Karate rank: Fourth-degree black belt in Tang Soo Do

What research are you personally doing? I'm interested in trustworthy computing, which includes reliability, security, privacy and usability. A student and I are working on a problem in privacy where we'd like to understand what people mean by the "use" and "purpose" of information. Suppose promises they will not read your e-mail in order to target advertising, but they will read it for spam detection. That seems like a reasonable policy, because you'd like them to filter your e-mail so you don't get spam but not to figure out what ads to serve you. If a company does have such a policy, how can the user ensure it is enforcing it? Is there a formal way to specify those policies? Is there a way to analyze the code to see that it actually satisfies the policy? Using formal methods, how do you analyze the code? We are starting from scratch because we don't even have formal logics for expressing those privacy policies.

Can computational thinking help people who are not computer scientists? One of my visions for the 21st century is that it will be a fundamental skill used by everyone. Scientists and engineers [who are not computer scientists] already know the power of metal tools -- such as supercomputers and networks -- but what I'm arguing is that it's the mental tools that can give them more power. It can truly transform the way they think, even prompting them to ask questions they wouldn't have thought to ask before.

[Take] for instance, the fact that we have many techniques for dealing with large data sets -- machine learning, data mining, data federation and so on. So for us, large data sets offer a different way to solve problems. But scientists and engineers might not even know that they could look for particular patterns or clusters in a data set. It would be unfathomable that they could answer a question [using such techniques].

We are even seeing applications of computational thinking in music, linguistics, economics, medicine and law. My dream is that a course in principles of computing or foundations of computer science would be on a list of courses for a general education. It would go way beyond programming in Java and would be for everyone.