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Jeanette Wings talks about upcoming NSF role

02.02.2007
The National Science Foundation Jeannette Wing, head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, to lead its new Computer & Information Science and Engineering Directorate, beginning on July 1. Wing, an expert on security, trustworthy computing and formal methods in safety- and mission-critical systems, will oversee US$527 million in annual government spending on computer science and engineering. Wing, who coined the term "computational thinking," has worked or consulted for a number of major players in the IT industry, and said in an interview with Computerworld that she hopes to take that experience and use it to encourage computer sciences education in the U.S.

Excerpts from that interview follow:

What from your background was of interest to the National Science Foundation (NSF)? I think the current interest by the whole country in trustworthy systems and security is one of the things NSF was looking for, and they came to me as someone who could bring that expertise. But looking ahead, one of the things that intrigued NSF and the whole computer science (CS) community is my philosophy about computational thinking. The ideas in computing, the abstractions we bring from CS, will pervade all other disciplines -- not just other sciences and engineering -- but also humanities, arts, social sciences, entertainment and everything.

People forget that there are fundamental advancements that CS brings that make it possible to have things like MySpace and YouTube and Google. The audacity that we have to automate our abstractions -- that is CS and what's going to be influencing many other disciplines.

What does that mean for NSF programs? It means [funding] research in the basics of CS so that an algorithm we invent today will have a use tomorrow [that] we didn't even predict. And [it means making] sure we are working with the other disciplines to help them do their science and engineering or media technology or whatever. So this just says that CS is all over the place.

What does this mean for CS education? CS is more than programming, and we have to convey that message to the general public and inspire the young to the deep intellectual challenges that remain in the field. We need the next generation to be working on those.