Computer Science — What is it about?
Are you too wondering about the reasons to get swayed towards the computer science? Well this article might just give you a motivational spark for you just like it did for me! Having a background in the computers I believe I am able to answer the question to an extent.
Lets start by asking a question to you itself, can you think of something where computers or the smart little chip hasn’t made its presence? Well its really difficult though 😲. There is nothing as on today that can work without the help from technology. Consider the following.
Rockets launched into the space, consists of uncountable computing peripherals. Even the machinery that made the rockets is automated.
Communication across now takes less than a second even to the remote place across the globe, be it because of the cellular technology, the social media networks, mailing systems and a lot more!
Now, the computers can even think on themselves , take decisions intuitively without human interactions, they have become intelligent enough to learn the environments, analyze the scenarios and act accordingly! Well really smart of them right? 😅
This cannot just be limited to the few things above, the scope of it just gets going on and on and on!. Now done with the little brushing up of the things? lets get ahead and have a look at the various domains that a computer scientist or engineer can get his hands at.
Networks and Communication
Well this is a really vast domain of computers, this field talks about the communication workflows across devices irrespective of where they are geographically present. Networking can be wired (such as ethernet, DSL, fiber), wireless (such Wi-Fi, bluetooth etc) , cellular (CDMA,GSM,2G,3G,4G and soon 5G!) and can depend on several types of mediums that makes the connectivity of devices possible.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is surely a domain of computer science that is progressively increasing in demand and applications around. Cloud storage solutions, which provide high , efficient volumes of data storage across data servers are used in great demands everywhere. Cloud computing provides various other functions including processing capabilities, advanced computing infrastructure support , application development and hosting, management services and much more!
Internet of Things (IoT)
The IoT promotes the self-reliant devices that interconnect with each other that constantly collect the data in the deployed environment through the various sensor interfaces, exchange the data across networks, dynamically adapt to the environment. IoT devices can be deployed for implementing various applications starting from smart cities, health monitoring to personal wear-able’s. IoT devices are capable of remotely being deployed with the data being stored in the back end across cloud infrastructure.
Big Data Analytics (BDA)
This is one of the most fast pacing technology which is having its presence across various applications. In this era, where data is generated in huge volumes per second. We have data being generated in telecommunication sector, data being exponentially generated at global data stores and databases, geospatial data coming through satellites, space stations, rovers etc. Handling such large amounts of data is seldom possible through traditional database and repository technologies, hence Big Data provides such an advanced framework of efficient handling, management and storage of devices. Big Data Analysis deals with the exploratory analysis of the big data to discover information patterns used in various tasks such as automation, business intelligence, predictive analysis etc.
Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence
Well, ever wondered if the devices have the capabilities of learning on themselves, making intelligent decisions ?
This is the area of computer sciences that just deals with the thing. ML/AI focuses on designing algorithms that are capable of learning the patterns involved in input data, making machine to learn the environments and apply it to take outputs on unseen input data with intelligent decision making capabilities. This area involves several topics from supervised, unsupervised learning techniques, deep neural networks etc.
Operating Systems\ Computer Architecture
A Sensible fact:
A system or machine without the basic set of instructions i.e the OS is just a mere dumb machine!
Well these are the drivers of all the machines that are working around the globe, without which the working of them can never sustain! OS are the set of programs designed for connecting the end-users to the actual hardware, they are interface between that make the communication flow simple and possible. They are responsible providing communication standards, management standards, tools for efficient use of machines , applications to carry out different tasks and most importantly security of systems. When talking about operating systems we have insights to parallel computing, distributed computing systems and more briefing towards the computer architecture and organization that talks about the processor architecture, internal hardware devices including the memory , the storage technologies, registers , computational logic and much more.
Information \Cybersecurity
We have seen so many domains in the computing environment but now we talk about the most important one among them that is about the security! Yes security is an aspect that really shares greater proportions of its involvement when talking about the systems, networks,communications etc. There are several prevalent risks which includes data theft, identity theft , information breaches, policy violations, exploitation of user and confidential data etc. Under such case there is a need for a definite strong and active system that governs these risks and safeguards against them, this domain is the solution to these issues. Information security defines several technologies , standards , protocols that aim at providing the three important aspects of confidentiality, integrity and availability. Cybersecurity talks about the regualtions, policies , measures that are defined to govern these security issues. This also makes it one of the most important and interesting domain.
Programming
The core aspect of computer terminology, that builds the software systems, applications , programs and the user instructions to the machine are all defined through the practices of programming which we fondly like to call it as coding 😄. Programming is the way of defining the instructions for performing different tasks and operations and finally leading to a certain desired outcome. Programming is achieved through the formal set of system languages called programming languages which define the basic syntactic and semantic meaning to the user defined instructions. We have traditional languages that are most basic and machine native in nature such as assembly language, COBOL, FORTAN to a much higher level languages such as C, C++, Java, Python etc.
This list could be extended to a lot other domains in computer sciences as we tend to dig deeper and deeper but it won’’t just be sufficient! None the less by now you might have already grown the interest by a bit towards it right? It is definitely a fascinating field of sciences and technology.
