

The growing data-driven component to computer science - eob
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2010/03/22/data-driven-computer-science/

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lutorm
There's been a lot of talk here about the need for academic researchers to
share their data. I'm interested what people's opinions are about this when
it's corporations doing the researching.

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drats
The pressure to publish is so high, promotions et cetera all rely on it.
Putting together large datasets can be can be costly and time consuming and
the hope is often to get a few publications out of it. I think citations need
to acknowledge datasets more, as do promotions otherwise people will have
large incentives to "silo" vertically and not share. A big issue that has no
excuse is public access to journals though. It's amazing that the public pays
for the research and then pays for it again and again in every library's
subscription to the vampire publishing houses who do nothing other than
distribute a few hardcopies that nobody reads and then gatekeep the pdfs (the
editing and review is all done by academics, so it's just copy and typesetting
that's commanding this huge price). Maths, physics and comp sci are some of
the better disciplines (masters of LaTeX) for making things available online,
but everywhere else it's horrible.

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eru
I hope some of the system biologists are seeing the light. (But that's only
because they are getting colonised by mathematicians.)

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kurtosis
Is CS becoming like particle physics?

They should also mention the very nice recent flow of ideas from theoretical
physics into the field of probabilistic inference:

Many algorithms that make the analysis of these data sets possible either
originate from or are widely used in [particle] physics. Examples include
message-passing, mean-field methods, variational inference, monte-carlo
methods, and many others.

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binarymax
While earning my undergraduate degree in CS/Math there was not a single course
in the CS department that had anything to do with databases. I had to teach
myself. The MIS department had one course that taught some rudimentary stuff
using Access. This was 1996-2000. Has it changed since? By that I mean is it
still common to go to university for CS and not be offered any courses that
teach the basics of RDBMS (or NoSQL)?

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moron4hire
A lot of this is science with computers, not computer science.

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mattrepl
Out of curiosity, what is your definition of computer science?

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Anon84
"Computer science is a funny thing for what we do. It's not a science, and
it's not about computers."

(I forget the author, but I believe it was someone at MIT)

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elcron
I think it was either Hal Abelson or Jerry Sussman in one of the SICP
lectures. <http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/>

