organizational implications

Similar to a school of medicine, a college of agriculture, or an engineering department, I believe the correct organizational principle for a use-driven research area such as C&I is not common foundations, but shared concerns about the use of C&I systems. The view illustrated in Figure 3 does not imply that each C&I researcher needs to be an expert in all core sciences or application areas. Rather, it implies that C&I researchers with different foundational knowledge and knowledge of different application domains will often need to work together in order to design, implement, and evaluate C&I systems and provide students with the education needed to do so.

The broad, integrated view of C&I is reflected at the NSF in the name of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). It is no surprise these days to find a linguist, anthropologist, or economist in a research lab at Microsoft or Yahoo. Some U.S. universities (including Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Indiana, Michigan, and the University of California at Irvine) are establishing or expanding schools or colleges that bring under one roof computer science, information science, applied informatics (C&I research that is application domain specific) as well as interdisciplinary research and education programs. These universities are still a minority. The broad, inclusive model is common in Japan (University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Osaka University), and is becoming more prevalent in the U.K. (Edinburgh, Manchester).

While organization models will differ from university to university, it is essential that all C&I units on a campus develop an integrative view of their field, and jointly develop coordinated research and education programs. This may require a change of attitude from all involved. Many cognitive and social aspects of system design are not amenable to quantitative studies; however, the engineering culture is often suspicious of social sciences and dismissive of qualitative sciences. Conversely, the importance of prototypes and artifacts is not always well appreciated outside engineering.

We can and
should develop an
environment where
no scientist has an
incentive to withhold
information.

undergraduate curriculum

I discussed in the previous section the increasing variety of C&I research. In addition, there is a tremendous diversification of the professional careers in IT. Less than half of students who graduated in computer science in 1992–1993 were employed in traditional computer science professions 10 years after graduation (compared for 57% in engineering and 69% in health sciences). 4 In many computer science departments, more than half of the students graduating with bachelor’s degrees are hired by companies in finance, services, or manufacturing, not by IT companies; this is where most of the growth in IT jobs is expected to be. 12 The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks a dozen different occupations within computing12 (although its categories are somewhat obsolete). A recent Gartner report20 suggests the IT profession will split into four distinct professions: technology infrastructure and services, information design and management, process design and management, and relationship and sourcing management.

These trends imply an increasing diversification of C&I education. Currently, ABET accredits three different types of computing programs; ACM has developed recommendations for five curricula. Many schools experiment with more varied majors and interdisciplinary programs—in particular, Georgia Tech. 17 This evolution could lead to an increasing balkaniza-tion of our discipline: It is fair to assert that we are still more concerned with differentiating the various programs than defining their common content. In particular, should there be a core common to all programs in C&I?

To clarify: A common core is not about what every student in C&I must know: most of the specific knowledge we teach will be obsolete long before our students reach retirement age. A common core is about C&I “education,”c not about C&I know-how. It is about educating students in ways of thinking and problem solving that characterize our community and differentiate us from other communities: a system view of the world, a focus on mathematical and computational representations of systems, information representation and transformation, and so forth. The selection of courses for the core will not be based (only or mostly) on the usefulness of the facts taught, but on the skills and concepts that are acquired by the students.

I believe such a common core is extremely important: It is, to a large extent, what defines a discipline: You can expect a student of physics to take a sequence of physics courses that start with mechanics and end with quantum physics. This is not necessarily what those students will need in their future careers; but those courses define the physics canon. If we take ourselves seriously as a discipline, we should be able to define the C&I canon. Like physics, this core should be concise—say four courses: A common core does not preclude variety and specialization in junior and senior years.

eating our own Dog food

IT has a profound impact on the way the information economy works. It can and should have a profound impact on the operation of universities that are information enterprises par excellence. The C&I academic community can and should have a major role in pioneering this change. We should be ahead of the curve in using advanced IT in our professional life, and using it in ways that can revolutionize our enterprise. I illustrate the possibilities with a few examples here.

William J. Baumol famously observed that labor productivity of musicians has not increased for centuries: it still takes four musicians to play a string quartet. 2 This has become c “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school”— A. Einstein.