An Explosion of Subparadigms

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subrata Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Computer Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Computing Services ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
University Communities ◽  
Computer Centers ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Manchester

In 1962, purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in the United States opened a department of computer science with the mandate to offer master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science. Two years later, the University of Manchester in England and the University of Toronto in Canada also established departments of computer science. These were the first universities in America, Britain, and Canada, respectively, to recognize a new academic reality formally—that there was a distinct discipline with a domain that was the computer and the phenomenon of automatic computation. There after, by the late 1960s—much as universities had sprung up all over Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries after the founding of the University of Bologna (circa 1150) and the University of Paris (circa 1200)—independent departments of computer science sprouted across the academic maps on North America, Britain, and Europe. Not all the departments used computer science in their names; some preferred computing, some computing science, some computation. In Europe non-English terms such as informatique and informatik were used. But what was recognized was that the time had come to wean the phenomenon of computing away from mathematics and electrical engineering, the two most common academic “parents” of the field; and also from computer centers, which were in the business of offering computing services to university communities. A scientific identity of its very own was thus established. Practitioners of the field could call themselves computer scientists. This identity was shaped around a paradigm. As we have seen, the epicenter of this paradigm was the concept of the stored-program computer as theorized originally in von Neumann’s EDVAC report of 1945 and realized physically in 1949 by the EDSAC and the Manchester Mark I machines (see Chapter 8 ). We have also seen the directions in which this paradigm radiated out in the next decade. Most prominent among the refinements were the emergence of the historically and utterly original, Janus-faced, liminal artifacts called computer programs, and the languages—themselves abstract artifacts—invented to describe and communicate programs to both computers and other human beings.

The Master Synthesizer

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Seifudein Adem
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Secretary General ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Makerere University ◽  
Secondary School Education ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Organization Of African Unity ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Manchester

Ali Mazrui was born in 1933 in Mombasa, Kenya. Sent to England in 1955 for his secondary school education, he remained there until he earned hisB.A. (1960, politics and philosophy) with distinction from the University of Manchester. He received his M.A. (1961, government and politics) and Ph.D. (1966, philosophy) from Columbia and Oxford universities, respectively. In Africa, he taught political science at Uganda’s Makerere University College (1963-73), and then returned to the United States to teach at the University of Michigan (1974-91) and New York’s Binghamton University (1991-2014). An avatar of controversy, Mazrui was also legendary for the fertility of his mind. Nelson Mandela viewed him as “an outstanding educationist” 1 and Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations, referred to him as “Africa’s gift to the world.”2 Salim Ahmed Salim, former secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity and prime minister of Tanzania wrote: Ali Mazrui provided [many of us] with the illuminating light to understand the reality we have been confronting. He armed us with the tools of engagement and inspired us with his eloquence, clarity of ideas while all the time maintaining the highest degree of humility, respect for fellow human beings, and an unflagging commitment to justice.

Glimpses of a Scientific Style

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subrata Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Computer Software ◽  
Doctoral Degree ◽  
Personal Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Computer Hardware ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Manchester

In august 1951, David Wheeler submitted a PhD dissertation titled Automatic Computing with the EDSAC to the faculty of mathematics (D. F. Hartley, personal communication, September 7, 2011) at the University of Cambridge. The year after, in November 1952, another of Maurice Wilkes’s students, Stanley Gill, submitted a thesis titled The Application of an Electronic Digital Computer to Problems in Mathematics and Physics. Wheeler’s was not the first doctoral degree awarded on the subject of computing. That honor must surely go to Herman Hollerith for his thesis submitted to Columbia University in 1890 on his invention of an electrical tabulating system (see Chapter 3, Section IV). Nor was Wheeler’s the first doctoral degree on a subject devoted to electronic computing. In December 1947, Tom Kilburn (codesigner with Frederic C. Williams of the Manchester Mark I [see Chapter 8, Section XIII]) had written a report on the CRT-based memory system he and Williams had developed (but called the Williams tube). This report was widely distributed in both Britain and the United States (and even found its way to Russia), and it became the basis for Kilburn’s PhD dissertation awarded in 1948 by the University of Manchester (S. H. Lavington, personal communication, August 31, 2011). Wheeler’s doctoral dissertation, however, was almost certainly the first on the subject of programming. And one might say that the award of these first doctoral degrees in the realm of computer “hardware” (in Kilburn’s case) and computer “software” (in Wheeler’s case) made the invention and design of computers and computing systems an academically respectable university discipline. As we have witnessed before in this story, establishing priority in the realm of computing is a murky business, especially at the birth of this new discipline. Thus, if by “computer science” we mean the study of computers and the phenomena surrounding computers (as three eminent computer scientists Allan Newell, Alan Perlis (1922–1990), and Herbert Simon suggested in 1967), then—assuming we agree on what “computers” are—the boundary between hardware and soft ware, between the physical computer and the activity of computing, dissolves.

The Master Synthesizer

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Seifudein Adem
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Secretary General ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Makerere University ◽  
Secondary School Education ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Organization Of African Unity ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Manchester

Ali Mazrui was born in 1933 in Mombasa, Kenya. Sent to England in 1955 for his secondary school education, he remained there until he earned hisB.A. (1960, politics and philosophy) with distinction from the University of Manchester. He received his M.A. (1961, government and politics) and Ph.D. (1966, philosophy) from Columbia and Oxford universities, respectively. In Africa, he taught political science at Uganda’s Makerere University College (1963-73), and then returned to the United States to teach at the University of Michigan (1974-91) and New York’s Binghamton University (1991-2014). An avatar of controversy, Mazrui was also legendary for the fertility of his mind. Nelson Mandela viewed him as “an outstanding educationist” 1 and Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations, referred to him as “Africa’s gift to the world.”2 Salim Ahmed Salim, former secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity and prime minister of Tanzania wrote: Ali Mazrui provided [many of us] with the illuminating light to understand the reality we have been confronting. He armed us with the tools of engagement and inspired us with his eloquence, clarity of ideas while all the time maintaining the highest degree of humility, respect for fellow human beings, and an unflagging commitment to justice.

scholarly journals The academic productivity and impact of the University of Toronto Neurosurgery Program as assessed by manuscripts published and their number of citations

2015 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 561-570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Lozano ◽  
Joseph Tam ◽  
Abhaya V. Kulkarni ◽  
Andres M. Lozano
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Published Data ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Gini Coefficients ◽  
Academic Activity ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Number Of Publications ◽  
The University ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact

OBJECT Recent works have assessed academic output across neurosurgical programs using various analyses of accumulated citations as a proxy for academic activity and productivity. These assessments have emphasized North American neurosurgical training centers and have largely excluded centers outside the United States. Because of the long tradition and level of academic activity in neurosurgery at the University of Toronto, the authors sought to compare that program's publication and citation metrics with those of established programs in the US as documented in the literature. So as to not rely on historical achievements that may be of less relevance, they focused on recent works, that is, those published in the most recent complete 5-year period. METHODS The authors sought to make their data comparable to existing published data from other programs. To this end, they compiled a list of published papers by neurosurgical faculty at the University of Toronto for the period from 2009 through 2013 using the Scopus database. Individual author names were disambiguated; the total numbers of papers and citations were compiled on a yearly basis. They computed a number of indices, including the ih(5)-index (i.e., the number of citations the papers received over a 5-year period), the summed h-index of the current faculty over time, and a number of secondary measures, including the ig(5), ie(5), and i10(5)-indices. They also determined the impact of individual authors in driving the results using Gini coefficients. To address the issue of author ambiguity, which can be problematic in multicenter bibliometric analyses, they have provided a source dataset used to determine the ih(5) index for the Toronto program. RESULTS The University of Toronto Neurosurgery Program had approximately 29 full-time surgically active faculty per year (not including nonneurosurgical faculty) in the 5-year period from 2009 to 2013. These faculty published a total of 1217 papers in these 5 years. The total number of citations from these papers was 13,434. The ih(5)-index at the University of Toronto was 50. CONCLUSIONS On the basis of comparison with published bibliometric data of US programs, the University of Toronto ranks first in terms of number of publications, number of citations, and ih(5)-index among neurosurgical programs in North America and most likely in the world.

Disaster Scenarios

2030 ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rutger van Santen ◽  
Djan Khoe ◽  
Bram Vermeer
Keyword(s):  
Volcanic Eruptions ◽  
Early Warning Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Warning Systems ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Tidal Waves ◽  
University Of Technology ◽  
Chinese Coast ◽  
The University

A hurricane striking the Chinese coast is ten times as lethal as one hitting the United States. The number of U.S. victims is limited because of better precautions, warning systems, and evacuation methods. More effective observation and communication can save lives. A century ago, hurricanes killed around 7,000 Americans every year, whereas nowadays there are only very few hurricanes of the lethality of Katrina. That progress has yet to reach every corner of Earth, says Guus Berkhout regretfully. This Dutch geophysicist has immersed himself in the mechanisms of disasters and disaster prevention since the beginning of his scientific career—first as professor of seismic imaging and later as professor of innovation at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. We talked to him at the university campus that lies 3 meters below sea level. At his laboratory, Berkhout analyzes the early warning systems and contingency plans that will be needed to protect both his lab and his compatriots. “We can’t stop earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, or tidal waves from happening,” he stresses. “And we may never be able to predict hurricanes or earthquakes with sufficient accuracy. Nor can we hope to prevent people from living in dangerous places. They are simply too attractive.” Human beings indeed seem addicted to living on the edge of catastrophe. The World Bank has calculated that a fifth of all countries are under permanent threat of natural disaster, with some 3.4 billion people—roughly half the world’s population—at heightened risk of being killed by one. Yet unsafe regions are often exceptionally popular places to live and work, one reason being that floodplains and the slopes of volcanoes are highly fertile. The climate is milder along the coast, the soil better, and transport more efficient than farther inland. Even the likelihood of earthquakes isn’t enough to persuade people to live elsewhere, as witnessed by some of the most densely populated areas of California and Japan. Current migration trends—moving to where the action is—suggest that the proportion of people living in unsafe areas will only increase.

A Comparative Study on Undergraduate Computer Science Education between China and the United States

2015 ◽  
pp. 918-933
Author(s):  
Eric P. Jiang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Education ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Computer Science Education ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
The United States ◽  
Education Systems ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Computer Scientists

With the rapid growth of the Internet and telecommunication networks, computer technology has been a driving force in global economic development and in advancing many areas in science, engineering, health care, business, and finance that carry significant impacts on people and society. As a primary source for producing the workforce of software engineers, computer scientists and information technology specialists, computer science education plays a particularly important role in modern economic growth and it has been invested heavily in many countries around the world. This chapter provides a comparative study of undergraduate computer science programs between China and the United States. The study focuses on the current curricula of computer science programs. It in part is based on the author's direct observation from his recent visits to several universities in China and the conversations he had with administrators and faculty of computer science programs at the universities. It is also based on the author's over two decades experience as a computer science educator at several public and private American institutions of higher educations. The education systems in China and the United States have different features and each of the systems has its strengths and weaknesses. This is likely also true for education systems in other countries. It would be an interesting and important task for us to explore an innovative computer science education program, which perhaps blends the best features of different systems and helps better prepare graduates for the challenges working in an increasingly globalized world. We hope the study presented in this chapter provides some useful insights in this direction.

scholarly journals In Memoriam: RAYMOND REITER June 12, 1939 – September 16, 2002

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. i-ix
Author(s):  
Jack Minker
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Knowledge Representation ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Theorem Proving ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Research Scientist ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
The World ◽  
In Memoriam ◽  
The University

Raymond Reiter, Professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and winner of the 1993 – IJCAI Outstanding Research Scientist Award, died September 16, 2002, after a year-long struggle with cancer. Reiter, known throughout the world as “Ray,” made foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and databases, and theorem proving.

scholarly journals Toward Our Reformation

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 101-104
Author(s):  
David L. Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
University Of Tennessee ◽  
Rubber Stamp ◽  
P 16 ◽  
The University ◽  
Abuse Of Women

Understandably, Muslims tend to bristle at the common quip by non-Muslims (especially in the West) that Islam is badly in need of a “Reformation” – referring to the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation that, despite the violence it unleashed in Europe for the next two centuries, did actually engender some positive changes within the Catholic church. No people, regardless of who they are or where they live, like outsiders telling them that they need to set their house in order. This book, by contrast, is written by an insider telling other insiders (Muslims) that Islamic law needs serious revamping, a weighty charge indeed. The author faces an extra hurdle based on the fact that he does not belong to the traditional ulama class, the gatekeepers of Islamic jurisprudence. Farooq earned a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Tennessee, taught in the United States for over a decade, and now heads the Bahrain Institute for Banking and Finance’s Centre for Islamic Finance. Rashid Rida would have said in his day that Farooq represents the new face of the ulama: one well versed in many aspects of the Islamic sciences and yet, because of his parallel expertise in the modern sciences, one who could provide indispensable guidance to society in the name of Islam. Why does Islam need a reformation? Much of the book seeks to expose the abuse, misapplication, and distortion of the Shari‘ah committed by states and individual ulama alike, for it “is being used to rubber stamp extremist, violent behavior, the abuse of women, and the unfair control and imprisonment of human beings” (p. 16). Speaking of South Asia in particular, he writes that the following are “prevalent”: “[t]he torture and persecution of brides over their dowry, the throwing of acid onto girls who do not either want to accept a proposal of marriage or to concede to extramarital sex, the practice of honor killings and so on …” (p. 86) ...  

Defining Whiteness: Race, Class, and Gender Perspectives in North American History

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 203-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Carstairs
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
International Labor ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Gender Perspectives ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The University

African-American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Ida B. Wells have regarded “whiteness” as a problem for a long time. However, it is only fairly recently that white historians have taken seriously the importance of de-naturalizing “whiteness,” and critically examining its privileges. “Defining Whiteness: Race, Class, and Gender Perspectives in North American History,” was sponsored by the University of Toronto and York History Departments, the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the Centre for Ethnic and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto, with the cooperation of International Labor and Working-Class History and the Canadian Committee on Labour History and its journal Labour/Le Travail. Conference organizers invited several leading American scholars of “whiteness” to Toronto, where they, along with a number of Canadian scholars, presented papers on the ways that whiteness has been constructed in North America. The conference contained much to interest labor historians and those interested in class/race/gender analytical frameworks.

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