Wide-scale adoption and promotion of open source software in the industry (e.g. Microsoft, Facebook, Google)
Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
71–80 of 183 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#72Secure Multi-party Computation. The basic idea is developing methods for two (or more) parties with sensitive data to be able to compute some function of their data without having to reveal the data to one another. The classic example is developing an algorithm that allows two people to figure out who is paid more without either revealing what their salary is. Such algorithms get significantly more complicated if the…
This is a big deal.
If we can find ways to perform secure, multi-party computation, we could develop fully distributed computational, networking, and power delivery systems.
Your solar roof tiles could be, basically, CPUs or GPUs with embedded wireless networking.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#73I am certain there will be an emerging field in AI for engineering. Suspension that 'learns' how to keep the car flat; buildings that start shuffling warm air from a to b before it's needed ... things like that. Programming is going to change from "explain how to do it" to "show it what you want", and this has got to be a big deal.
I'm not convinced: are you an engineer? To your first example, the Bose suspension doesn't use AI and is already as good as it can get. HVAC already works well and 90% of the time the air is kept at the same temperature +/- a few degrees.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
No progress in language theory can fix the fundamental problem of software verification: you need a formal specification to have anything to verify. Who wants to write not only a detailed spec for their code, but a spec that has well defined semantics in some kind of logic? Nobody, that's who. There are very few properties that you care about that are both sufficiently easy to encode in a formal specification and not…
In the logical extreme that can't be the case, because a fully debugged program plus a machine to run it on actually satisfy the definition of a formal specification. Deciding what you want your program to do is the eternal burden of programming, but maybe there's a way to make formal specification at least as easy as regular programming.
But then you already have a perfect implementation that you somehow made without the use of formal verification. But you want to introduce formal verification because translating real-world requirements into a formal language is hard enough that you can't be sure of correctness...
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#75Graphical models[0] & probabilistic programming[1], with the latter making it easier for developers to dive into this growing AI trend. Research in the field for the past decade has been steadily booming with more companies like Microsoft leading the way. I recommend checking out some MOOCs[2] in coursera.
[0]http://www.computervisionblog.com/2015/04/deep-learning-vs-p...
[1]http://probabilistic-programming.org/wiki/Home
[2]https://www.coursera.org/specializations/probabilistic-graph...
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#76Homomorphic encryption is a mind-blower. But I fear that we may never see it in it's fullest glory. It's going to be computationally too expensive or too impractical for reason or another. One can still hope.
Quantum computation gives your homomorphic encryption for free so there is some hope in a quantum-inspired algorithm.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#77Secure Multi-party Computation. The basic idea is developing methods for two (or more) parties with sensitive data to be able to compute some function of their data without having to reveal the data to one another. The classic example is developing an algorithm that allows two people to figure out who is paid more without either revealing what their salary is. Such algorithms get significantly more complicated if the…
Has zero-knowledge proofs at its core as far as I know. Only a handful of universities teach it even. This was helpful when I was grazing the surface of MPC : https://github.com/rdragos/awesome-mpc
This video course too : https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~mp/crypto/mpc2017/
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#78Human-computer interaction. The field is not new but the way people interact with computers has drastically changed in the last ten years and will probably continue to do so.
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#79I don’t know for sure, but I certainly hope we’ll see some fresh thinking about user interface design and construction. The past couple of decades seem to have been substantially about recapitualating what came before in the web browser, and while webification has it’s good sides (easier deployment), the actual interfaces for data-entry type tasks still seem as clunky as ever.
AR is potentially an interesting sub-field, but doesn’t seem to be the answer for everything (e.g. those form-like data entry tools...)
Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?
#80I don’t know for sure, but I certainly hope we’ll see some fresh thinking about user interface design and construction. The past couple of decades seem to have been substantially about recapitualating what came before in the web browser, and while webification has it’s good sides (easier deployment), the actual interfaces for data-entry type tasks still seem as clunky as ever. AR is potentially an interesting sub-fie…
I think UI progress is unlikely without good AI, and good AI has to be much better than human to be passable.
(If you're not convinced, try watching how often you have to ask your fellow humans what they meant by a communication and/or a request for information. It's probably more often than you expect - but you give fellow humans a pass because you're used to it, and so are they.)
Either that, or personal data has to stored in a central server so it can be accessed on demand by web apps - which would eliminate a lot of web forms, but would have uncomfortable political and social implications.
There's still room to improve form-based pages, because there's still far too little research into best practice. But forms are an efficient way to collect information, so it's hard to imagine a secure and private UI paradigm that would eliminate them altogether.