Interview

Steven Cherry: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations.”

In a recent podcast, I was surprised to learn there were 93 000 data scientists registered with Kaggle, the site that creates competitions among them and helps award freelance contracts. I’m not the only one. The article in The Atlantic that brought Kaggle to our attention had a parenthetical exclamation: “Who knew there were that many data scientists in the world!”

Paul Hyman
Winner of the 1971 A.M. Turing Award, John McCarthy was a founder of artificial intelligence and inventor of the Lisp programming language.
The FIELD OF artificial intelligence (AI) was founded at a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956, with John McCarthy as one of its influential attendees. McCarthy subsequently expanded on the notion of logical AI, writing what appears to be the first paper on the topic, “Programs With Common Sense,” in 1958.

Philip L. Frana
The Ch arl es Babb age Instit ute holds one of the world’s largest collections of research- grade oral history interviews relating to the history of computers, software, and networking. Most of the 400 interviews have been conducted in the context of specific research projects, which facilitate the interviewer’s extensive preparation and often suggest specific lines of questions. Transcripts from these oral histories are a key source in understanding the history of computing, since traditional historical sources are frequently incomplete.

Paul Hyman
Colleagues recall the creator of C and codeveloper Unix, an unassuming but brilliant man who enjoyed playing practical jokes on his coworkers.
Of the three giants in the computer industry who passed away last October, Steve Jobs was easily the most recognizable one. And that is exactly how Dennis Ritchie preferred it.
Even though much of today’s digital world is built from tools he created, Ritchie, who authored the C programming language and cocreated Unix with Ken Thompson, never sought the spotlight.

Len Shustek, Editor
In this second of a two-part interview by Edward Feigenbaum, we find Knuth, having completed three volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, drawn to creating a system to produce books digitally.
Don switches gears and for a while and becomes what Ed Feigenbaum calls “The World’s Greatest Programmer.”

Peter J. Denning, Neville Holmes

This e-mail interview with Peter Denning sprang from comments in the October 2010 The Profession column, “The Future of the Computing Profession: Readers’ E-mails” about Denning’s essay, “The Great Principles of Computing” (American Scientist, Sept./Oct. 2010, pp. 369-372).

Computing has its own paradigm, distinct from engineering or science.

To view the relationship between computing and science as a one-way street is mostly untrue today, argues Ian Foster, and will be even less true by 2020.

A growing number of sciences, from atmospheric modelling to genomics, would not exist in their current form if it were not for computers. A simplistic analysis of this relationship focuses on hardware, and sees science as largely a passive beneficiary of the computing industry's relentless innovation, acquiring and applying to its own ends the fastest computers, largest disks and most capable sequencing machines. In this view, science and computing (as an intellectual discipline) have little to say to each other: it is the computer industry that drives the advances that have an impact on science.