Distinguished Speaker Series: Jeannette Wing

Starts: November 9, 2007 at 3:00 PM
Location: McGlothlin-Street 020

Summary

Computational Thinking

Full Description

Jeannette M. Wing
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University

My vision for the 21st Century: Computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. The two A's to computational thinking are abstraction and automation. Thinking like a computer scientist means thinking at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously; and it is the the automation of our abstractions that gives us the ability and audacity to scale. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science.

Biography

Dr. Jeannette M. Wing is the President's Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her S.B. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1979 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1983, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Currently on leave from CMU, she is the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

Professor Wing's general research interests are in the areas of specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, and programming languages. Her current focus is on the foundations of trustworthy computing.

Professor Wing was or is on the editorial board of ten journals, including the Journal for the ACM. She has been a member of many advisory boards, including: the Networking and Information Technology (NITRD) Technical Advisory Group to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Tecbnology (PCAST), the National Academies of Sciences's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, ACM Council, the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Board, NSF's CISE Advisory Committee, Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, and the Intel Research Pittsburgh's Advisory Board. She is a member of the Sloan Research Fellowships Program Committee. She is a member of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. Professor Wing is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow.