Computer Science is Changing Everything
I think the 19th century was about the Industrial
Revolution, about electricity, about disrupting the agricultural society and making it more advanced.
The 20th century was about physics and engineering to do more things easier in
our everyday life from refrigerators to washing machines.
And the 21st century is definitely the digital age. It's the Internet.
Even if you want to become a race car driver or play
baseball or build a house, all of these things have been turned upside down by software.
AGRICULTURE
The lettucebot is a robot that can sense its environment.
Every single hour this lettucebot is seeing 1.5 million plants, and it's taking individual action
on those plants.
We enable lettuce growers to have higher yields in their field by helping
make it cheaper, by helping produce food in a more sustainable way, and that wasn't previously
possible without computer science and technology.
FASHION
I have a really fun job where we build Polyvore,
which kind of combines all my favorite things, so programming, as well
as fashion, art, design, and shopping!
Half the products you use these days are software
products that you play with on your phone and so if you want to build something cool
you need to know programming.
There's so many things you can do with computer science so
if you just work backwards from the cool thing you want to build and you figure out what
that is, a lot of times computer programming is part of that.
So you should learn this skill.
MEDICINE
It's really exciting right now, the technology that we're developing
right now is going to be used by your doctor in the next decade.
When you come into the
office and you're sick, the doctor is going to ask you to spit in this cup.
I will put
it into this magic machine which is a sequencer and in an hour I can tell you what you have
or what's wrong with you.
So if we're looking for a new virus, for example, we'll download
a database of all the viruses that are known.
We'll search for our sequence of interest
against a whole database of all viruses.
So you still need somebody to analyze the data;
the computer is not smart enough yet.
ENERGY
Our software helps people save energy
and thereby reduce their carbon emissions.
To date, we've saved over 8 terawatt hours,
which is the equivalent of about 1.1 million cars on the road.
When you're forecasting
the wind there are so many different parameters that go into it, it would be impossible for
a human to sit down and do all those calculations.
We need a computer model in order to forecast it.
PUBLIC SAFETY
I write software which scans images--looking for bad images, images that we know are illegal.
I work very closely with organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
I know that the work that we've done has impacted the life of people, and I feel very strongly
about it because there are a lot of social problems right now that could really leverage
the use of technology.
It's a lot about empowering the people who are there helping the world by giving them
the tools to be able to do better.
That's something that we can do right now and the tools available are huge.
ART AND ENTERTAINMENT
The merging of art and technology
is getting more and more significant now.
Because computers and software are such an
integral part of our lives day to day, people are realizing that it can be quite creative
to take this medium of computers and create incredible works of art.
In Finding Nemo,
when Crush and Squirt and all their friends are flying through the East Australian Current,
you're seeing images of water flowing by, you're seeing the colors on the back of the
turtle, you're seeing the sides of the fish, all of those things are generated through
math and computer programs that we write that we then give to the artist and they take that
to create that final image and to tweak it and make it look beautiful and look fun.
The crux of it is really about invention.
It's about looking at the world and being dissatisfied
with things and questioning everything.
I always felt like if I didn't learn how to
program it would be like not learning how to read.
The future would just be closed to me.
If you're in the coding profession, there's so many things that you can do and you can
pretty much pick and choose the course you want to be in.
Think that you can start something
in your college dorm room and you can have a set of people who haven't built a big company
before come together and build something that a billion people use as part of their daily
lives is just crazy to think about.
It's really humbling and amazing.
Really it's about the
chance to reinvent things and see it out there in the world and see people using it
and having fun or having a better life because of something that wasn't there before that
you put in the world.
Learn computer science. It's changing everything.