The Martian, Computer Science, and College

This summer, the school asked professors if they would be interested in leading book discussions with incoming first-year students in Computer Science.  I, along with many other professors, volunteered, where each of us could select our specific title to discuss.  I proposed reading, The Martian, by Andy Weir.  What follows is not a review of the book, which I really enjoyed, but rather a summary of the discussion points from the hour we had together.

The following text contains many book spoilers.

We started the discussion with a short summary of my background and then a student asked about the Martian rover hacking.  It is in my opinion, plausible.  It depends on several assumptions, such as the rover's driver being able to be modified so easily to log the malformed network data (sent by the probe).  It would then be reasonable to send commands to the probe to broadcast the necessary data to construct an executable on the rover.  Then assuming that Mark can run it with sufficient privileges or that there is a known vulnerability allowing the executable to gain the privilege, the probe's data could be a patch.  Personally, I enjoyed the thought of using ASCII to communicate and myself and my TAs agree, "man ascii".  Besides, I carry an ASCII chart in my wallet.

We discussed how there was significant cooperation in solving the problems.  The crew worked together.  NASA had many teams working on the problems.  Internationally, China also provided assistance.  The people working on these problems were diverse.  And there were continual concerns about the crew's mental state and about Mark's.  Similarly, Computer Science students will need to learn to work with others, to work in groups with diverse backgrounds and skill sets, and know that there are many many more people that are wanting to see and willing to support them in having successful lives and taking steps whenever circumstances dictate.

Mark Watney survives in part by having a diverse education and training.  Being a fictional character, he has the right skills to survive, but this is based in reality.  Astronauts are trained in a diverse set of skills, particularly to maximize the value gained from their time in space.  They are not experts, but rather trained well to exercise the guidance of experts on Earth.  And similarly, I reinforced to the students that their studies should work to give them a broad foundation beyond Computer Science.

The final topic brought up by the students was about ethics.  First, should NASA tell the crew of the Hermes that Mark Watney was alive on Mars, when it was first determined.  Or instead, NASA would censor all communication to ensure that they were not informed that they abandoned Mark.  What is the trade-off between the truth and mission results?  Second, the Chinese scientists had to make a decision, is the life of one astronaut worth their probe?  Should they give up their long-prepared mission of great scientific value to instead make a "grocery delivery"?  How much is one life worth?  Third, when the Rich Purnell plan presented an alternative to rescuing Mark, was NASA obligated to consult the crew in evaluating this option?  And related, the crew of the Hermes decided to return to Mars (on the low chance of killing everyone plan) to save Mark Watney, and also extending their mission duration.  Also briefly discussed was that governments also have to decide how much a life is worth.  It is noted that the science that Mark can perform makes up for the cost of his rescue, which addresses this concern in story.

I think that the 20 or so students appreciated the hour we had together.  I hope to some day be able to meet and ultimately teach them in person.

Improving Computer Science Education

Recently in the news are two articles that relate to improving Computer Science Education.  It is valuable to broaden the base of students who understand the basics of computing, just as students are expected to know Chemistry or Calculus.  In fact in my biased opinion, knowing the basics of computing and programming will have greater practical benefit to students; however, it should never be at the expense of a diverse education.

The White House announced that the 7 largest school districts will be including Computer Science in their curriculum.  This will quickly lead to another problem of who will teach the Computer Science classes.  Not me, but I am interested in teaching the teachers.  I do want to see Computer Science as an actual specialty (endorsement) for Education majors.

Another aspect of broadening the base is retaining students enrolled in the major.  Being part of the majority, it is difficult for me to know the challenges faced by other groups.  Similarly, I know why I entered Computer Science, so I would like to understand why others have too.  Why are they passionate or interested in this field that I am a part of?  Here are some things minority students have to say about STEM.

Computer Science Diversity

I attended a top program in Computer Science, where the gender split was 60 / 40.  Then I worked for five years at a major company.  Therefore, my expectation is always that anyone regardless of their gender, race, etc can succeed in Computer Science.  Now, recently there was a short lived Barbie book about being a computer engineer.  Ignoring any semantics about Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering being different disciplines, the work still did not portray women in the more technical efforts.  I'd rather read a collegue's remix of the work.

In a different vein of diversity, as a white male, I have been regularly been excluded from tech events because I dislike the taste of alcohol.  Thus at the (especially) frequent events in industry settings where alcohol is served, I was not socializing with my colleagues, and instead would inevitably find myself back at my desk working.  As a consequence, I was effectively excluded from the event.  And now in academia, I find myself attending conferences, where the social events are also touted for serving alcohol.  I have no issue with serving alcohol, rather it is the near exclusivity of which the drink options trend that way.  Thus a recent article struck a chord in the continuing desirability of extending the options and respecting the decision (for whatever reason) to not drink alcohol.

Ongoing Goto Wars

Recently, Apple announced a security fix for their SSL implementation.  I would have taken little note here, except WIRED's summary indicated the cause being the use of goto.  Ah, goto, how useful you are.  How abused you are.

In practice, I would also have used goto, if I was writing a series of conditionals where I only have a single error block.  The code could be restructured to link all of the conditionals into a single clause, yet it also tries to retain the specific error code for the check that failed.  I would really dislike to see the following:

if ((e = foo) != 0 && (e = bar) != 0 && ...) goto fail;

So what then?  Do we call upon the software engineering folk to better analyze programs and find these mistakes?  Or write style guidelines that require braces for every if, and ban every goto?  And then the employee's manager is required to sign off on every exception.  These are some of the many proposals floated for addressing this, and often made by programmers touting the superiority of their proposal and how this would never happen to them.

Leave me to shrug.  I'll use my goto, sparingly.  And I'll continue to try to impress on students that they and all of us programmers will make mistakes so write elegant code to help find these bugs.  Until then, if anyone has a good construction for the error code that doesn't require goto, let me know.

To research the unknown

As part of my duties as a graduate student, I presented some of my research on Friday.  Beyond the presentation itself, which went well, an intriguing question arose: "If something is so difficult / expensive to implement that no one has written the code, then how do you know what it is?"  Indeed.  This is an honest criticism, how am I going to explore performance improvements to particular problems when the problems are so computationally expensive that they aren't implemented in existing applications.

Fortunately for my research, the scope of computationally expensive is still well within the feasible realm.  Furthermore, many of these expensive problems are already known, and are not so far removed from the current applications as to be independent.  So in the end, perhaps it isn't a horrible road block, but rather just one more piece to *research.*

For bonus points, the discussion portion of my presentation ran about the same length as my presentation itself.  And spawned further emails in the subsequent days.  So I'm delighted by how thought provoking (or perhaps contentious) my research is proving to be.