Stanford Computer Science department celebrates its 50th anniversary

The year was 1965. A first class stamp cost five cents. “The Sound of Music” opened to popular acclaim. And a Soviet cosmonaut made history by walking in space.

Meanwhile, at Stanford University, a handful of professors were forming one of the world’s first computer science departments, helping to pioneer a field that would profoundly affect so many aspects of research, commerce and culture.

“We want to celebrate the history of computer science at Stanford, but we also want to focus on the future of research in machine learning, cyber security, computer vision and other fields,” said Andrew Ng, an associate professor of computer science and an organizer of the 50th Anniversary event being held Tuesday.

More than 600 faculty, alumni and friends are expected to take part in this daylong celebration organized around the theme of computer science “In Service to the World.”

Speakers will include Stanford President John Hennessy and Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Meyer, a Stanford computer science graduate, along with many other notable alumni, faculty and industry guests.

The celebration commemorates how computer science emerged 50 years ago as a field independent of mathematics, where it was first offered at Stanford through the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S).

But Alex Aiken, the Alcatel-Lucent Professor in Communications and Networking, and chair of computer science at Stanford, said the event also celebrates how the department has adapted to meet growing student interest while maintaining the university’s liberal arts tradition.

“We’ve never lost the connection between computer science and the humanities and sciences, but today we are expanding and encouraging these ties in imaginative ways,” Aiken said, referring to the CS+X initiative that lets undergraduates study computer science in conjunction with other disciplines.

“CS+X is intended to be a first stab at what a modern liberal arts education might be,” Aiken said.

English department chairman Gavin Jones, a CS+X supporter, noted that computer science can trace its roots to an algorithm created by 19th century writer Ada Lovelace, who coined the term “poetical science” to describe what we call programming today.

“Stanford is forging a new synthesis of computer science and humanities, and it’s a two-way street,” Jones said, adding, “I see this when our undergraduates apply computational analysis to their studies in literature and culture, then turn around and do things like adapt proofreading techniques to help debug computer code.”

A series of panels at Tuesday’s event reflects some of the ways Stanford computer science has changed the world, including its famous startup culture, which will be the topic of one colloquia featuring, among others, Jerry Yang, the Stanford alum who co-founded Yahoo.

But while proud of the commercial successes that have emerged from Stanford computer science, the celebration’s organizers chose service to the world as their overarching theme because that is the motivation that drives their research.

“When I sit down with our faculty and students what they talk about are the challenges they see and their practical suggestions to make things better,” said Persis S. Drell, the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the Stanford School of Engineering, the James and Anna Marie Spilker Professor, and a professor of materials science and engineering as well as physics.

Service to the world will be the theme underlying the panel titled “Future Challenges.” That session will allow researchers such as Dan Boneh, the Rajeev Motwani Professor in Computer Science, a professor of electrical engineering and an expert in cybersecurity, to talk about issues such as privacy and trust, while Michael Bernstein, an assistant professor of computer science who studies crowdsourcing, will discuss how many hands can make light work of societal problems.

Two threads running through the day’s events will be remembrance of the pioneers who helped create the department and an appreciation of why computer science has proven to be such a useful academic discipline.

Among those pioneers was George Forsythe, who joined Stanford as a math professor in 1959 and six years later led the effort to carve out computer science as a discipline of its own.

“He was a wonderful leader,” said Gio Wiederhold, an emeritus professor of computer science research at Stanford who started here during the Forsythe era. “He was a great intellect who also knew how to listen to others and get people to go along.”

As for what makes computer science so successful, Aiken, the department chair, said the discipline’s secret sauce is the problem-solving approach known as computational thinking.

“What computer science teaches is a set of skills that enable you take a problem and break it down into a series of steps; let’s call that an algorithm,” Aiken said. “And once you’ve outlined the components of the problem, you can think about how to address each step at the lowest possible cost. That’s what engineers are about: getting the most out of the resources available.”

Professor Hector Garcia-Molina, a graduate student at Stanford during the department’s early days, said the computational thinking techniques he learned then still apply today. “The problems change, of course, and the complexity, but you still need a plan or a recipe; it consists of steps, and you have to reason about how efficient you are being,” he said.

Garcia-Molina, the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the School of Engineering and a professor of computer science and electrical engineering, will lead a special panel discussion on the challenges facing the computer science department as it begins its next 50 years.

Chief among these, perhaps, is maintaining academic excellence as more Stanford students choose computer science training and more industries seek to hire people with computational skills.

“There’s a tremendous need for computer science graduates, and it’s been accelerating over the last few years,” said Mehran Sahami, Associate Chair for Education in Computer Science, the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and a professor of computer science.

Sahami, who will talk Tuesday about the challenges facing computer science education, said there is an overarching need to attract more women and minorities, in part to help avert what might otherwise be a crippling skill shortfall.

“We need to cast a wider net,” Sahami said. “This is so important for so many reasons, not just for fairness or to get enough graduates, but because a diversity of minds looking at problems gives you a more robust set of solutions than relying on people with the same perspectives.”

Media contact:

Tom Abate, Associate Director of Communications for Stanford Engineering, tabate@stanford.edu, 650-736-2245