It's about clarity of thought I think that's really the key.
And in the same way you wanna have clarity in the thoughts that
you can convey in your writing, is the same way you want to
have clarity in your thoughts in conveying them to a computer via a computer program.
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In computer science, there's a couple different areas I'm involved in.
The main one being computer science education which is how do you actually get
students to understand computing.
How do you put together curriculum that would motivate students to really wanna go
into the discipline, and for them to understand how computing relates to other
things, both in their lives, other disciplines, how they can really impact
the world through computer science, and make that appealing and attractive.
And then, the other, sort of the more technical portion of where I spend my time
is on a sub-area of artificial intelligence called machine learning,
which is about data analysis and building models for things like prediction or
understanding a domain.
And things get really fun when you begin to put those together.
So, how can you use data analysis techniques to understand how people learn?
So you can make learning experiences better for them.
When your building models of a domain or when your trying to do some kind of data
analysis or build a computational model, its often easy to think its
just about the mathematics or just about the algorithm and in fact.
What it's most important is to convey to other people what is
this model trying to tell you, what is the insight we are getting and
also explain the methods that other people can use it.
I've actually seen some cases of extremely powerful computational techniques which
even after they in, were invented took years to catch on.
And part of the reason why they took that long to catch on was the people who
invented them did not do a good job of explaining to others or writing about them
to really show what the power of those methods were, the circumstances in
which they could be used, how they would be appropriately harnessed.
And so as a result, it took years until someone else who really had the writing
and communication skills came along to take that information, digest it, and
then present it in a way that more people can understand it,
that the real value of those techniques were sorta appreciated by the community.
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Think about all the cases where you get some initial reaction to something and
over time your thought process revisits it, and you gather more information and
you're better able to clarify your opinions or your thought about something.
That in terms of clarity of thought is the same thing I believe that goes on in
the writing process.
If one per, if someone just puts down the first thing that comes into their head,
and after they've gotten a certain amount of text written down, there's a period and
that's the end of it.
There isn't that process going on of trying to really revise and
clarify one's thinking and bring in new information as relevant to dig deeper
into the issue at hand, to really understand it better.
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I mean if you look at some of the issues wer are confronting right now,
things like cyber security, things like intellectual property and ownership.
And a lot of these topics have really emerged in the last few years in
the field of computing, but they're argued by people in the fields of law,
and public policy, and political science.
Computing is becoming a substrate for work in many other fields, and
so part of that is to really make progress significantly in other fields.
Computer scientists need to be able to talk, to communicate, to write,
in an understandable way for people in other fields.
And in turn to be able to understand the things that they, that are being written
in other fields, in some sense, that are directed towards computer scientists.
Because it is that kind of cross-disciplinary
work which involves cross-disciplinary communication that
really allows us to make progress in the boundary of these fields.
So, I think it's getting increasingly important for
computer scientist to be able to talk to people outside of their field.
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Really think about how you can communicate your ideas to someone else, and
have real clarity of thinking.
So, in the same way that we think about writing a computer program as having
sufficient clarity in your thinking to be able to explain what you want done
in detail to a computer, so that a computer could execute it which is,
has to be extremely clear and extremely precise.
Can you bring that same kind of clarity to your the presentations you make,
the communication you have with other people?
Can you make your writing that clear?
That the message that you're trying to convey is really that unambiguous and
understandable by someone else.
And at the end of the day, why do we write?
Why do we speak?
Is because there ideas and things that we feel are important,
that we want to convey to someone else.
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