At a glance
Solo · launched Unit 4, Day 7 and due Unit 4, Day 13 · three working periods and two seminar days · one written report, one twelve-minute seminar, and questions you have to answer without notes
What you are making
A report and a seminar on one topic at the edge of computer science, chosen from three kinds — and you must engage with all three in the report, even though one of them leads:
- An emerging technology and its effects on people: who gains, who loses, which communities are affected differently, and what is already being decided about it.
- A collaborative field where computer science works with another discipline: bioinformatics, computational linguistics, health informatics, computational archaeology, climate modelling, computational social science, digital humanities.
- A topic in theoretical computer science: computability, P versus NP, formal verification, information theory, cryptographic hardness, automata, or another you can source.
The lead choice is yours. The other two appear as connections: what theory underlies the technology you chose, and which other discipline it touches. Real work sits at those intersections, which is the point of making you cross them.
What must be in it
- The question, in one sentence a classmate understands.
- What is actually established, distinguished from what is claimed. A result with a paper behind it and a result in a company’s announcement are different kinds of evidence, and your report must treat them differently.
- The theory underneath: what problem class this sits in, what is known to be hard, and what that means for what it can promise.
- The other discipline: what it contributes, and why computing alone could not answer the question.
- The human consequences: who is affected, unevenly, and what is being done about it. Ethics, Security, and the Profession is the frame; “some people worry” is not an analysis.
- What is unsolved, and why it is hard rather than merely unfinished.
- Sources: at least five, at least two of which are primary — a paper, a standard, a specification, a government or professional body. Cited where used, not heaped at the end.
The seminar
Twelve minutes, then questions from the room for five, answered without notes. The audience’s job is to ask the question your report avoided — and everybody prepares one question for each seminar in advance.
Seminars run on Unit 4, Days 12 and 13, half the room on each day. Rehearse yours once against a timer before Day 12 — twelve minutes is shorter than it sounds, and the part that gets cut when you overrun is always the theory you worked hardest on.
The working periods
| Day | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Unit 4, Day 7 | Topic registered; the first two sources found and judged together |
| Unit 4, Day 8 | The theory section — the hardest part, drafted while I work my way round the room |
| Unit 4, Day 10 | The consequences section and the cross-discipline connection; then drafts are traded and one unsourced claim in each is challenged |
| Unit 4, Days 12 and 13 | Seminars, half the room each day; the report is handed in at the end of Day 13 |
How this is assessed
| Quality | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Established separated from claimed | Says which is which, every time |
| Theory is real | Names the problem class and what follows from it |
| Crosses disciplines | The other field is doing genuine work, not decoration |
| Consequences are specific | Named groups, named effects, named responses |
| Sources hold up | Five or more, two primary, cited in place |
| Seminar survives questions | Answers the hard one honestly, including “I do not know” |
Choosing a topic nobody else will
The overlooked ones make the best reports, because the general-audience writing does not exist and you are forced to the real sources: computing and hydrology, formal methods in medical devices, language revitalisation, error-correcting codes in storage, provenance in archives. Bring one to me early and I will tell you whether it has enough behind it.
Reflect
A Code Journal entry: what did you believe about this topic before you read the primary sources, and which one changed your mind? Then: which of the three kinds — technology, collaboration, theory — do you want to spend more time in, and what would that require of you?
Curriculum connection
D3.1
explain the impact of a variety of emerging technologies on various members of society and on societies and cultures around the world and on the economy;
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D3.2
investigate an emerging technology and produce a report using an appropriate format (e.g., technical report, website, presentation software, video).
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D4.1
report on some areas of collaborative research between computer science and other fields (e.g., bioinformatics, geology, economics, linguistics, health informatics, climatology, sociology, art), on the basis of information found in industry publications (e.g., from the ACM and IEEE);
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D4.2
investigate a topic in theoretical computer science (e.g., cryptography, graph theory, logic, computability theory, attribute grammar, automata theory, data mining, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, image processing), and produce a report, using an appropriate format (e.g., website, presentation software, video);
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