Communications of the ACM
Everything Is Becoming a Branch of Computer Science
The robot lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Department of Computer Science.
Credit: Flickr
Computer science is widening its public appeal as people increasingly realize how it impacts nearly every other field of academic endeavor. And it isn't that computer science is growing up. Instead, the way work is done is developing to catch up with trends in computer science. At the shifting interface of humans and automation technology is an enormous amount of change pushed by IT departments and implemented by savvy users finding their own tools and techniques for work automation. As a result, experts say the workplace needs to be retooled and steps taken to ensure that everyone has a basic knowledge of computer science.
The work we do today isn't just supported by computers as a form of automation. Rather, machines are the new way even traditional work is being accomplished. In marketing, for example, what was once about creative tag lines and elegant prose is now a data-driven, automation-enabled and very much a human-machine system. Where people once ordered retail stock based on hunch, they now routinely use predictive analytics that rely on new sources of data. And this isn't simply an automated task — the buyer must know what the variables are and what data to trust and when. And as quickly as we figure out a better way, an even better way comes along.
From Wired
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