The Diver­sity of Com­put­ing

2020 • IX • 25

In August 2018, the Por­tuguese Min­istry of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, and Higher Edu­ca­tion decided to phase out inte­grated mas­ter’s pro­grams, with the excep­tion of those in med­i­cine, vet­eri­nary med­i­cine, and archi­tec­ture.

As a result, the Inte­grated Mas­ter’s Pro­gram in Engi­neer­ing and Man­age­ment of Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems had to be restruc­tured. I was assigned to coor­di­nate the efforts that led to the cre­ation of both the Licen­ciatura and a Mas­ter’s in Engi­neer­ing and Man­age­ment of Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems.

To fos­ter dis­cus­sion within the Depart­ment of Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems, I pre­pared sev­eral mate­ri­als. One of them was a poster illus­trat­ing the diver­sity of Com­put­ing dis­ci­plines. This diver­sity reflects the pres­ence of dis­tinct objects of inter­est—such as com­put­ers, net­works, soft­ware, infor­ma­tion, and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy appli­ca­tions—as well as a wide range of knowl­edge, skills, and dis­po­si­tions required to engage with those objects effec­tively.

In addi­tion to brief def­i­n­i­tions of each of the five core Com­put­ing dis­ci­plines, the poster fea­tures word clouds rep­re­sent­ing the key knowl­edge areas of each dis­ci­pline. The rel­a­tive size of the words indi­cates the weight of each area within the dis­ci­pline’s body of knowl­edge.

Because the con­tent of the poster per­tains to under­grad­u­ate degree pro­grams, I believed it could also serve prospec­tive Com­put­ing stu­dents—help­ing them iden­tify the aca­d­e­mic path that best aligns with their inter­ests and apti­tudes.

Click the fig­ure below to down­load a full-size PDF file of the poster.

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