The Com­put­ing Field

2015 • V • 28

The field of Com­put­ing—in some coun­tries more com­monly referred to as Infor­mat­ics—is a dynamic and intel­lec­tu­ally rich aca­d­e­mic and pro­fes­sional domain. It under­pins key phe­nom­ena such as “The Infor­ma­tion Age”, “The Knowl­edge Soci­ety”, “Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion”, “Dig­i­tal Tran­si­tion”, among other more or less res­o­nant con­cepts.

How­ever, Com­put­ing is far from mono­lithic. While a shared foun­da­tion exists, it is pos­si­ble to iden­tify dis­tinct emphases and approaches within the field. Nat­u­rally, new­com­ers are not expected to fully grasp these nuances. In some cases, even those with expe­ri­ence in the field may lack aware­ness ot its inter­nal diver­sity.

In 2014, I encoun­tered prima facie evi­dence that even senior indi­vid­u­als—both in acad­e­mia and indus­try—often failed to rec­og­nize the dis­tinc­tions within Com­put­ing, and per­haps were unaware of them alto­gether. In cer­tain con­texts, this lack of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion hin­ders dia­logue, delays mutual under­stand­ing, and con­trib­utes to set­backs, includ­ing the under­recog­ni­tion of spe­cific com­pe­ten­cies and areas of inter­est. While I can not change this sit­u­a­tion sin­gle-hand­edly, I felt com­pelled to con­trib­ute to mit­i­gat­ting it.

The solu­tion I arrived at was the cre­ation of the poster below. Though it reflects a per­sonal inter­pre­ta­tion, it is grounded in the cur­ric­ula rec­om­men­da­tions issued by the Asso­ci­a­tion for Com­put­ing Machin­ery (ACM), IEEE Com­puter Soci­ety (IEEE-CS), and Asso­ci­a­tion for Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems (AIS) for the field of Com­put­ing.

The poster presents the five main dis­ci­plines in the field of Com­put­ing—listed alpha­bet­i­cally: Com­puter Engi­neer­ing, Com­puter Sci­ence, Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems, Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy, and Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing. For each dis­ci­pline, it out­lines the spe­cific prob­lem space it addresses, the main knowl­edge areas it draws upon, and the core per­for­mance capa­bil­i­ties that define its pro­fes­sional prac­tice.

The poster is based on the Com­put­ing Cur­ric­ula (2006) and the cur­ric­ula guide­lines for under­grad­u­ate pro­grams in Com­puter Engi­neer­ing (2004), Com­puter Sci­ence (2013), Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems (2010), Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy (2008), and Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing (2004).

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

The Computing Field Poster

UPDATE, 2021 • IV • 3

The poster appears to have proven use­ful: in late 2020, it was included as Appen­dix A in the pri­mary cur­ricu­lum ref­er­ence for the field of Com­put­ing, pub­lished jointly by ACM and IEEE-CS.

I orig­i­nally devel­oped the poster in 2014. Since then, sev­eral cur­ricu­lum guide­lines for under­grad­u­ate degrees have been updated: Com­puter Engi­neer­ing in 2016, Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems in 2021, Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy in 2017, and Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing in 2015. While these updates intro­duced changes to the cur­ric­ula, I believe the foun­da­tional dis­tinc­tions that char­ac­ter­ize each of the five orig­i­nal Com­put­ing dis­ci­plines have largely remained con­sis­tent.

In 2021, ACM and IEEE-CS pub­lished “Com­put­ing Cur­ric­ula 2020 (CC2020)”, sub­ti­tled: “Par­a­digms for Global Com­put­ing Edu­ca­tion encom­pass­ing under­grad­u­ate pro­grams in Com­puter Engi­neer­ing, Com­puter Sci­ence, Cyber­se­cu­rity, Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems, Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy, Soft­ware Engi­neer­ing with data sci­ence”.

This pub­li­ca­tion brought two note­wor­thy addi­tions to the dicus­sion of Com­put­ing dis­ci­plines: Cyber­se­cu­rity and Data Sci­ence.

Regard­ing Cyber­se­cu­rity, ACM, IEEE-CS, AIS Spe­cial Inter­est Group on Infor­ma­tion Secu­rity and Pri­vacy, and the Inter­na­tional Fed­er­a­tion for Infor­ma­tion Pro­cess­ing (IFIP) Tech­ni­cal Com­mit­tee on Infor­ma­tion Secu­rity Edu­ca­tion jointly pub­lished “Cyber­se­cu­rity Cur­ric­ula 2017—Cur­ricu­lum Guide­lines for Post-Sec­ondary Degree Pro­grams in Cyber­se­cu­rity”. This marked the for­mal intro­duc­tion of Cyber­se­cu­rity as a core Com­put­ing dis­ci­pline. How­ever, it is impor­tant to note the phras­ing used: “post-sec­ondary degree pro­grams”. A clearer under­stand­ing of this emph­sis can be drawn from the fol­low­ing excerpt: “In the field of cyber­se­cu­rity, knowl­edge acqui­si­tion and skill devel­op­ment at all post-sec­ondary lev­els occurs in both for­mal higher edu­ca­tion set­tings and in the pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, train­ing, and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion space.” (p. 82).

As for Data Sci­ence, at the time CC2020 was released, cur­ricu­lum guide­lines for under­grad­u­ate pro­grams were still under devel­op­ment. These were later pub­lished by ACM in 2021 as “Com­put­ing Com­pe­ten­cies for Under­grad­u­ate Data Sci­ence Cur­ric­ula”. This doc­u­ment intro­duced Data Sci­ence as an addi­tional Com­put­ing dis­ci­pline. How­ever, it empha­sized the field’s inter­dis­ci­pli­nar­ity nature, as illus­trated by this excerpt: “Data Sci­ence is the field that brings together domain data, com­puter sci­ence, and the sta­tis­ti­cal tools for inter­ro­gat­ing the data and extract­ing use­ful infor­ma­tion.” (p. 10) This is fol­lowed by fur­ther clar­i­fi­ca­tion: “Each com­po­nent of the Data Sci­ence envi­ron­ment: the domain that pro­vides the data; sta­tis­tics and math­e­mat­ics for analy­sis, mod­el­ing, and infer­ence; and com­puter sci­ence for data access, man­age­ment, pro­tec­tion, as well as effec­tive pro­cess­ing in mod­ern com­puter archi­tec­tures, is essen­tial.” (p. 10).

Today, Data Sci­ence and Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems are arguably the two Com­put­ing dis­ci­plines whose inter­dis­ci­pli­nary nature is most evi­dent.

Per­haps one day there will be an updated ver­sion of the poster... Until then, let us con­tinue to rec­og­nize and appre­ci­ate the rich­ness and diver­sity within the Com­put­ing field!

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