Speaker: Dr. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
                University of North Carolina
                 Member of National Academy of Engineering

Title: The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith

Date and Time: March 8, 2004, 3:00-4:30PM
Place: E130 Howe-Russell Building, LSU
Reception: Howe-Russell Lobby, 2:00-3:00PM-March 8, 2004

 

Abstract:

Computer Science is a discipline misnamed-we do not study nature; we make things. Mostly, we make things for people to use as tools. I don't propose renaming, but want to raise conscious mental defenses against the subconscious attitudes engendered by thinking of ourselves as scientists. The most important of these defenses are a continual focus on our users and a continual evaluation of our progress by their successes.
Making things has its own glories and joys, and they are different from those of the mathematician and those of the scientist. We need to reflect together on these in a fundamental way.

Computer graphics has been seen as a left-handed stepchild of computer science. My own view of computer science sees it as a discipline focused on problem-solving systems. In this view computer graphics is very near the center of the discipline. Looking at problem-solving systems, we have seen the salutary evolution of two polar positions toward a common median: computer graphics has increasingly adopted more and more of the techniques called artificial intelligence: artificial intelligence has increasingly moved away from autonomous computer systems to human-aiding and human-guided systems.

If the computer scientist is a toolsmith, fashioning power tools and amplifiers for minds, we must partner with those who will use our tools, those whose intelligences we hope to amplify. Inter-disciplinary collaboration over the last thirty years has been an exciting experience. It also has some inherent costs, which one should intentionally decide whether to pay; and some inherent pitfalls.

The magic of computer graphics gives us a creative medium of a totally new kind. We can sub-create worlds that show us new truth from our own world through scientific visualization, and new excellence, new beauty, flowing directly from our imaginations. What comes out of a human imagination depends upon the condition of the heart. If we would have our creations be true, beautiful, and good, we must attend to our hearts.

About the Speaker:

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., is Kenan Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was an architect of the IBM Stretch and Harvest computers. He was Corporate Project Manager for the System/360, including development of the System/360 computer family hardware, and the Operating System/360 software. He founded the Department of Computer Science in 1964 and chaired it for 20 years. His research there has been in computer architecture, software engineering, and interactive 3-D computer graphics ("virtual reality"). His best-known books are The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, and Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution (with G.A. Blaauw, 1997). Dr. Brooks has received the National Medal of Technology, the Bower Award and Prize of the Franklin Institute, the John von Neumann Medal of the IEEE, and the Allen Newell, Turing, and Distinguished Service awards of the ACM. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a member of National Academy of Engineering.

Dr. Brooks is the first recipient of the prestigious ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, which is presented annually to an individual selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. Dr. Brooks was honored for a breadth of career contributions within computer science and engineering and for his interdisciplinary contributions to visualization methods for biochemistry. This talk is an extension of his acceptance lecture of the Allen Newell Award in 1994, and the text of the lecture was published in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 39, No. 3 (March 1996), pp. 61-68.