Blurring Boundaries in Computer Science

Research groups in Computer Science departments are awkward. I’m not talking about group members themselves, but the very notion of a group. 

Whereas traditional subjects such as Medicine have lots of nice, well-defined groupings (oncology, diabetes, etc.), this is not as clear for Computer Science, where new disciplines are continuously arising, and the boundaries between established areas seem to be gradually fusing. 

Let us take a set of typical department groups:

Formal Methods

Algorithms

Software Engineering

Machine Learning

Natural Language Processing

These areas all have their own journals and conference venues, their own superstars and core problems. 

But it is striking how much overlap there can be. Let us start with Software engineering. There are now countless Software Engineering papers that apply and build upon Machine Learning techniques. Natural Language Processing has a second home in Software Engineering, with the extensive use of Topic Modelling, LSI etc. Topic Modelling by the way is a technique in itself that straddles the areas of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Formal Methods and Software Engineering essentially share the same goals. Theorem proving, which is a core Formal Method, is increasingly using Machine Learning techniques. Indeed many of the automated reasoning techniques that underpin theorem provers fundamentally share the same goals as a Machine Learning algorithms. All of these areas (FM, SE, ML, and NLP) revolve around Algorithms. 

Crucially, the expertise of individuals rarely sits squarely in one of these areas, but usually cuts across two or more of these areas. The traditional groups are simply no longer appropriate for pigeon-holing many researchers or research problems.

This is what makes Computer Science groups (and the discipline as a whole) awkward. The community (and departments) are very much split along these traditional, entrenched lines. Formal methods people operate in their own groups and publish in their own conferences and journals. As do Algorithms people, Software Engineers, etc. 

This post however argues that these boundaries are unnecessary and largely artificial. This always hits home when I get the opportunity to attend a conference that is slightly outside of my area. It is always striking how much scope there is for cross-disciplinary collaboration, how similar the fundamental problems are. One can’t help but wonder how much work is duplicated in different fields, and how much further we would be as a discipline if these boundaries simply didn’t exist.