PRANESH B. ASWATH: Hi.

Welcome back.
Today we are going to be talking a little bit about Computer Science
and Engineering as a field of study.
Computer Science and Engineering is actually
a very interdisciplinary field, which is an integration of knowledge
from a variety of fields that include Electrical Engineering, Mathematics,
and, in some cases, fields as diverse as Bioengineering, Mechanical Engineering,
and so forth.
And one of the things that is a confusion for students
is is Computer Science and Engineering, is it
a science or an engineering field?
And that confusion comes from the fact that many universities
house the programs in Science and sometimes in Engineering.
So in some areas, in some universities where
the focus is more on the pure science aspect and the fundamental aspects
of computers, particularly where there is an integration with mathematics
and the algorithm developmental and so forth,
it is housed in a College of Science.
However, in many other cases, for example,
like our university at UT Arlington, it is housed in the College of Engineering
where the field is a little bit more applied and includes
analysis and development of algorithms, but also
in the area of Applied Computer Engineering where
development of microprocessors, software that
runs the microprocessors, and so forth.
So I primarily focus on Computer Engineering right now.
To take Computer Engineering as a field, it
includes aspects of both software and hardware.
And when you think of hardware, it is really an interdisciplinary mix
of input from electrical engineers, electronic engineers, and computer
science and engineering people.
In particular, when you think of computers or microprocessors
or computing devices, it involves integration
of both the hardware, that is the microprocessors, as well
as the instructions that go in, that run these things.
So that's where the Computer Science and Engineering
majors come in where they work very closely with electrical engineers
in the design, fabrication, and application of microprocessors
and devices for computing applications.
On the software side, this is more of the realm of Computer Science
and Engineering where things such as firmware, where the guts of a computer
are actually hardcoded and programed, as well as application software.
So things like operating systems as well as utility software,
like word processors, and so forth are all coded and developed
by Computer Science and Engineering majors.
So Computer Science and Engineering is a very broad field.
There are many other aspects of Computer Science and Engineering
as well, which are equally important.
One area that one can look at is in the area of databases.
Databases is an area where ability to design and manage
and store data becomes very critical.
And a lot of that is based on efficient software design
so that you're able to journal this data in a very efficient way,
and you're able to retrieve it on-demand in the least possible amount of time.
The other area that is of particular importance in Computer Science
and Engineering is in the area of robotics,
and this very interdisciplinary.
It involves interaction with people with a background in Electrical Engineering
and Mechanical Engineering, which kind of comes
into a field known as mechatronics.
But folks in computer science play a very important role, particularly
in the area of controls, robotic vision, sensor integration, and controls.
The other area where computer science and engineering
majors play a very important role is in what we consider
the emerging field of big data.
A lot of you have probably heard the term big data,
but big data is really a very interdisciplinary field of research
where people from Computer Science and other fields
find more efficient ways in which you can retrieve useful information
from very large pieces of data.
Good examples of this are when you do population analysis where
you have billions of pieces of data, how do you develop and understand trends
an population?
The other area, for example, you get a lot of data
from sensors on highways, traffic lights, and so forth.
So it's a lot of information that comes from traffic management.
So being able to analyze traffic flow patterns
involves manipulating large amounts of data.
The other area is in the area of patient information and health.
So this is an area called bioinformatics where you're trying to develop trends
in usefulness of specific drugs or product matter in certain populations
that are more prone to certain diseases, you're
be able to manipulate information from very large pieces of information.
So this emerging field of big data is a very important field
where the confluence of multiple fields come into the area of Computer Science.
There are many more areas in Computer Science and Engineering.
And what I will do now is introduce to you
four faculty members who are form the Computer Science and Engineering
department at UT Arlington who will be sharing with you some
of their interest and expertise in the area of Computer Science
and Engineering.
And the first person that I'm going to introduce you to
is Professor Gautam Das.
Dr. Das got his Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering
from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur
and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
His area of research is in big data.
In particular, he focuses on the manipulation, management, retrieval,
and use of big data, for example, in social media applications,
because, for example, people using Facebook and other social media tools
generate a huge amount of data.
How can you develop and understand patterns
that are emerging from this use of social media tools.
And in his presentation, he will primarily focus on what are big data
and how data is manipulated.
The second faculty member I would like to introduce you to
is Dr. Gian Luca Mariottini.
He's also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science
and Engineering.
He received his PhD in Engineering Information
from the University of Siena in Italy.
Dr. Mariottini's area of research is in medical robotics,
and in particular in the area of medical vision.
The applications of something like this is
extremely critical in things such as endoscopies or in surgical applications
where you're using robotic devices and you're
trying to understand from the images that
are being gathered from these robotic instruments what type of diagnosis
can be made and what type of analysis can be made.
The third faculty member I would like to introduce you to is Dr. Taylor Johnson.
He's an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering.
He received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering
from Rice University, and a master's and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His area of research is in what we would consider the interface
between the cyber and the physical.
So for example, when you think of air traffic control systems,
software is extremely critical in being able to ensure that aircraft don't come
closer to each other beyond a certain distance, and if they do,
before humans can respond, the software can actually
direct the two aircraft that are coming close together
to move in opposite directions.
This is an example where you're using computers and the cyber environment
and the physical environment of the aircraft,
so the interface between cyber and physical spaces
becomes extremely critical.
And being able to manipulate and what you would consider
have an efficient handshake between the cyber interface
to the physical interface.
In this presentation, Dr. Johnson will be primarily focusing
on what you consider as graph theory.
Graph theory is the relationship between people or phenomena
and how you can develop those patterns and get a deeper
understanding of those relationships.
The last faculty member I'd like to introduce you to
is Professor Farhad Kamanger.
He's a Professor in Computer Science and Engineering
as well, got his Bachelor of Engineering degree
in Computer Science and Engineering form the University of Tehran,
and master's and PhD from the University of Texas at Arlington.
His area of research is in pattern recognition, computer vision,
and related subjects matters.
However, in this course, he is primarily going
to focus on giving you an introduction to the software language called Python.
Python is a very interesting language, it is a little bit recent,
and it's finding great acceptance in various applications including
website design and so forth.
And it involves both deterministic and object-oriented programming approaches.
So Professor Kamanger is also going to be
teaching a full-fledged course on Python that will go live in January on EdX,
and this presentation will give him an opportunity to tell you a little bit
about, or introduce you to, the field of Python and how Python language works.
Hopefully by the end of this series of presentations in Computer Science
and Engineering you'll get a general idea of the tremendous opportunities
that are there in the field and a general overview
of the field of Computer Science and Engineering as well.