Dr. Bo Jin Hatfield returned to Salem State College on July 1, 2007, and was been appointed by President Nancy D. Harrington to serve as Chairperson of the Computer Science Department from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2010.
    During the 2006-2007 academic year, Dr. Hatfield was on leave of absence from Salem State College and was at California State University at Fresno.   During her absence, Dr. Mikhail Brikman served as Department Chairperson.

    As of January 2007, all CSC courses numbered below 200, as well as all Business Technology and Education (BTE) courses, have been re-labeled as Information Technology courses, identified by the prefix ITC. In both printed schedules and on this web site, ITC courses will henceforth be listed separately from CSC courses.

     During the 2002-2003 academic year the Computer Science Department hosted a visitation team from CSAC/CSAB (the Computer Science Accreditation Commission of the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board) in its quest for accreditation of the Computer and Information Studies degree program. In mid-August 2004 the Salem State College administration and the Computer Science Department were notified by the Computing Accreditation Commission of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (CAC/ABET) that the program has been accredited, effective 1 October 2002.

    As of July 2004, the Salem State College faculty members who teach Business Technology and Education (BTE) courses were transferred to the Computer Science Department,  and the BTE courses (now re-labeled ITC, for Information Technology) are listed in the Computer Science Department section in the College catalog, and on this web site:   see the Directory.
    The three faculty members are Associate Professors Robert W. Campbell and Gregg C. Whyte and Assistant Professor Everett H. Rudolph.

    The following item appeared in the February 2000 number (vol.2, issue 5) of President Harrington's newsletter From the President's Desk:

    Salem State's Computer and Information Studies Program was cited by the Massachusetts Board of Higher education for numerous strengths in a systemwide review of programs.   In a Dec. 10, 1999 memo to President Harrington, the late Chancellor Stanley Koplik emphasized that, 'The continuous improvement and expansion of CIST programs systemwide are of the highest priority for the Board.'   Strengths enumerated for the SSC program, chaired at the time by Edward J. Wilkens, included well-covered basics, well-integrated curriculum, well-thought-out course descriptions, growing enrollment, alumni support, sound faculty credentials which show a good representation from industry, and adequate and accessible equipment."   The CSC major program subsequently received full accreditation from the Computing Sciences Accreditation Board.

»     The programming language currently used in the core sequence CSC201J-CSC202J-CSC260 in the CSC major is Java. (Prior to Fall 2001, the Ada95 language was used.) In the Fall of 2002, the foundational problem-solving and programming sequence (formerly CSC201 and CSC202) was renumbered and retitled as
      CSC 201J   Software Design and Programming I
      CSC 202J   Software Design and Programming II.
The CSC201J-202J sequence and many other CSC courses with a laboratory component ---CSC 245A, CSC 260, CSC 263, CSC 266, CSC 271, CSC 273, CSC 311, CSC 312A, CSC 315A, CSC 320, CSC 325, CSC 330A, CSC 390, and CSC 445--- now have scheduled and required laboratory sessions (usually 3 hours per week) in addition to lectures, and registration for these lab sessions is part of registration for the course.
     All of the recent changes of number, title and credits are summarized at the bottom of the list of courses page and are reflected in the individual course documents on this site. Course documents for the previous versions of these courses are still available in an archive.

»     Joseph Weizenbaum, former MIT professor and a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, died on March 5, 2008, in Groeben, Germany, of complications from stomach cancer.   In the 1960s he created a software program called ELIZA (named after Eliza Doolittle, the heroine of "My Fair Lady") which simulated conversation with a therapist.   The program's "conversations" were so realistic that many users were impelled to confide personal secrets, a result that so disturbed Weizenbaum that he began to question human over-reliance on technology.   His arguments were set forth in a 1976 book, "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation".

»     The recipients of the $250,000 A. M. Turing Award for 2007 were announced early in 2008. They are Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis. The award is for their work on an automated method for locating errors in computer hardware and software. The method is called Model Checking, introduceed originally in 1982 and currently the most widely used technique for locating and analyzing errors in both hardware and software.

»     At the annual Awards Banquet of the Association for Computing Machinery on 9 June 2007, four awards honoring outstanding achievement and innovation were presented:
    Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award -- to Robert K. Brayton (UC Berkley) for work in logic synthesis and electronic system simulation
    Software Systems Award -- to Eiffel Software (an object-oriented language and development environment)
    ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award -- to Karen Sparck Jones (Cambridge University) for work in information retrieval and tools that are used in modern search engines
    Grace Murray Hopper Award -- to Daniel Klein (University of California, Berkeley) for the creation of a machine-learning system that is able to examine text and infer a corresponding high-level grammar without human assistance.

»     Computer software pioneer John Backus died at his home in Ashland, Oregon, on Saturday, March 17, 2007. He was 82 years old. At IBM in the 1950s Backus and a team of associates invented FORTRAN, the first high-level (platform-independent) programming language, and thereby fundamentally changed the field of software development. Backus received the A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1977. He was also awarded a National Medal of Science in 1975, and the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering in 1993.

»     Dr. Jean D. Ichbiah, principal architect of the Ada programming language, died of cancer on 26 January 2007 at his home in Burlington, Massachusetts. He was 66 years old. The Ada language was developed for the Department of Defense in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dr. Ichbiah was a recipient of the French Legion of Honor and was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

»     Douglas Ross, a computer scientist, software engineer, and computer language developer, died on 31 January 2007 at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was 77 years old. Mr. Ross studied and later taught at M.I.T. He directed the development of the APT and AED computer languages, and was a developer of the Structured Analysis and Design technique for the creation of computer software.

»     Computer engineer Paul Flaherty died at his home in Belmont, California, on 16 March 2006. At Digital Equipment Corporation in 1995, Flaherty and two other DEC employees created the AltaVista search engine, the first such engine that generated its own searchable full-text index instead of using indexes compiled by human operators. In less than a year, AltaVista users were generating several million searches per day. AltaVista separated from DEC and became a private company in 1999.

»     Early in 2006 software pioneer and language designer Peter Naur was named as the recipient of the 2005 A. M. Turing Award, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery.   Dr. Naur was one of the designers of the Algol 60 programming language, and edited the report that described and specified the language. He was co-inventor of an elegant notational system, later known as Backus-Naur Form (BNF), for specifying the syntax of programming languages. He also made significant contributions in the areas of compiler design and programming methodology.

»     Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, who developed the TCP/IP protocols for Internet communication, have been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (on Wednesaday 9 November 2005) in recognition of this accomplishment. As noted below, they have already received the Turing Award from the A.C.M. for the same work.

»     Jack St. Clair Kilby, inventor of the microchip, died at his home in Dallas, Texas, on Monday 20 June 2005.   Kilby invented the integrated electronic circuit while working alone in his Texas Instruments laboratory on July 24, 1958.   His idea was to place all of the necessary elements---resistors, capacitors, and transistors---on a single thin slice of silicon or germanium.   A few months later, another inventor, Robert Noyce (later one of the founders of Intel Corporation), came up with the same idea. The two men eventually agreed to be credited as co-inventors of the microchip.

»     The Association for Computing Machinery's 2004 winners of the A. M. Turing Award (sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Computing") were announced in February 2005. The winners are Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, recognized for their work on the design and implementation of the basic communications protocols of the Internet. More information on these and other awards can be found here.

»     The Millennium Technology Prize was established in 2002 by the Finnish government to honor "outstanding technological innovation that directly promotes people's quality of life, is based on humane values, and encourages sustainable economic development."   The first such prize was awarded on 15 June 2004 to Tim Berners-Lee for his work in the development of the World Wide Web.   Full information on the award and the presentation ceremony can be found here.

»     The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced the winners of its ACM Awards for the year 2003.   For full information, click here.

»     Dr. James M. Early, an electrical engineer and transistor pioneer, died on January 12, 2004 at the age of 81. Dr. Early worked with William Schockley at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he developed much of the theory of bipolar transistors. He later became vice president of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California. Fairchild is credited with revolutionizing the computer chip industry. Other companies that grew out of the work at Fairchild include National Semiconductor and Intel Corporation.

»     In August 2004 Intel Corporation announced the development of 35-nanometer transistor switches, about thirty percent smaller than those on current state-of-the-art memory chips. As a result, the company has been able to increase the capacity of a memory chip to 70 megabits. This is in line with the well-known Moore's Law, first proposed in the 1960s: that the number of transistors that a memory chip could hold would double approximately every two years. That prediction has held true ever since. (The "law" was proposed by Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel Corporation.)

»     The year 2004 marks the 40th anniversary of the creation of the BASIC programming language. Designed to be easier to learn than other programming languages of the time, the language was developed at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire by Mathematics professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, and was first used on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, a network of communication terminals connected to a mainframe. (Information on the DTSS may be found here.)

»     Goodbye, floppy disk! Early in February 2003, Dell Computer Corporation announced that the 3½-inch diskette drives would no longer be standard on many of its desktop computers. Apple Computer stopped including floppy drives in its Mackintosh computers several years ago. Gateway Computers now offers discounts to customers who order systems without floppy drives. The current widespread view is that the diskette, with a storage capacity of only 1.44MB, is too limited to deal with the increasaingly large volumes of data that computer users now want or need to store.
    The 3½-inch diskette was introduced by Sony in 1980, and quickly replaced the previous 5¼-inch disk (which really was "floppy"!) in use since 1976.

»     The computer professional society ACM posts a three-times-a-week digest of up to date news in computer-related fields, ACM TechNews, "Timely Topics for IT Professionals." The digest was inaugurated in December 1999, and is produced under the sponsorship of Gateway Inc. New editions appear every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and can be found at http://www.acm.org/technews/ .   An archive of printed copies of this news digest is available in the Computer Science Department office, MH200.

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