Skip to ContentGo to accessibility pageKeyboard shortcuts menu
OpenStax Logo
Introduction to Computer Science

Summary

Introduction to Computer ScienceSummary

Summary

1.1 Computer Science

  • Computer science is pervasive in our daily lives, business and industry, scientific research and development, and social change.
  • Computer science (CS) is the study of computing, which includes all phenomena related to computers, such as the Internet. With foundations in engineering and mathematics, computer science focuses on studying algorithms, which are instructions that enable computing. This includes computer hardware and software and the way these are used to process information. Three perspectives on computers include the hardware perspective, software perspective, and theoretical perspective. These perspectives each emphasize different aspects of computation, and they’re often centered in undergraduate computer science because of the history of computer science, but there are other perspectives on computer science.
  • People have used computer science to advance many more diverse goals beyond making war or making money. Computing was imagined as: a new medium for helping people learn everything; a new technology that could enable anti-racism; a means of enabling global development for peoples across the world. Yet these visions and promises are still taking hold in a world largely focused on the dominant history of computer science.

1.2 Computer Science across the Disciplines

  • By contributing tools and resources to handle tasks and improve operations, computer science enables many other fields and areas of research or development.
  • Data science is an interdisciplinary field that applies computing to managing data and extracting information from data. Many millions of people engage in data science work by using spreadsheets. Still, data science also often emphasizes larger-scale problems involving big data that are hard to manage using spreadsheets alone.
  • Computational science refers to applying computing concepts and technologies to advance scientific research and practical applications of science knowledge. Computer science’s emphasis on creating things can help other sciences by, for example, contributing new models or simulations that can enable the discovery of new kinds of scientific knowledge previously inaccessible to scientists.
  • Information science is an interdisciplinary field studying information technologies and systems as they relate to people, organizations, and societies. As computing is now so central to information management and information exchange, information science has significant overlap with computer science. Still, it tends to emphasize the social value of information, whereas computer science has (historically) emphasized algorithms and computation over people or information.
  • Today, computer science is an interdisciplinary field that contributes to all other fields. Effective computational solutions to research or business problems require combining domain-specific knowledge with computer science concepts from a combination of areas.

1.3 Computer Science and the Future of Society

  • Computer science is shaping the future of society. There are three ways in which computer science can shape the future of society: developing foundational technologies, evaluating negative consequences of technologies, and designing technologies for social good.
  • As one example of developing foundational technologies, computer science’s rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies (and the current trend around neural networks) has enabled many new applications like image recognition. These developments often do not occur in isolation: the popular use of neural networks, for example, depended on new computer architectures and advancements in the Internet (computer networks). Technologies can encode social values: neural networks are designed to learn from big data, so they encode a preference for the contemporary social realities that produced the data.
  • As one example of evaluating negative consequences, computer science considers the philosophical and practical limitations of neural networks. Research into adversarial attacks can enable computer scientists to develop more robust neural networks that are safer and more effective.
  • As one example of designing technologies for social good, computer science contributes to the research, development, mass production, delivery, and logistics of modern medicine from beginning to end. Yet applications for social good are often embedded in broader social and political dynamics that computer science has difficulty addressing. Even though computer technologies can be designed for social good, they can cause harm when their design processes fail to center on human values and diverse users.
PreviousNext
Citation/Attribution

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Attribution information
  • If you are redistributing all or part of this book in a print format, then you must include on every physical page the following attribution:
    Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-computer-science/pages/1-introduction
  • If you are redistributing all or part of this book in a digital format, then you must include on every digital page view the following attribution:
    Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-computer-science/pages/1-introduction
Citation information

© Oct 29, 2024 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.