Careers in Computer Science

Jeff Gray, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorUAB – CIS Departmentgray@cis.uab.eduhttp://www.cis.uab.edu/gray

Department of Computer and Information SciencesUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham

S o f t C o m

Opportunities in Computing

Software is Everywhere• Think of some of the things that entertain

and enrich your daily life

• All of the above are driven by software• Software developers equipped with a

computer science degree have opportunities to work on exciting and cutting-edge projects

Software is Everywhere• 98% of all microprocessors control devices other than desktop computers– Automobiles, airplanes, televisions, copiers, razors…

• These devices also need software and often require strong technical skills to develop

>10Mb embedded software15-20Kb 1-1.5Mb

> 1M SLOC

Meteoric Opportunities

February 15, 2005: Domain registered (youtube.com)

Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve ChenAround 25 years old at this time

November 2005:Official Debut

100 Million Clips viewed daily; 65,000 uploads per day 20 Million visitors each month October 2006: Time Magazine Invention of the Year

Great Talk: From Concept to HyperGrowthhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg

October 6, 2006: Google purchased for $1.65B

Alabama Technology Leaders

Jimmy WalesWikipedia FounderHuntsville Native

• The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. • Since its creation in 2001, nearly 10 million articles in over 250 languages.• Over 680 million visitors each year; 75,000 active contributors.

The Demand for Computer Scientists

Offshore hysteria: Many companies with high paying jobs within the US are unable to fill positions with computer scientists.Source: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestjobs/top50/index.html

The Demand for Computer Scientists

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 5 of the top-10 growing jobs have a computer science focus.

(Reprinted with Permission from onInvesting)

The Demand for Computer Scientists

Computer Science occupations are projected to grow twice as fast as the average for all occupations.

Source: http://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/2007/fall/art02.pdf

Between 2006-2016 a projected 822,000 new jobs will be available in Computer Science occupation areas in the United States alone.

The Demand for Computer Scientists

Source: IEEE Spectrum, August 2008

Computer science has the highest engineering salary and the fastest growing salary increase.

The Demand for Computer Scientists

• National Job Outlook– $56,921 is the average starting salary for

computer science degrees in the class of 2008 (among top 3 highest starting salaries); 7.9% increase over 2007 offers

– 1000s of openings each at Microsoft Game Studios, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Google

– Epic Games President: “We do not hire anyone under $100k”

The Demand for Computer Scientists• Local Job Outlook

– In Birmingham, there was a recent need for 200 Java programmers; exceeded university’s ability to deliver employees

– CTS hiring several new developers each month– Summary of recent openings in Birmingham:

• JAVA/J2EE/EJB ($60/hr), Peoplesoft ($95/hr), SAP Technical ($85/hr), SAP Functional ($95/hr), Corba ($55/hr), Oracle DBA ($70/hr), DB2 DBA ($70/hr), Sybase DBA ($75/hr), .Net,vb.net,C#,asp.net ($60/hr), C/C++ ($55/hr), Cobol ($55/hr)

• Recent Birmingham Software Success– UAB CIS Graduates

– Dr. Stephen Brossette (Founder) Dr. Daisy Wong (Dir. IT)

– Estimated $100M– 179% growth – tops among

Birmingham companies

Synopsis of Faculty Member’s Research

• Techniques that enable software developers to automate common tasks

• Improved modularity to enable adaptive changes to large-scale software

• Supporting end-users with notations and languages that are appropriate for their domain, rather than computer programming languages

The “Twisted Plot” MetaphorThe Problem of Keeping Track of Things in Your Head

• The interactions among characters and overlapping events makes a good novel (“thickness” of plot as a complexity metric)

• The author must take care in preserving, throughout the entire novel, internal consistency within plot

• e.g., a change in the conclusion of the plot may necessitate global changes in all chapters

• Keeping track of all the twists can be difficult because the various concerns of the plot are distributed across multiple chapters

• but…Software development is MANY orders of magnitude more difficult!

Logically Consistent?

…

Chapter 2

Conclusion

Chapter 1

…

Factors Leading to Chosen Career

• New form to express creativity

• Science Fairs– 8th grade

• Bulletin Board Software– High School

• Tic-Tac-Toe Learner

• “Wargames”

Scientific Method in CS Research

18

Code Clones• Code clone: a sequence of statements

that are duplicated at multiple locations in a program

• Research shows that 6-8% of large-scale application code are clones (Jiang, 2007)

Source Code

Cloned Code

19

int func1() { int x = 1; int y = x + 5; return y;}

int func2() { int p = 1; int q = p + 5; return q;}

int main() { int x = 1; int y = x + 5; return y;}

int func3() { int s = 1; int t = s + 5; s++; return t;}

Types of Clones

Exact match Exact match with differing variable names

Near exact match

Original code

int func1() { int x = 1; int y = x + 5; return y;}

int func2() { int p = 1; int q = p + 5; return q;}

int main() { int x = 1; int y = x + 5; return y;}

int func3() { int s = 1; int t = s + 5; s++; return t;}

int func1() { int x = 1; int y = x + 5; return y;}

int func2() { int p = 1; int q = p + 5; return q;}

int main() { int x = 1; int y = x + 5; return y;}

int func3() { int s = 1; int t = s + 5; s++; return t;}

int func1() { int x = 1; int y = x + 5; return y;}

int func2() { int p = 1; int q = p + 5; return q;}

int main() { int x = 1; int y = x + 5; return y;}

int func3() { int s = 1; int t = s + 5; s++; return t;}

Scientific Method in CS Research

Extra Stuff

• Video of undergraduate research– Self parking car

• Alice video games by middle schoolers