Featured in Five is a monthly section where we pose five questions to a Computing Reviews featured reviewer. Here are the responses from our February featured reviewer, Santiago Escobar.
Q: What is the most important thing that's happened in computing in the past 10 years?
A: Constraint satisfaction has been an important computing feature for decades; that said, despite very good techniques, algorithms, and tools, it is still far from being mainstream. Constraint satisfiability, on the other hand, where there is at least one solution rather than finding all the solutions, has been developed quite a lot in the last ten years and is now mainstream in many computer science areas. While it is still limited to some specific domains, such as nonlinear reals and strings, it has many applications.
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 to that?
A: Building algorithms and programs has been a longstanding task for centuries, but its complexity and impact on society has been steadily increasing, with big challenges in areas such as artificial intelligence, privacy, and quantum computing. I imagine a world where programs will be immune to flaws, and thus really trustworthy, similar to today’s civil engineering.
Q: Who is your favorite historical figure? Why?
A: Tony Hoare, a British computer scientist and Turing Award winner, who envisioned a world of verifiable software, including verifiable programming languages.
Q: If you weren't working in the computer science field, what would you be doing instead?
A: I can’t really imagine myself doing anything but computer science. Maybe biology, which is not so different from computer science in its computability roots.
Q: What is your favorite type of music?
A: I am more of a book lover than a music fan. But I like classical, pop and rock, and Spanish music.
Click here to read one of Santiago’s highlighted reviews.
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