Window to the soul (or at least the brain)
The media has been awash lately in stories about brain imaging, from Slate to the Baltimore Sun to the New York Times Magazine. Broadly speaking, brain imaging allows scientists to see what parts of the brain are active when a person performs a specific task, such as reading or problem-solving. Brain imaging offers tremendous insights into the physiological origins of human thought and decision-making, and it is a powerful tool for studying brain disorders such as autism and dyslexia. Carnegie Mellon, of course, is making excellent use of this technology, and you can learn more here and here. (You may also have heard about this study, which made news recently.)
Jonathan Potts
Green is good
In a new podcast, Tepper School of Business alumnus Sarosh Kumana says that the profit motive can spur the development of sustainable technologies that will address many of the environmental challenges we face.
"Business is a very powerful force in the world, profits are a very powerful force in the world. And in order for sustainability to be sustainable ... it has to become something that is a provider of jobs, a provider of revenue and a provider of profits rather than a sinkhole for foundations or government money," Kumana says.
In addition to raising awareness of sustainable technology through the podcast, Kumana funded the inaugural Sustainable Technology Award for the McGinnis Venture Competition, March 15–17 at the Tepper School. The competition is hosted by the school's Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship.
To listen to the podcast, go to the Tepper School of Business Web site or download the file directly here.
Jonathan Potts
The Big Dance
Hey, what are you doing? Are you filling out a bracket sheet? You're supposed to be doing work, you know.
Well, if you insist on wasting your employer's precious time trying to win that unauthorized NCAA tournament office pool, you might as well give yourself a fighting chance with this research described by Michael Trick, a professor of operations research in the Tepper School of Business. According to the system, the top four teams going into the tournament are UCLA, North Carolina, Kansas and Texas A & M. Incidentally, Peter Leo in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has some interesting March Madness trivia and bracket tips.
Now get back to work.
Jonathan Potts
The death of computer science is greatly exaggerated--again
As computers have grown ubiquitous in life and work, it has become fashionable among some academics to declare that computer science has reached the end of the line - that all of the interesting questions have been answered, all of the important programs encoded. The latest to do so is Neil McBride, principal lecturer in the School of Computing at De Montfort University, Leicester, U.K. In "The Death of Computing," a paper he wrote for the British Computer Society, he bemoans declining enrollments in computer science courses and a drop in computer research funding.
"There is the smell of death in the air," he says in the piece, which provoked hundreds of comments on Slashdot. Commercial software has matured, he contends, and high-level tools have grown so sophisticated that virtually anyone can build sophisticated Web pages, produce computer animations or assemble business systems without knowing much of anything about computer programming.
Whatever he's smelling in the air of Leicester is missing in Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science (SCS) lacks neither students nor interesting research questions. Sure, misconceptions abound. Despite fears that software jobs are all being sent offshore, the fact is that more IT positions exist in the U.S. today than did before the infamous dotcom bust.
But the biggest misconception is that computer programming somehow is synonymous with computer science, rather than simply a skill used by computer scientists. Computer scientists aren't just tweaking operating systems; at Carnegie Mellon, they develop systems that automatically find errors in digital circuits, guide autonomous vehicles hundreds of miles without human intervention and translate speech from one language to another. They are using machine learning techniques to "read" minds by analyzing brain scans, modeling cellular processes to unravel the secrets of cancer and, in a technique known as "human computation," designing Internet games that trick thousands of human players into doing work that computers can't yet perform. Computer science continues to transform discipline after discipline, from cosmology to biochemistry. Computers have become so important that Jeannette Wing, head of the Computer Science Department within SCS, says "computational thinking" has become as important an educational concept as reading, writing and arithmetic.
Computational thinking isn't about computer programming, but about understanding how the power of computers can be brought to bear on problems. Computer scientists know that the use of abstraction can make complex problems manageable and automation can tackle huge databases that are overwhelming to humans. Wing, who this summer will join the National Science Foundation as assistant director for Computer Science & Information Science and Engineering, says every citizen will need to share this understanding if they are to function in a global society where computer science is anything but dead.
Byron Spice
