor technology really has the capacity to continue scaling for a very long time, and that’s really a big deal.”

Related: Demystifying the Memristor – How We Found the Missing Memristor – Self-assembling Nanotechnology in Chip Manufacturing

Siftable Modular Computers

Posted on January 19, 2010  Comments (3)

Pretty cool. I must admit I don’t really see how this would function outside of specifically designed situation. I can imagine it could be very cool for education, especially of young kids. Siftables act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them – piling, grouping, sorting – to interact with digital information and media. David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi originally created Siftables at the MIT Media Lab and have formed a company to commercialize the product and have received a grant from NSF to continue the work.

Related: Cool Mechanical Simulation System – Video Cat Cam – Arduino: Open Source Programmable Hardware – What Kids can Learn

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard Using Wii Remote

Posted on October 29, 2009  Comments (12)

Using infrared (IR) light pens and the Wii Remote, it is possible to create very low-cost multi-point interactive whiteboards and multi-point tablet displays. Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. Download the software. Great stuff, it is wonderful to see what people can create with technology.

Related: Very Cool Wearable Computing Gadget from MIT – Build Your Own Tabletop Interactive Multi-touch Computer – Whiteboard Mechanical Simulation System (from MIT) – How Do Wii Game Controllers Work?

Researching Direct Brain Interfaces for Text Entry

Posted on October 27, 2009  Comments (1)

Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter — just by thinking about it. A UW-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student, Wilson is among a growing group of researchers worldwide who aim to perfect a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally. Among those are people who have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), brain-stem stroke or high spinal cord injury.

The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. “The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually,” says Williams. “And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”

The system still is not very quick. However, as with texting, users improve as they practice using the interface. “I’ve seen people do up to eight characters per minute,” says Wilson.

Read full press release

Related: Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair – Rat Brain Cells, in a Dish, Flying a Plane – The Brain Hides Information From Us To Prevent Mistakes – Roachbot: Cockroach Controlled Robot
Continue reading →

Dennis Bray Podcast on Microbes As Computers

Posted on October 13, 2009  Comments (1)

Carl Zimmer interviews Dennis Bray in an interesting podcast:

Dennis Bray is an active professor emeritus in both the Department of Physiology and Department of Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. He studies the behavior of microbes–how they “decide” where to swim, when to divide, and how best to manage the millions of chemical reactions taking place inside their membranes. For Bray, microbes are tiny, living computers, with genes and proteins serving the roles of microprocessors.

Related: E. Coli Individuality – Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell by Dennis Bray – Programing Bacteria – Micro-robots to ‘swim’ Through Veins

Another Survey Shows Engineering Degree Results in the Highest Pay

Posted on August 7, 2009  Comments (3)

The PayScale salary survey looked at both starting and mid career salary. Engineering topped both measures. Of the top 10 mid career salaries, 7 were engineering degrees – including the top 4. The survey is based upon data for full-time employees in the United States who possess a Bachelor’s degree and no higher degrees and have majored in the subjects listed above.

The top 11 paying degrees are:

Highest Paid Undergrad College Degrees
Degree Starting Median Salary Mid-Career Median Salary
Aerospace Engineering $59,600 $109,000
Chemical Engineering $65,700 $107,000
Computer Engineering $61,700 $105,000
Electrical Engineering $60,200 $102,000
Economics $50,200 $101,000
Physics $51,100 $98,800
Mechanical Engineering $58,900 $98,300
Computer Science $56,400 $97,400
Industrial Engineering $57,100 $95,000
Environmental Engineering $53,400 $94,500
Statistics $48,600 $94,500

Related: Engineering Graduates Paid Well Again in 2008 – High Pay for Engineering Graduates in 2007 – Engineering Graduates Get Top Salary Offers in 2006 – posts on science and engineering careers – posts on engineering education

Barbara Liskov wins Turing Award

Posted on June 28, 2009  Comments (0)

photo of Barbara Liskovphoto of Barbara Liskov by Donna Coveney

Barbara Liskov has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in science and engineering, for her pioneering work in the design of computer programming languages.

Liskov, the first U.S. woman to earn a PhD from a computer science department, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking. She is only the second woman to receive the honor, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the “Nobel Prize in computing.”

“Computer science stands squarely at the center of MIT’s identity, and Institute Professor Barbara Liskov’s unparalleled contributions to the field represent an MIT ideal: groundbreaking research with profound benefits for humankind. We take enormous pride that she has received the Turing Award,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield.

“Barbara Liskov pioneered some of the most important advances in fundamental computer science,” said Provost L. Rafael Reif. “Her exceptional achievements have leapt from the halls of academia to transform daily life around the world. Every time you exchange e-mail with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of her research.”

The Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery and is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, who helped the Allies crack the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II.

Read the full article at MIT.

Related: 2006 Draper Prize for Engineering – Thompson and Tits share 2008 Abel Prize (Math) – von Neumann Architecture and Bottleneck – MIT related posts

The First Web Server

Posted on May 30, 2009  Comments (3)

photo of the first web server

Photo by sbisson from Geneva, Switzerland, November 2006 .

In a glass case at CERN is an unpreposessing little NeXT cube. It’s hard to believe that this little workstation changed the world, but it did. It’s Tim Berners Lee‘s original web server, the world’s first.

NeXT is the computer company Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple. Then he left NeXT to buy out Pixar. And then, of course, went back to Apple.

Related: The Web is 15 Years Old – The Second 5,000 Days of the Web – 2007 Draper Prize to Berners-Lee – Google Server Hardware Design

Artificial Intelligence Finds Ancient Indus Script Matches Spoken Language

Posted on April 24, 2009  Comments (0)

Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery by Brandon Keim

An ancient script that’s defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.
…
The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.
…
They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.

The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.

When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages.

Related: The Rush to Save Timbuktu’s Crumbling Manuscripts – The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript – Aztec Math

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