There is an article in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that gives a nice overview of the current push to make significant improvements to the internet. Lots of things could be better. Lots of things were not anticipated when the internet was designed 30 years ago.I especially like the quote that closes the article, from Jennifer Rexford of Princeton’s CS Department:

‘People built buildings before there was civil engineering. But a lot of them fell down. Eventually, out of those experiences, people developed principles that allowed for sound construction. We’re sort of at the same point with the Internet. We’ve learned a huge amount. Now there’s a need to go to the next level. The Internet has become so important that the stakes are a lot higher. We need a sound foundation so we can build networks that are worthy of society’s trust.’

This gets at something I often tell students who are interested in computer science: I believe we are much closer to the beginning than the end of the era of new and important and interesting computer science opportunities.

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The April 2007 edition of Communications of the ACM has an interesting article by Jenova Chen titled ‘Flow in Games (and Everything Else)’. (If you have access to the ACM Digital Library you can read the article here). Chen describes how game designers seek to transport users into their personal ‘Flow Zones’, where the players get totally immersed in a challenging, pleasurable experience. Similar principals of Flow theory from psychology and video game design apply to any interactive system, and perhaps to almost any experience. In fact, what struck me about the article was that the eight characteristics of Flow that are listed sound like an advertisement for why designing and implementing software can be so much fun.

Here’s the list (taken from Csikszentmihalyi, 1990):

• A challenging activity requiring skill;
• A merging of action and awareness;
• Clear goals;
• Direct, immediate feedback;
• Concentration on the task at hand;
• A sense of control;
• A loss of self-consciousness; and
• An altered sense of time.

I think one of the coolest things about being a computer scientist is that you get to be in the flow not only when you are playing a game, but while you are solving important problems and creating things that will help people.

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VT CS alumni are all over, doing all kinds of interesting things. It’s fun to hear from some of them from time to time. For example, I ran into Caitlin Kelleher (BS, 1998) at a conference this summer. She has just finished her PhD at CMU where she was one of the major contributors to the <a href=’http://www.alice.org/’>Alice</a> project. Her dissertation work focused on better ways to introduce middle school girls to programming. This <a href=’http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/nov2006/id20061107_196348.htm’>BusinessWeek article</a> contains a nice summary of what Caitlin has been up to.

Another VT CS graduate who is doing well in graduate school is Megan Olsen (BS, 2005). Megan was recently awarded a prestigious <a href=’http://www.umass.edu/loop/talkingpoints/articles/33818.php’>scholarship</a> from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and Google Inc. She is working in the area of biologically inspired computation at the University of Massachusetts

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It’s not just about jobs. Ideally, you study and do something you love. But for most people, job prospects are part of the equation too when you are choosing a major — especially if mom or dad is paying the tuition bill.

Which is why those of is in the CS profession are mystified over the widespread belief that there aren’t any jobs in this field. The rumor is either that CS is old news (all the jobs went poof in the dot.com bust) or CS jobs have all been outsourced to Bangalore or Beijing. Talk about your false rumors. If you decide to avoid CS for these reasons, you’re just not paying attention in my opinion. Lots of flaky companies did disappear in the dot.com bust. But there are all kinds of new, more subtantial companies that have arisen since then. And IT is growing like crazy in India and China and lots of other places, no question. But there is absolutely no shortage of interesting and profitable opportunities in the U.S. for people in CS. (More on that in future posts.)

There have been lots of news item recently that are starting to correct this mis-conception. Here’s one from last week. And there are several more at the CS department ‘Why CS?’ FAQ page. But here’s a close-to-home statistic that you won’t get anywhere else: in the first 25 class days of this semester, we forwarded 21 job announcements to our undergraduate email list. I don’t know exactly how many students we are going to graduate with B.S. degrees this year — probably somewhere around 125 — but at the rate things are going right now, there will easily be more jobs than people. Lots more jobs infact, when you remember that several of these employers are looking to hire several students.

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Right up front, let’s be clear about my editorial position: I think CS is an incredibly compelling and exiting discipline and I think the VT CS department is a great place to work and study. Since I’ve been drawing a paycheck from the department since 1987, I’m not exactly impartial on this topic. But maybe my ramblings will be useful to some of you who are thinking about studying CS at VT. Or maybe it will prompt an interesting discussion about the dynamics in our field today. Or maybe it will provide deep meaning and answer the great mysteries of life. Or not.

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This is the blog for the Department of Computer Science. This blog is an informal place to ramble and rant about things in the department, the college, the university, and the discipline. For now, it will be mostly a few faculty doing the postings. As this experiment gets underway, we’ll probably invite a couple of students to get involved as well. Usual disclaimer — our posts are just our own humble opinions. They don’t represent anything or anyone official.

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Welcome to the VT CS BLOG. What’s the point? Mostly this is just a place to ramble about computer science, and especially computer science at Virginia Tech. The CS Department’s website includes the usual summary of recent department news — a little dry, but accurate and useful as a snapshot of what’s going on. This blog is a much more informal place to rant about things in the CS department, the college, the university, the discipline and the field. A few of us faculty types will be posting mostly. We’ll probably invite a couple of students to get involved eventually as well. Usual disclaimer — our posts are just our own humble opinions. They don’t represent anything or anyone official.

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