CS Dept Colloquium: New Perception of "Computer Science"

Monday, October 17, 2011,
11:00 AM,
Eng 4201 
Jozef Gruska, Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Abstract

The talk will present a new, much broader and deeper, vision of the field usually called "Computer Science" or "Informatics" and will justify why such a new view is possible and much needed.

New view is to a large extent motivated by the recent developments in "natural computing" (quantum and biological) and the fact that many areas of science and technology are information-processing driven. Understanding this broader and deeper view of Informatics puts the field into the position of the main servant and also guiding and inspiring force for other areas of science and technology with broad impacts almost everywhere. This new perception of the Informatics sees the field as having four closely related components: scientific, engineering, methodological and applications, which are described and illustrated by their grand challenges.

As an area of science, Informatics is having similar goals as other areas of basic science and represents a new window to see and explore the real and artificial worlds and lives. A special attention is given to the new and very powerful methodology Informatics provides that much extends the role mathematics used to have in serving sciences, technologies and other areas of human activities.

Speaker's Bio

Prof. Jozef Gruska got his PhD from Slovak Avademy of Sciences in Bratislava (1966) Slovakia, in Computer Science. Currently he is a professor at the Faculty of Informatics with Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He is an expert in Theoretical Informatics and an author of two foundation monographs on "Foundations of Computing" US, 1997 and "Quantum Computing", UK, 1999 and has over 150 publications. He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea, member of its Informatics Section committee (since 2006) and member of its Council (2007-2010). "Computer pioneer" award of IEEE USA and many other awards and recognitions including Bolzano award of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Currently he is the head of two big interdisciplinary projects at Masaryk University.
He is a founder of seven regular international conferences including Asia Quantum Information Science (Japan, Korea, China, India), 2001-2013. He gave more than 250 talks on international events including two invited talks at the World Computer Congress. He was the founding head (1989-1996) of the main international committee for theoretical informatics at IFIP (International Federation of Information Processing). He spent more than 15 years at major universities of Europe and North America.