Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016

Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016 PDF Author: Peter A. Freeman
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450372740
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
This organizational history relates the role of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the development of modern computing. Drawing upon new and existing oral histories, extensive use of NSF documents, and the experience of two of the authors as senior managers, this book describes how NSF’s programmatic activities originated and evolved to become the primary source of funding for fundamental research in computing and information technologies. The book traces how NSF's support has provided facilities and education for computing usage by all scientific disciplines, aided in institution and professional community building, supported fundamental research in computer science and allied disciplines, and led the efforts to broaden participation in computing by all segments of society. Today, the research and infrastructure facilitated by NSF computing programs are significant economic drivers of American society and industry. For example, NSF supported work that led to the first widely-used web browser, Netscape; sponsored the creation of algorithms at the core of the Google search engine; facilitated the growth of the public Internet; and funded research on the scientific basis for countless other applications and technologies. NSF has advanced the development of human capital and ideas for future advances in computing and its applications. This account is the first comprehensive coverage of NSF's role in the extraordinary growth and expansion of modern computing and its use. It will appeal to historians of computing, policy makers and leaders in government and academia, and individuals interested in the history and development of computing and the NSF.

Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016

Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016 PDF Author: Peter A. Freeman
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450372740
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 433

Get Book Here

Book Description
This organizational history relates the role of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the development of modern computing. Drawing upon new and existing oral histories, extensive use of NSF documents, and the experience of two of the authors as senior managers, this book describes how NSF’s programmatic activities originated and evolved to become the primary source of funding for fundamental research in computing and information technologies. The book traces how NSF's support has provided facilities and education for computing usage by all scientific disciplines, aided in institution and professional community building, supported fundamental research in computer science and allied disciplines, and led the efforts to broaden participation in computing by all segments of society. Today, the research and infrastructure facilitated by NSF computing programs are significant economic drivers of American society and industry. For example, NSF supported work that led to the first widely-used web browser, Netscape; sponsored the creation of algorithms at the core of the Google search engine; facilitated the growth of the public Internet; and funded research on the scientific basis for countless other applications and technologies. NSF has advanced the development of human capital and ideas for future advances in computing and its applications. This account is the first comprehensive coverage of NSF's role in the extraordinary growth and expansion of modern computing and its use. It will appeal to historians of computing, policy makers and leaders in government and academia, and individuals interested in the history and development of computing and the NSF.

Code Nation

Code Nation PDF Author: Michael J. Halvorson
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450377556
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Code Nation explores the rise of software development as a social, cultural, and technical phenomenon in American history. The movement germinated in government and university labs during the 1950s, gained momentum through corporate and counterculture experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, and became a broad-based computer literacy movement in the 1980s. As personal computing came to the fore, learning to program was transformed by a groundswell of popular enthusiasm, exciting new platforms, and an array of commercial practices that have been further amplified by distributed computing and the Internet. The resulting society can be depicted as a “Code Nation”—a globally-connected world that is saturated with computer technology and enchanted by software and its creation. Code Nation is a new history of personal computing that emphasizes the technical and business challenges that software developers faced when building applications for CP/M, MS-DOS, UNIX, Microsoft Windows, the Apple Macintosh, and other emerging platforms. It is a popular history of computing that explores the experiences of novice computer users, tinkerers, hackers, and power users, as well as the ideals and aspirations of leading computer scientists, engineers, educators, and entrepreneurs. Computer book and magazine publishers also played important, if overlooked, roles in the diffusion of new technical skills, and this book highlights their creative work and influence. Code Nation offers a “behind-the-scenes” look at application and operating-system programming practices, the diversity of historic computer languages, the rise of user communities, early attempts to market PC software, and the origins of “enterprise” computing systems. Code samples and over 80 historic photographs support the text. The book concludes with an assessment of contemporary efforts to teach computational thinking to young people.

Probabilistic and Causal Inference

Probabilistic and Causal Inference PDF Author: Hector Geffner
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450395899
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 946

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Book Description
Professor Judea Pearl won the 2011 Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” This book contains the original articles that led to the award, as well as other seminal works, divided into four parts: heuristic search, probabilistic reasoning, causality, first period (1988–2001), and causality, recent period (2002–2020). Each of these parts starts with an introduction written by Judea Pearl. The volume also contains original, contributed articles by leading researchers that analyze, extend, or assess the influence of Pearl’s work in different fields: from AI, Machine Learning, and Statistics to Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences. The first part of the volume includes a biography, a transcript of his Turing Award Lecture, two interviews, and a selected bibliography annotated by him.

Logic, Automata, and Computational Complexity

Logic, Automata, and Computational Complexity PDF Author: Bruce M. Kapron
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Professor Stephen A. Cook is a pioneer of the theory of computational complexity. His work on NP-completeness and the P vs. NP problem remains a central focus of this field. Cook won the 1982 Turing Award for “his advancement of our understanding of the complexity of computation in a significant and profound way.” This volume includes a selection of seminal papers embodying the work that led to this award, exemplifying Cook’s synthesis of ideas and techniques from logic and the theory of computation including NP-completeness, proof complexity, bounded arithmetic, and parallel and space-bounded computation. These papers are accompanied by contributed articles by leading researchers in these areas, which convey to a general reader the importance of Cook’s ideas and their enduring impact on the research community. The book also contains biographical material, Cook’s Turing Award lecture, and an interview. Together these provide a portrait of Cook as a recognized leader and innovator in mathematics and computer science, as well as a gentle mentor and colleague.

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents PDF Author: Birgit Lugrin
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450398979
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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Book Description
The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents;Intelligent Virtual Agents;and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs);whether virtually or physically embodied;are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or other agents;reason;decide how to interact;and express attitudes such as emotions;engagement;or empathy. They are capable of interacting with people and one another in a socially intelligent manner using multimodal communicative behaviors;with the goal to support humans in various domains. Written by international experts in their respective fields;the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs;while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students;and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved. In two volumes;the book clearly structures the vast body of research. The first volume starts by introducing what is involved in SIAs research;in particular research methodologies and ethical implications of developing SIAs. It further examines research on appearance and behavior;focusing on multimodality. Finally;social cognition for SIAs is investigated using different theoretical models and phenomena such as theory of mind or pro-sociality. The second volume starts with perspectives on interaction;examined from different angles such as interaction in social space;group interaction;or long-term interaction. It also includes an extensive overview summarizing research and systems of human–agent platforms and of some of the major application areas of SIAs such as education;aging support;autism;and games.

Democratizing Cryptography

Democratizing Cryptography PDF Author: Rebecca Slayton
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450398286
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
In the mid-1970s, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman invented public key cryptography, an innovation that ultimately changed the world. Today public key cryptography provides the primary basis for secure communication over the internet, enabling online work, socializing, shopping, government services, and much more. While other books have documented the development of public key cryptography, this is the first to provide a comprehensive insiders’ perspective on the full impacts of public key cryptography, including six original chapters by nine distinguished scholars. The book begins with an original joint biography of the lives and careers of Diffie and Hellman, highlighting parallels and intersections, and contextualizing their work. Subsequent chapters show how public key cryptography helped establish an open cryptography community and made lasting impacts on computer and network security, theoretical computer science, mathematics, public policy, and society. The volume includes particularly influential articles by Diffie and Hellman, as well as newly transcribed interviews and Turing Award Lectures by both Diffie and Hellman. The contributed chapters provide new insights that are accessible to a wide range of readers, from computer science students and computer security professionals, to historians of technology and members of the general public. The chapters can be readily integrated into undergraduate and graduate courses on a range of topics, including computer security, theoretical computer science and mathematics, the history of computing, and science and technology policy.

Software

Software PDF Author: Kim W. Tracy
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450387276
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Software history has a deep impact on current software designers, computer scientists, and technologists. System constraints imposed in the past and the designs that responded to them are often unknown or poorly understood by students and practitioners, yet modern software systems often include “old” software and “historical” programming techniques. This work looks at software history through specific software areas to develop student-consumable practices, design principles, lessons learned, and trends useful in current and future software design. It also exposes key areas that are widely used in modern software, yet infrequently taught in computing programs. Written as a textbook, this book uses specific cases from the past and present to explore the impact of software trends and techniques. Building on concepts from the history of science and technology, software history examines such areas as fundamentals, operating systems, programming languages, programming environments, networking, and databases. These topics are covered from their earliest beginnings to their modern variants. There are focused case studies on UNIX, APL, SAGE, GNU Emacs, Autoflow, internet protocols, System R, and others. Extensive problems and suggested projects enable readers to deeply delve into the history of software in areas that interest them most.

Effective Theories in Programming Practice

Effective Theories in Programming Practice PDF Author: Jayadev Misra
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450399746
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
Set theory, logic, discrete mathematics, and fundamental algorithms (along with their correctness and complexity analysis) will always remain useful for computing professionals and need to be understood by students who want to succeed. This textbook explains a number of those fundamental algorithms to programming students in a concise, yet precise, manner. The book includes the background material needed to understand the explanations and to develop such explanations for other algorithms. The author demonstrates that clarity and simplicity are achieved not by avoiding formalism, but by using it properly. The book is self-contained, assuming only a background in high school mathematics and elementary program writing skills. It does not assume familiarity with any specific programming language. Starting with basic concepts of sets, functions, relations, logic, and proof techniques including induction, the necessary mathematical framework for reasoning about the correctness, termination and efficiency of programs is introduced with examples at each stage. The book contains the systematic development, from appropriate theories, of a variety of fundamental algorithms related to search, sorting, matching, graph-related problems, recursive programming methodology and dynamic programming techniques, culminating in parallel recursive structures.

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist PDF Author: James Hendler
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450376150
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
Enterprises have made amazing advances by taking advantage of data about their business to provide predictions and understanding of their customers, markets, and products. But as the world of business becomes more interconnected and global, enterprise data is no long a monolith; it is just a part of a vast web of data. Managing data on a world-wide scale is a key capability for any business today. The Semantic Web treats data as a distributed resource on the scale of the World Wide Web, and incorporates features to address the challenges of massive data distribution as part of its basic design. The aim of the first two editions was to motivate the Semantic Web technology stack from end-to-end; to describe not only what the Semantic Web standards are and how they work, but also what their goals are and why they were designed as they are. It tells a coherent story from beginning to end of how the standards work to manage a world-wide distributed web of knowledge in a meaningful way. The third edition builds on this foundation to bring Semantic Web practice to enterprise. Fabien Gandon joins Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler, bringing with him years of experience in global linked data, to open up the story to a modern view of global linked data. While the overall story is the same, the examples have been brought up to date and applied in a modern setting, where enterprise and global data come together as a living, linked network of data. Also included with the third edition, all of the data sets and queries are available online for study and experimentation at data.world/swwo.

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra PDF Author: Krzysztof R. Apt
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450397743
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930–2002) was one of the most influential researchers in the history of computer science, making fundamental contributions to both the theory and practice of computing. Early in his career, he proposed the single-source shortest path algorithm, now commonly referred to as Dijkstra’s algorithm. He wrote (with Jaap Zonneveld) the first ALGOL 60 compiler, and designed and implemented with his colleagues the influential THE operating system. Dijkstra invented the field of concurrent algorithms, with concepts such as mutual exclusion, deadlock detection, and synchronization. A prolific writer and forceful proponent of the concept of structured programming, he convincingly argued against the use of the Go To statement. In 1972 he was awarded the ACM Turing Award for “fundamental contributions to programming as a high, intellectual challenge; for eloquent insistence and practical demonstration that programs should be composed correctly, not just debugged into correctness; for illuminating perception of problems at the foundations of program design.” Subsequently he invented the concept of self-stabilization relevant to fault-tolerant computing. He also devised an elegant language for nondeterministic programming and its weakest precondition semantics, featured in his influential 1976 book A Discipline of Programming in which he advocated the development of programs in concert with their correctness proofs. In the later stages of his life, he devoted much attention to the development and presentation of mathematical proofs, providing further support to his long-held view that the programming process should be viewed as a mathematical activity. In this unique new book, 31 computer scientists, including five recipients of the Turing Award, present and discuss Dijkstra’s numerous contributions to computing science and assess their impact. Several authors knew Dijkstra as a friend, teacher, lecturer, or colleague. Their biographical essays and tributes provide a fascinating multi-author picture of Dijkstra, from the early days of his career up to the end of his life.