Featured in Five is a monthly section where we pose five questions to a Computing Reviews featured reviewer. Here are the responses from our current featured reviewer, Wolfgang Schreiner (Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria).
Q: What is the most important thing that's happened in computing in the past 10 years?
A: The evolution of the Internet to a universal communication, information, and service platform, for a major part of the population in wide areas of the world. The emergence of search engines; news services; online encyclopedias; special topic sites; and blogs from companies, governments, public organizations, and individuals has given people more possibilities for the acquisition, exchange, and dissemination of information than ever before, thus also strengthening their roles as individuals, citizens, and consumers.
Related to this is the open-source/free software movement, which has made high-quality software (applications and libraries) widely available for end users and developers. A rich ecosystem of vendor-independent software has emerged that is open for further development.
Q: By the end of your career, where do you think computer science
will have taken us? What are you working on that might contribute
toward that?
A: I do not expect a major revolution in the field with respect to the basic principles of how computers operate and are programmed, rather a steady evolution of already-known principles; concurrency, distribution, mobility, and dynamic reconfiguration will pervade all system levels. For managing the complexity of such systems, it will be necessary to apply appropriate techniques and tools to get a clear understanding of the systems and the properties they will exhibit. The only way that I see to address these issues is the application of formal methods to construct adequate system models, specify the required (qualitative and quantitative) properties, and analyze/verify the models correspondingly, before transforming them to actual software. For this purpose, we need a new generation of software engineers who understand formal modeling and analysis as their core activity, have the necessary abstraction and reasoning skills, and can use corresponding tools effectively. I personally am working on the development of a program exploration environment based on formal methods that will help to educate students in computer science and computer mathematics in this respect.
Q: Who is your favorite historical figure? Why?
A: Socrates, as one of the great teachers of mankind. On the one hand, he introduced the rationale method as an important way of approaching human problems; on the other hand, he was also quite aware of the limits of our understanding and therefore never created a closed "belief system." In short, he told us to use our own heads to search for truth rather than waiting for others to tell us.
Q: If you weren't working in the computer science field, what would you be doing instead?
A: Before beginning my studies, I had (almost) equal interests in computers, mathematics, and physics, so my career might have turned in any of these directions. Today, I'd also consider molecular biology as an exciting choice. Outside the technical/scientific field, I'm interested very much in history.
Q: What is your favorite type of music?
A: First baroque and classical, then jazz/blues/folk/soul. Good vocalists with minimal instrumentation (rather than the other way round).
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To learn more about Wolfgang Schreiner, check out his profile.
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