Computing And The National Science Foundation 1950 2016

This organizational history relates the role of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the development of modern computing. Drawing upon new and existing oral histories, extensive use of NSF documents, and the experience of two of the authors as senior managers, this book describes how NSF’s programmatic activities originated and evolved to become the primary source of funding for fundamental research in computing and information technologies. The book traces how NSF's support has provided facilities and education for computing usage by all scientific disciplines, aided in institution and professional community building, supported fundamental research in computer science and allied disciplines, and led the efforts to broaden participation in computing by all segments of society. Today, the research and infrastructure facilitated by NSF computing programs are significant economic drivers of American society and industry. For example, NSF supported work that led to the first widely-used web browser, Netscape; sponsored the creation of algorithms at the core of the Google search engine; facilitated the growth of the public Internet; and funded research on the scientific basis for countless other applications and technologies. NSF has advanced the development of human capital and ideas for future advances in computing and its applications. This account is the first comprehensive coverage of NSF's role in the extraordinary growth and expansion of modern computing and its use. It will appeal to historians of computing, policy makers and leaders in government and academia, and individuals interested in the history and development of computing and the NSF.

For over twenty years, James W. Cortada has pioneered research into how information shapes society. In this book he tells the story of how information evolved since the mid-nineteenth century. Cortada argues that information increased in quantity, became more specialized by discipline (e.g., mathematics, science, political science), and more organized. Information increased in volume due to a series of innovations, such as the electrification of communications and the development of computers, but also due to the organization of facts and knowledge by discipline, making it easier to manage and access. He looks at what major disciplines have done to shape the nature of modern information, devoting chapters to the most obvious ones. Cortada argues that understanding how some features of information evolved is useful for those who work in subjects that deal with their very construct and application, such as computer scientists and those exploring social media and, most recently, history. The Birth of Modern Facts builds on Cortada’s prior books examining how information became a central feature of modern society, most notably as a sequel to All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870 (OUP, 2016) and Building Blocks of Society: History, Information Ecosystems, and Infrastructures (R&L, 2021).

This Third Edition is the first English-language edition of the award-winning Meilensteine der Rechentechnik; illustrated in full color throughout in two volumes. The Third Edition is devoted to both analog and digital computing devices, as well as the world's most magnificient historical automatons and select scientific instruments (employed in astronomy, surveying, time measurement, etc.). It also features detailed instructions for analog and digital mechanical calculating machines and instruments, and is the only such historical book with comprehensive technical glossaries of terms not found in print or in online dictionaries. The book also includes a very extensive bibliography based on the literature of numerous countries around the world. Meticulously researched, the author conducted a worldwide survey of science, technology and art museums with their main holdings of analog and digital calculating and computing machines and devices, historical automatons and selected scientific instruments in order to describe a broad range of masterful technical achievements. Also covering the history of mathematics and computer science, this work documents the cultural heritage of technology as well.

This volume provides a history of the computer which now comes properly up to the ubiquitous age, with new chapters that look at globalization, platformitization and regulation, allowing readers to engage with the more recent takeover by computers in their historical perspective. With the growing ubiquity of computers, the subject is one of interest to many students and this will feature in history of science and technology courses, and world history courses as well as ones specifically on computing. Books on the history of computing tend to be quite technically or business focused, this covers the social and cultural history as well.

When electronic digital computers first appeared after World War II, they appeared as a revolutionary force. Business management, the world of work, administrative life, the nation state, and soon enough everyday life were expected to change dramatically with these machines’ use. Ever since, diverse prophecies of computing have continually emerged, through to the present day. As computing spread beyond the US and UK, such prophecies emerged from strikingly different economic, political, and cultural conditions. This volume explores how these expectations differed, assesses unexpected commonalities, and suggests ways to understand the divergences and convergences. This book examines thirteen countries, based on source material in ten different languages—the effort of an international team of scholars. In addition to analyses of debates, political changes, and popular speculations, we also show a wide range of pictorial representations of "the future with computers."

How the computer became universal. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific supertool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people, to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music and movies, communicate, and count their steps. In A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace these changes. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smart phones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents;Intelligent Virtual Agents;and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs);whether virtually or physically embodied;are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or other agents;reason;decide how to interact;and express attitudes such as emotions;engagement;or empathy. They are capable of interacting with people and one another in a socially intelligent manner using multimodal communicative behaviors;with the goal to support humans in various domains. Written by international experts in their respective fields;the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs;while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students;and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved. In two volumes;the book clearly structures the vast body of research. The first volume starts by introducing what is involved in SIAs research;in particular research methodologies and ethical implications of developing SIAs. It further examines research on appearance and behavior;focusing on multimodality. Finally;social cognition for SIAs is investigated using different theoretical models and phenomena such as theory of mind or pro-sociality. The second volume starts with perspectives on interaction;examined from different angles such as interaction in social space;group interaction;or long-term interaction. It also includes an extensive overview summarizing research and systems of human–agent platforms and of some of the major application areas of SIAs such as education;aging support;autism;and games.

This book introduces the concept of Event Mining for building explanatory models from analyses of correlated data. Such a model may be used as the basis for predictions and corrective actions. The idea is to create, via an iterative process, a model that explains causal relationships in the form of structural and temporal patterns in the data. The first phase is the data-driven process of hypothesis formation, requiring the analysis of large amounts of data to find strong candidate hypotheses. The second phase is hypothesis testing, wherein a domain expert’s knowledge and judgment is used to test and modify the candidate hypotheses. The book is intended as a primer on Event Mining for data-enthusiasts and information professionals interested in employing these event-based data analysis techniques in diverse applications. The reader is introduced to frameworks for temporal knowledge representation and reasoning, as well as temporal data mining and pattern discovery. Also discussed are the design principles of event mining systems. The approach is reified by the presentation of an event mining system called EventMiner, a computational framework for building explanatory models. The book contains case studies of using EventMiner in asthma risk management and an architecture for the objective self. The text can be used by researchers interested in harnessing the value of heterogeneous big data for designing explanatory event-based models in diverse application areas such as healthcare, biological data analytics, predictive maintenance of systems, computer networks, and business intelligence.