Transcript

So now what I wanted to do is convince you that computational thinking has already influenced other disciplines. So let’s start with one discipline influenced by many different computational methods or concepts. So who can guess what that discipline might be? Don’t be shy. Scream out the answer, scream out any answer. Yes sir – that is an interesting answer. I’ll come back to that one. Medicine – is close to my answer. Biology, biology – that is my answer. It is just an answer. Computational thinking has greatly influenced biology to the point now that we have biology and computer sciences working together hand-in-hand but more than that we have now started to produce a new generation of computational biologists. Hold on, you are now answering my next question. My next question is; what was the tipping point, at which point did the biologist look over their shoulder and say, ‘you computer scientists have something to bring to the table. You computer scientists are making me think differently, making me approach my problem in a new way.’ Answer is … right, it was the shotgun algorithm that expedited the sequencing of the human genome that all of a sudden caused a lot of interest by the biologists, by the whole medical and biological communities who said hey there is something to computer science, to algorithms, more than just processing power. That is the point I am trying to make. That computing is more than just about devices and horsepower, and supercomputers, and this particular algorithm was what I think the tipping point when biology and computer science came together. Since then, there have been many, many examples of different kinds of computational methods, different kinds of computational models, different kinds of computational languages, different kinds of computational approaches for understanding biology. I have just listed a few. A lot of this is just buzzwords, if you will.