Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 183 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#161

Post by screye »

dbatten wrote: post #70

Secure 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…

Michael Jordan in a recent seminar talked about how they were developing a trade-off parameter that modelled privacy. By treating the trade-off parameter as a knob, you can control the trade-off between data quality and privacy compromise.

Similarly Google has started using methods like federated learning to learn from ML models without ever sending your data to the cloud.

The idea is certainly gathering traction, and it will be very interesting where this is going to from here.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#162

Post by incadenza »

denzil_correa wrote: post #48
Davidbrcz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. Formal verification has been around for 40/50 years and we can't say it is a wide success from a industrial point of view. It has some achievements in terms of results/methods and projects checked, but on a daily basis, pretty much no one uses it. We are ages away of having every programmer understanding formal verification and having all programs verified/proved. Type theory is in a similar situation. Many iss…

> Formal verification has been around for 40/50 years and we can't say it is a wide success from a industrial point of view. It has some achievements in terms of results/methods and projects checked, but on a daily basis, pretty much no one uses it. Formal verification is an essential part of mission critical applications. Therefore, even though they might be few in number - their impact is pretty significant and "wi…

That’s interesting you say that. I’ve known two engineers who worked at JPL and they said that no teams did anything close to formal verification. It’s an incredibly difficult bar to meet

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#163

Post by Tesl »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #102
laken wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the reason why your Spanish was insufficient for his writings is that his writings are in Portuguese ;) Here's his primary English writing on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general (not necessarily blockchain), sent to the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-batsbzx-2016-30/batsbzx20163...

Thanks for pointing out it's Portugese! This critique of Bitcoin is quite short, and seems directed at Bitcoin in particular, in no way do I conclude that he is against the concepts of blockchain (say non-currency), or perhaps even cryptocurrencies that do not take on some of the Ponzi aspects. After reading this I can perfectly imagine (but do not claim so) that he might support certain other forms of blockchains an…

This is his reddit account:

https://www.reddit.com/user/jstolfi

He primarily posts in buttcoin, a sub that exists to mock bitcoiners. It's pretty fair to say he thinks all coins are crap, not just bitcoin.

Also, please include me in the "Understands cryptocurrencies and yet doesn't support it" bucket please :)

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#164

Post by RantyDave »

engi_nerd wrote: post #101
RantyDave wrote: post #43

I 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-levelling_suspension https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6J-QK1lw You don't need AI to keep your car's body level. The technology has been around in various forms for over 60 years. So much of what people believe we need AI for is amenable to classical engineering techniques.

Indeed, couldn't agree more. But quite possibly AI will prove simpler than classical techniques, and more adaptable to i.e. changes in tyre pressure.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#165

Post by sitkack »

neilwilson wrote: post #94
nailer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

88 (taking a stab here as I was pretty young): DTP OO RISC CPUs 'graphics' (as in render farms) 98: Linux, Apache, Mozilla, OSS in general Perceptual audio compression : MP3 (layer3.org, MP3 vs TwinVQ, codecs created during the period before Fraunhofer announced the source code it uploaded to ISO without a license and that people had been working on for free, in fact had a license and everyone owed them 10 grand). 20…

88 OSI network stacks. They were going to replace the 'old' Internet protocols. Relational Databases, SQL and two phase commit. Formal methods and verification.

> Formal methods and verification.

Still emerging.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#166

Post by jacknews »

azhenley wrote: post #78

Human-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.

And within that, Distributed/shared UI.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#167

Post by whazor »

janemanos wrote: post #41
gota wrote: post #12

Process Mining [1]. When I programmed a rather complex logistics simulator at work I told my coworkers 'whoever comes up with a way of instantiating a simulator from data will be praised forever'. Turned out process discovery is a thing (well, one of _the_ things in PM). And there's so much cool stuff to do and being done. I'm now on the last stretch of my doctorate researching the mining of typical plans in non-comp…

Have you ever had a look into analyzing processes with a graph database like e.g. ArangoDB. Wonder if that would make sense for your needs. You can traverse along the processes, find patterns or use distributed graph processing with Pregel analyze from different angels. edit:typo

It is not about the big scale of processes that make process mining interesting. But also the tooling that comes with the field, look for example at the tool Disco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmXZQhFSv10

It provides automatic visualisation of graphs, analysing of bottlenecks, and lots of analytics. While you only need system logs linked to an id.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#168

Post by austinjp »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #66
resiros wrote: post #14

I think most interesting computer science fields are actually application of CS in other domains. Science changed a lot in the last decades, moving from a genius in a room looking at the data and coming up with grand theory to have vast amounts of data that no single human can make sense of. The work of the computer scientist is to quickly understand problems from various fields then solve it using tailor-made algori…

Agreed. CS is the study of translating human needs into formal systems. In a way, it's "applied philosophy". I think taking CS and "bouncing it off" of other disciplines is where the real magic happens.

Fully agree with this. I'm amazed that even in universities and similar organisations, nobody from Dept X wanders into Dept Y and simply asks "I'm working on this problem, anybody got any ideas?"

It happens, but far too rarely.

Universities understand silos. Supervisors get nervous when a student wants or needs to work with another department. There are reasons for this: supervision and grading become hard, and funding applications become complex. But this simply uncovers the depth of the silo effect.

Arts departments are at the vanguard here. You'll be far more likely to find a fashion PhD working with a biologist than you would to find a comp sci PhD working with a lawyer. Perhaps medicine gets it too, but even then it's largely the lab-based stuff like image processing. The clinical and public health worlds are only starting to gain exposure.

That's my experience anyway, hopefully others have counter experiences.

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#169

Post by Davidbrcz »

incadenza wrote: post #162
denzil_correa wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Formal verification has been around for 40/50 years and we can't say it is a wide success from a industrial point of view. It has some achievements in terms of results/methods and projects checked, but on a daily basis, pretty much no one uses it. Formal verification is an essential part of mission critical applications. Therefore, even though they might be few in number - their impact is pretty significant and "wi…

That’s interesting you say that. I’ve known two engineers who worked at JPL and they said that no teams did anything close to formal verification. It’s an incredibly difficult bar to meet

She/He is right and I was a bit cynical in my answer. There are some real industrial projects that used formal methods. I have in mind Airbus with ASTREEE, the Meteor subway system (Paris' subway line 14), Windows' drivers with the SLAM analyzer...

Also, JPL released its model-checker Java PathFinder and hosts every year the Nasa Formal Method conference so I'm pretty confident that at least someone at NASA is interested in formal methods =)

Re: Ask HN: What are the most interesting emerging fields in computer science?

#170

Post by resiros »

tastyham wrote: post #106
resiros wrote: post #14

I think most interesting computer science fields are actually application of CS in other domains. Science changed a lot in the last decades, moving from a genius in a room looking at the data and coming up with grand theory to have vast amounts of data that no single human can make sense of. The work of the computer scientist is to quickly understand problems from various fields then solve it using tailor-made algori…

Nothing in your example is being "leveraged". "Use" is the word you're looking for.

leverage: use (something) to maximum advantage. "the organization needs to leverage its key resources"
Post reply on HN