Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, engineering, mathematical, technological and social aspects. Major computing disciplines include computer engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, data science, information systems, information technology, digital art and software engineering.
A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another. Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems.
In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that map values to other values, rather than a sequence of imperative statements which update the running state of the program.
The LEO was a series of early computer systems created by J. Lyons and Co. The first in the series, the LEO I, was the first computer used for commercial business applications.
In computer science, an abstract machine is a theoretical model that allows for a detailed and precise analysis of how a computer system functions. It is similar to a mathematical function in that it receives inputs and produces outputs based on predefined rules. Abstract machines vary from literal machines in that they are expected to perform correctly and independently of hardware. Abstract machines are "machines" because they allow step-by-step execution of programmes; they are "abstract" because they ignore many aspects of actual (hardware) machines. A typical abstract machine consists of a definition in terms of input, output, and the set of allowable operations used to turn the former into the latter. They can be used for purely theoretical reasons as well as models for real-world computer systems. In the theory of computation, abstract machines are often used in thought experiments regarding computability or to analyse the complexity of algorithms. This use of abstract machines is fundamental to the field of computational complexity theory, such as finite state machines, Mealy machines, push-down automata, and Turing machines.
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"
Alfred Vaino Aho is a Canadian computer scientist best known for his work on programming languages, compilers, and related algorithms, and his textbooks on the art and science of computer programming.
The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) was a 10-year initiative begun in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to create computers using massively parallel computing and logic programming. It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like performance and to provide a platform for future developments in artificial intelligence. FGCS was ahead of its time, and its excessive ambitions led to commercial failure. However on a theoretical level, the project spurred the development of concurrent logic programming.
The von Neumann architecture—also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture—is a computer architecture based on a 1945 description by John von Neumann, and by others, in the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. The document describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with these components:
The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former Department of Artificial Intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the Department of Computer Science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.
James Reginald Cordy is a Canadian computer scientist and educator who is Professor Emeritus in the School of Computing at Queen's University. As a researcher he is most recently active in the fields of source code analysis and manipulation, software reverse and re-engineering, and pattern analysis and machine intelligence. He has a long record of previous work in programming languages, compiler technology, and software architecture.
Hope is a small functional programming language developed in the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh. It predates Miranda and Haskell; it is contemporaneous with ML, also developed at the University of Edinburgh. Hope was derived from NPL, a simple functional language developed by Rod Burstall and John Darlington in their work on program transformation. NPL and Hope are notable for being the first languages with call-by-pattern evaluation and algebraic data types.
NPL is a functional programming language with pattern matching designed by Rod Burstall and John Darlington in 1977. The language allows certain sets and logic constructs to appear on the right hand side of definitions, e.g.
setofeven(X) <= <:x: x in X & even(x) :>
Joseph Amadee Goguen was an American computer scientist. He was professor of Computer Science at the University of California and University of Oxford, and held research positions at IBM and SRI International.
Keith Leonard Clark is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, England.
Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall FRSE is a British computer scientist and one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.
Peter George Harrison is an Emeritus Professor of Computing Science at Imperial College London known for the reversed compound agent theorem, which gives conditions for a stochastic network to have a product-form solution.
In computing, algorithmic skeletons, or parallelism patterns, are a high-level parallel programming model for parallel and distributed computing.
Data-intensive computing is a class of parallel computing applications which use a data parallel approach to process large volumes of data typically terabytes or petabytes in size and typically referred to as big data. Computing applications which devote most of their execution time to computational requirements are deemed compute-intensive, whereas computing applications which require large volumes of data and devote most of their processing time to I/O and manipulation of data are deemed data-intensive.
