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.