39,115 research outputs found
Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science
The Park City Math Institute (PCMI) 2016 Summer Undergraduate Faculty Program
met for the purpose of composing guidelines for undergraduate programs in Data
Science. The group consisted of 25 undergraduate faculty from a variety of
institutions in the U.S., primarily from the disciplines of mathematics,
statistics and computer science. These guidelines are meant to provide some
structure for institutions planning for or revising a major in Data Science
Philosophy of Computer Science: An Introductory Course
There are many branches of philosophy called “the philosophy of X,” where X = disciplines ranging from history to physics. The philosophy of artificial intelligence has a long history, and there are many courses and texts with that title. Surprisingly, the philosophy of computer science is not nearly as well-developed. This article proposes topics that might constitute the philosophy of computer science and describes a course covering those topics, along with suggested readings and assignments
Overcoming the Newtonian Paradigm: The Unfinished Project of Theoretical Biology from a Schellingian Perspective
Defending Robert Rosen’s claim that in every confrontation between physics and biology it is physics that
has always had to give ground, it is shown that many of the most important advances in mathematics
and physics over the last two centuries have followed from Schelling’s demand for a new physics that
could make the emergence of life intelligible. Consequently, while reductionism prevails in biology, many
biophysicists are resolutely anti-reductionist. This history is used to identify and defend a fragmented but
progressive tradition of anti-reductionist biomathematics. It is shown that the mathematicoephysico
echemical morphology research program, the biosemiotics movement, and the relational biology of
Rosen, although they have developed independently of each other, are built on and advance this antireductionist tradition of thought. It is suggested that understanding this history and its relationship to the broader history of post-Newtonian science could provide guidance for and justify both the integration of these strands and radically new work in post-reductionist biomathematics
Contact between laboratory instruments and equations of quantum mechanics
Ambiguity in the contact between laboratory instruments and equations of
quantum mechanics is formulated in terms of responses of the instruments to
commands transmitted to them by a Classical digital Process-control Computer
(CPC); in this way instruments are distinguished from quantum-mechanical models
(sets of equations) that specify what is desired of the instruments. Results
include: (1) a formulation of quantum mechanics adapted to computer-controlled
instruments; (2) a lower bound on the precision of unitary transforms required
for quantum searching and a lower bound on sample size needed to show that
instruments implement a desired model at that precision; (3) a lower bound on
precision of timing required of a CPC in directing instruments; (4) a
demonstration that guesswork is necessary in ratcheting up the precision of
commands.Comment: 19 pages, prepared for SPIE AeroSense 200
Credimus
We believe that economic design and computational complexity---while already
important to each other---should become even more important to each other with
each passing year. But for that to happen, experts in on the one hand such
areas as social choice, economics, and political science and on the other hand
computational complexity will have to better understand each other's
worldviews.
This article, written by two complexity theorists who also work in
computational social choice theory, focuses on one direction of that process by
presenting a brief overview of how most computational complexity theorists view
the world. Although our immediate motivation is to make the lens through which
complexity theorists see the world be better understood by those in the social
sciences, we also feel that even within computer science it is very important
for nontheoreticians to understand how theoreticians think, just as it is
equally important within computer science for theoreticians to understand how
nontheoreticians think
Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications for How We Think
This paper explores the role of the traditional computational metaphor in our thinking as computer scientists, its influence on epistemological styles, and its implications for our understanding of cognition. It proposes to replace the conventional metaphor--a sequence of steps--with the notion of a community of interacting entities, and examines the ramifications of such a shift on these various ways in which we think
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