Computer Science Department Blog

VT is #1

ribbens — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:53:34 +0000

OK. Not in football, unfortunately. We can dream though, right? This #1 ranking comes from Aviation Week & Space Technology, which ranked Virginia Tech first for industry workforce recruiting based on an annual survey of companies in the aerospace and defense industries. Chris Hall, Department Head of Aerospace & Ocean Engineering at VT, graciously pointed out that although aerospace engineering departments are the most obvious producer of graduates for this particular sector, “the aviation and defense industries recruit from all College of Engineering programs.” Boy is that true. We have several very active members of our industrial affiliates board who come from this sector. And if you read the details of the report from Aviation Week (pdf), you will see some interesting numbers. For example, the survey responders plan to hire 192 aerospace engineers in 2010, 325 “computer hardware engineers”, and 1722 “computer software engineers.” The salary data reported for software engineers is very competitive as well. Just another example of the many and varied opportunities open to computer scientists.

Computing research that changed the world

ribbens — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:40:56 +0000

If you want a sense of the huge variety of things that computer scientists are working on these days, a great place to look is the collection of videos posted by the Computing Research Association (CRA), taken at the symposium sponsored in March by the CRA, “Computing Research that Changed the World.” A very impressive and exciting list of contributions!

Project 10 to the 100

ribbens — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:37:57 +0000

If there’s a common theme to my posts over the last couple of years on this blog, it’s that computer science is a fascinating, dynamic, world-changing discipline. I see examples of this almost every day, but resist the temptation to blog about every one of them. (You’re welcome.) But at the risk of beating the same poor dead horse, here we go again! Have you voted in Google’s Project 10¹⁰⁰? These guys issued a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. They received something like 150,000 suggestions, and now they’ve narrowed and boiled those down to 16 broad candidates to receive funding. And we’re invited to vote for our favorites. My point here is not that computer science is the only discipline that will contribute to these exciting and high-impact projects. Big, important projects always require people with lots of skills and experience. But it’s pretty clear that computer science has a critical role to play in just about every one of them. Yet another example of how training in computing can position you to make a great positive difference in the lives of a whole bunch of people!

Computing for the future of the planet

ribbens — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:55:46 +0000

Want to make a difference in something important? How about the planet? That’s pretty important. Here’s an interesting article from researchers in the UK who nicely summarize four broad ways in which computing can help us build a sustainable future: optimizing the digital infrastructure to achieve maximum energy efficiency, developing a global data collection network for sensing and optimizing resource consumption and environmental impact, forecasting and responding to future events in natural systems, and finding digital alternatives to physical activities. We need lots of smart, creative, motivated young people to make this happen!

“That would be cool!”

ribbens — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:22:45 +0000

I talk a lot to prospective computer science majors about the great opportunities for creative people in computing. Thinking outside-the-box is highly rewarded in so many CS application areas. If you eavesdrop on a team of software designers who are building something for popular use, you would not be surprised to hear someone say “That would be cool!” Of course, there are application areas where wacky ideas are not as welcome, due to security or safety concerns for example. But compared to other technical fields, I would wager that there are a lot more career paths in computing that reward and encourage “that would be cool” inspirations.

Top-paying jobs for women

ribbens — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:14:31 +0000

I’ve always believed that computing is a wonderful career option for women. There are tons of obvious reasons why we need women to be strongly represented in computing, not the least of which is that half of the people in the world are female, so it’s a real shame to waste all that talent! But here comes an article from Forbes.com, which lists ten top-paying jobs for women — jobs where the unfair salary gap between men and women is somewhat less egregious. And guess what? Positions 4, 5 and 10 on that list are in the computing field. This makes sense! Computing has generally been a meritocracy — if you’re good, you’re good. And many computing careers offer the flexibility of part-time consulting or telecommuting careers, if that works best in certain stages of life. We need more people who are creative and passionate about solving really important problems and making people’s lives better. So if you are a young lady who is pretty good at math and would like to use your smarts and creativity to make a positive difference in the world (and make a good living while you’re at it), why aren’t you thinking about computer science? Please don’t let some worn-out stereotype about computer scientists chase you away from an amazing opportunity!

Top 30 innovations

ribbens — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:18:10 +0000

The Wharton School of Business recently convened a panel of experts to answer the question, “what are the top 30 innovations of the last 30 years?”. The article “A World Transformed” summarizes their conclusions. Not many surprises in there I guess. But it is striking how many of them emerged directly from advances in computer science. I am still amazed how many people I meet who have this vague notion that computer science is old news, and that they need to move on to something new and exciting, like biology or finance. To really believe that computer science is old news, one must believe that this dramatic period of CS-lead innovation is now coming to a screeching halt. Based on the energy and creativity I see in our department, I’m betting that’s not true!

Web anniversary

ribbens — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:09:23 +0000

By one measure, yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. And the guy who was there at the beginning, Tim Berners-Lee, says we are still at the beginning! In his talk yesterday, he’s quoted as saying “The web is not all done; this is just the tip of the iceberg. New changes are going to rock the boat even more.” I doubt there has ever been a technological innovation that got into the hands of so many people, so fast — and not just so that all these people can use the Web, but they can actually contribute to it and create with it. This is one of the main, though certainly not the only, reason computer science continues to be such an exciting field. There are so many opportunities to create and invent and solve problems in this still new world of the Web, not to mention the increasingly important and interesting field of studying what the Web is, how people use it, what effect it is having on the world, etc.

Job fairs alive and well

ribbens — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:30:12 +0000

Despite all the press reports, people are still hiring — at least in our small corner of the world, and based on talking to company reps who attended our just completed spring career night. Last year at this time we had seventeen companies represented at the spring career event. This year we had twenty-one. Over 200 students, from freshman to soon-to-graduate PhD’s, enjoyed the opportunity to meet with these company representatives. See the pictures here.

Model-checking and software

ribbens — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:03:56 +0000

One of the most frequently asked questions from high school students interested in computing is on the difference between computer science and computer engineering. There are many similarities, of course, including the chance to solve world-changing problems, the dynamism and creativity of the field, and great job opportunities. But at the risk of over-simplifying, I usually say that CPE has relatively more emphasis on hardware and CS has relatively more emphasis on software. And then, tongue-in-cheek, I sometimes go on to make cheap shots like claiming that software is what really makes computing so flexible and powerful, and pointing out that there are way more companies that design and build software than there are that design and build microprocessors.

Of course I’m biased on the issue. But software just continues to amaze me at how challenging and interesting it is. For example, there is an interesting interview with the 2007 Turing Award winners, published in the July 2008 issue of CACM, on the topic of “model-checking.” Model-checking is the modern descendant of (provable) program correctness; it has had some good successes and continues to receive attention from some really smart people. There is still much to do, however, especially on the software side. According to Joseph Sifakis, “For hardware, it’s relatively easy to extract mathematical models, and we’ve made a lot of progress. For software, the problem is quite a bit more difficult.” Fellow award winner, Edmund Clarke simply says, “software verification is a Grand Challenge.”