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What are some INTERESTING topics in Computer Science?

U

UCDznutz

Banned
I've got to write an essay due in a couple of weeks for my English class. We're supposed to explain an esoteric topic within our major and convey it to the reader in a way that doesn't just focus on computer science majors. Its got to be able to be appealing to folks who know very little about computers and still keep them interested in reading about it.

Thinking of all the topics we've covered so far in my CS courses, I don't find any of them interesting at all to myself, let alone the general public. You guys got any suggestions?
 
Lots of potential topics that you can use. Cryptography (number theory) and p vs np computational complexity are probably the top two topics. You can also choose various topics from AI that range from gaming AI to facial recognition systems.


Heifetz
 
Computer forensics might be an interesting topic for people who dont know much about computers. I saw an episode of 'The New Detectives' that was about some Air Force sgt who killed his wife, and there was some evidence (I cant remember exactly what it was) that he had saved to disk (5 1/4 floppy) . Anyway he managed to crumple and cut the disk into several pieces, but the Air Force forensics team was still able to recover the files!
 
some good choices so far... i can see a few readers getting interested in networking, AI, and computer forensics. Keep em coming i'm just going to general research for a bit this weekend and come up with a topic sunday.
 
Originally posted by: Stealth1024
what about an article about network security
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i think that might have alot of potential for the type of paper i'm doing. people are using the internet but many aren't aware about the dangers of it. i probably wouldn't get into a corporate network security type of thing but more of a personal security approach.
 
Originally posted by: Skyclad1uhm1
And the toughest class in CS, the one almost all CS students fail and drop out of:

How to talk to a girl.
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ROFL!


My suggestions...

none 😱



Confused
 
Originally posted by: notfred
regular expressions
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LOL, that'll get the crowd excited 😉

photorealistic rendering (and future legal nightmares from image generation and manipulation, maybe include a full-color PhotoChop to make your point)
 
just off the top of my head:

working with petabytes of data to find patterns of terrorism in our purchases, etc.

digital rights management for music, video.

war (battlefield) hardware/software.

bio-informatics

speech/face recognition (biometrics)

AI

virtual reality
 
Originally posted by: Apathetic
How about graphics?

Dave
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This is what I was thinking too. It'd be interesting to me (another CS student, so I guess I'd be a bad person to ask 😛) to find out what goes into making, say someones favorite game or into an (computer) animated movie. Of course, that may be more of an art thing, since it is graphics, than straight CS.

Why not ask some of your non-CS friends at school what'd they'd like to know about? Best thing to do is figure out the audience first.

Nate
 
Originally posted by: Heifetz
Lots of potential topics that you can use. Cryptography (number theory) and p vs np computational complexity are probably the top two topics. You can also choose various topics from AI that range from gaming AI to facial recognition systems.


Heifetz
Click to expand...

p vs. np is a nightmare. Been there, done that, unless you have an extremely firm grasp of the subject, it is very difficult to go far into.

Cryptography on the other hand is fun and interesting.
 
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