Recently, professor Dennis Shasha from New York University, visited the University of Nicosia as a guest of the Computer Science Department, AI Lab. He talked about “The Changing Nature of Invention in Computer Science”.
You can watch the Video following the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY5l2SBPnAc
The abstract of the talk is the following:
What drives inventions in computing?
Necessity seems to play only a minor role.
Anger at the way things are is much more powerful, because it
leads to easier ways to work (the invention of new computer languages).
A general dissatisfaction with the practical or theoretical structure
of the world can open up whole new approaches to problems
(complexity theory and cryptography).
Finally, a genuine collaboration between people and machines can lead to
an entirely new kind of engineering for devices that will travel to far-off
planets or to hostile environments.
The talk will discuss the work of several inventors in computing and
engineering, their inventions, and how they came up with them
and how they plan to come up with more in the future.
The ensuing discussion will address the fundamental nature of invention
in a world partly populated by intelligent machines.