Brewing Up Java Skills for the Knowledge Economy

sparky3887 — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:59:29 +0000

University College Dublin’s (UCD’s) School of Computer Science and Informatics will offer a second round of Java courses to companies that do not have the time and money to train their own employees. A year ago, UCD drew approximately 500 people for its Java training program. This year, UCD will offer a week of classes in foundation and advanced Java. UCD professor John Murphy says that more than 10 participants from last year are now pursuing a master’s degree in Computer Science by Negotiated Learning, which is a pioneering concept in Ireland and allows students to choose a module from wide range of subjects, such as courses in the School of Business, for developing entrepreneurial skills. “It has brought people back into the academic fold,” Murphy says. “UCD is looking to make a contribution to the economy and this is a good way of building relationships with both individuals and organizations in the technology sector.” UCD also is considering offering training in other key technology skills.

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Q&A: Turing Award Winner Barbara Liskov

sparky3887 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:35:59 +0000

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Barbara Liskov won ACM’s 2008 A. M. Turing Award for lasting and major technical contributions to the computing community for her work in developing methods that ease the construction of large software systems. “The work that I did was to develop a way of putting complicated software systems into modules where each module presented to its users a relatively simple interface and then on the inside there could be a complicated implementation,” Liskov says in an interview. She also developed CLU, a programming language that was not used outside of academia, but whose underlying concepts migrated into mainstream languages such as C++, Java, and C sharp. Liskov identifies two components of writing good software–comprehending the fundamental techniques that one can use and cultivating craft that has a lot to do with favoring simplicity over complexity. Liskov says her current research focus is distributed computing. She predicts that more and more of data storage is going to be transferred from personal devices to storage delivered via Internet providers fairly soon. Liskov reasons that the Internet is basically insecure, and among her recommendations for preventing data breaches is encrypting the data whenever it is placed on any sort of removable media. She says that innovations in programming languages may be fueled by the programming challenges of multicore systems, and speculates that artificial intelligence techniques may one day yield a more accurate search engine. Liskov agrees that women face obstacles in the pursuit of computing careers, including societal and cultural prejudices.

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Brewing Up Java Skills for the Knowledge Economy

Q&A: Turing Award Winner Barbara Liskov