RESEARCH
Barbara Meier on what
computer animation can learn
from art animation 3
Shriram Krishnamurthi on
security research in access
control 6
ree new faculty join CS 10
Recent books by Tom Dean,
Eli Upfal and Joe LaViola 15
Comments on the fall 2004
Natural Language Processing
Symposium 17
3.4.5.
Tom Doeppner’s update on the
CS curriculum 20
Charniak Unplugged 24
ALUMNI/AE
Alums speak out: True tales
from the tech world! 26
Commencement weekend
reunion and alumni discussion
groups 30
Computers and Human Values:
A First-Year Seminar in Computer Science
Department of Computer Science
Volume 14, Number 1
Brown University
Spring, 2005
conduit!
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B
FACULTY
rown’s freshman seminar program initiated three years ago gave
faculty in the sciences a welcome opportunity to off er substan-
tive introductory courses that fi t the model of a college seminar.
Although Brown stipulated only that the new seminars had to
be small and populated solely by fi rst-year students, those of us who
had benefi ted from freshman seminars as undergraduates knew that the
new courses should focus on important questions as much as recognized
bodies of knowledge, and should encourage discussion and open-ended
refl ection more than memorization of facts or mastery of techniques. For
me, the challenge was to create a seminar that helped students formulate
their own philosophy of technology through examining recent develop-
ments in computer science.
Fortunately, the opportunity to design a seminar came at a
time when traditional “computers and society” courses seemed ripe for
reconsideration. Taking Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics (1947) as the Ur-
text of this tradition, it’s easy to identify texts and courses that have tried
to art