 Bingo. We're back. 2 o'clock, Rock. Scott Robertson, Ph.D., Professor of the Information Computer Sciences Department at UH Manoa here on Research in Manoa. Welcome, Scott. Thank you. It's fun to be here. I wish it was you. I always wanted to be a computer person professionally. I spent a lot of time just for fun over a long time. I've been doing it since, oh gee, Clipper. Does that bring a bell? Clipper, in the early 80s, I've been off D-Base, D-Base 2, because there was no D-Base 1. Right. It's just D-Base then. I envy you, a fabulous job teaching computer science. Well, you have a good job too, though. This is wonderful being in front of cameras and lights and talking to people, different people all the time. But you have the power to change the world. That'd be great. So tell us, what is it like to be a professor of computer science information and computer science at UH Manoa? Well, it's a wonderful situation, actually. We get to teach really interesting students. We get to send them off on their new life as computer scientists, hopefully. I think the answer to that depends on what kind of computer scientist you are, though. So if you are a database person, you mentioned D-Base, then you have one kind of experience. If you're a software engineer, you have another kind of experience. If you're a human-computer interaction person, you have another kind of experience. It's really broken down in many different disciplines now, isn't it? Back 20, 30 years ago, they don't have those separations. Now it's many, many disciplines. Yeah, I think computer science is going through a growth period and also a diversification period. So a lot of computer science departments are trying to figure out how new people fit in. So different application areas. How do social media people fit into the hardcore... Like you said, there used to be a core of computer science. Yeah. And everybody knew what that was, and it's still there. Yeah. But now there's all these other things, security or interface design or something like that. So how to fit all that into the curriculum and get students interested in these different directions is a challenge. Well, who comes? Who wants to be in computer science information technology? Who wants to do that these days? And a footnote is a few years ago, we had a show where Microsoft had a team in town, and we got them to come to the HPR studios and tell us what they were doing. And not one of them was born in the U.S. In fact, all three of them was a recent arrival from another country all around the world. And you say to yourself, gee, does this explain why Bill Gates is out there going from college to college trying to encourage people to study computer science? So do you have enough people who want to do it? And who are they that do want to do it? We have plenty of people who want to do it. So we're lucky in that we are growing. Computer science in general continues to grow. The people who want to do it. So number one that comes to mind are gamers. We have people who say, I love making... Playing computer games. I'd like to make computer games. And then we have people interested in visualization. And usually, you know, kind of geeks in the basement like to come to computer science. Two o'clock in the morning? Yes, right. Night owls like to take computer science. But I think that one thing they find out early on is how big computer science really is, what a broad discipline it is, and what all the opportunities are. I think they imagine that they'll be a programmer. They're most people who come in freshman year, young people, they're hoping to sit out a computer in a company and write code, which many of them will do. But actually, there are so many other possibilities for them, which they'll learn over four years while they're there. They might become people who plan large software projects as opposed to actually writing the code. But it's good to know how to write the code if you want to plan. If you want to be an executive over some discipline, you need to know about the discipline. Yes, absolutely. You need to know about the code. So they still learn that. We still teach them that. It's interesting you said the discipline. They also need to know about the discipline. So let's say they become interested in bioinformatics, then they need to learn something about biology or genetics or something like that. Or maybe they want to do visualizations for NASA or something. Well then they're going to have to learn about planets and space. So there's always a domain that they need to learn something about. I want to ask you about it. Actually, I made a mental note to ask you about that. In the old days, if you were invested in computer science, you'd be the only one on your block. There weren't that many people who knew how to do this. It was arcane. The languages were difficult. You had to really be invested before it would be useful. Now, of course, at the front end, the pioneering aspect of it, you're going to be unique or very few of you. But in the world of consumer computer science, we call it, there's so many possibilities, so many ways to do things. So I give you somebody at UH Minoa who's in science and who says, gee, my science would benefit by having a huge database. So I have two choices. I can go and talk to Scott or I can learn it myself and just go in my basement at two o'clock in the morning and figure out using one of those intermediate programs and learn how to do a spreadsheet database and handle all the data I'm getting from all the sources, all the sensors that I have available to me. It's a tension, isn't it? I mean, some scientists are going to do it as a matter of independent thinking. They'll do it all by themselves. Thank you very much. And some will come to you and get your expertise. What are your thoughts about that? So you're talking about computer science as a tool or as a service on the one hand and then computer science as a core discipline on the other hand. So it is possible to take some kind of course, scripting course or something like that and be able to put together a program for yourself, an application for maybe a civic application or something like that, hack something together that will work basically for your purpose. However, the computer science education part helps you. There are going to be fundamental principles that you should know that would have helped you develop this more quickly perhaps or better, more powerful, more efficient. That's the more important part, that it would be more efficient or it would be more memory efficient or more time efficient or have a better interface or something like that. So there are lots of principles, which if you just learn it yourself, it's hit or miss in that case. Yeah. Well, we have a slide show. You want to talk about some of your slides? Yeah, so I did bring a few things to look at. So one of them is early desktop computer. I think it's important to think about where did computer science come from? What did people use to imagine? And there was a mechanical engineer named Vannevar Bush, 1946. So this is a very birth of computer science. And this is what he imagined a computer would become. So if you think about state of computers in that time, they were large machines, one giant machine in a room someplace and engineers interacted with them, plugging in cables and using levers and things like that. But he wrote in the Atlantic an article called As We May Think. And he was already imagining that computers could be models of how people think. This was his idea of what a desktop computer would look like. It was in a desk and the diagram shows a desk. And you'll see some other interesting things on there in 1946. He has people interacting with screens, with pictures. Which didn't exist at the time. Didn't exist at all. Not even close. He was dreaming. He was imagining. He was completely making this up, dreaming it up. Wonderful. They're interacting with a pen, a stylus of some kind. Inside there is a memory drum of some kind. And he said, Well, these will all be connected to each other. And they'll be connected to what he called a world encyclopedia, giant encyclopedia. So you could write a word on it. And then it would go to the encyclopedia world encyclopedia and come back and tell you everything about whatever that word was. He was looking way into the future. So he was thinking about the internet. He was thinking about interaction with the computer through graphics, writing with your hand, speaking to it is something that he was thinking about. And communicating it with other people through it. Now, one thing you don't see on that interestingly is a keyboard. There's no keyboard. Because they didn't interact with keyboards at that time. And he never imagined that anybody ever would. He put the whole notion of a typewriter aside. Yeah, that's something else. But you know what strikes me about this? So 1940 and then you get to go fast forward for, oh, you know, 50, 60 years before really any of it got serious. And why why can't we do that today? Why can't we do 50, 60 years ahead today? Can you do that? Do you do that? Do your students do that? Do your colleagues do that? Well, yes, hopefully that's what we are doing in computer science thinking 50 or 60 years ahead. So now we're talking about things like AI and robots and social robots and things like that. Those will be part of our life in say 50 or 60 years and we're imagining them now. And some of us are going to be pretty close like Vannevar Bush was. And some of us are going to be pretty far off. And it'll be funny. Yeah, it's so exciting. It's very exciting. And well, just in my, you know, since my education, I originally was interested in natural language processing. And when I was getting my PhD, this was a very new field and very limited what you could do. Now, of course, I can pick up my phone, you can pick up your phone and talk to Siri or one of the other, you know, agents on the phone. And it understands, well, it, it recognizes what you're saying. And it can do something in response. And it's moving at logarithmic speed. You know, this year, you have one level of quality next year, it'll be double that and so forth with the Echo and Siri and the Samsung program. Really remarkable. But it strikes me that, you know, learning AI, doing these things that were visionary a few years ago, and now our reality must be really exciting. And, and you're there. And so if you if you say, well, you can do a spreadsheet and you can get a program off the shelf and do a spread, that's nothing compared to being at the frontier where you are. So yes, it used to be the case that computers were all about work. So they mentioned the spreadsheet that was a very early revolutionary idea that to put a spreadsheet onto a computer, document processing was early application on computers, it was all about work. And the field of human computer interaction was all about studying how people worked with computers. Now, as you say, we all have computers, multiple computers, you have a computer in your pocket, you have a computer at home, you have maybe a computer on your wrist, and you use it for a lot of things other than work. Yes, you use it for entertainment, of course, but also communication for looking things up for finding your way around. Eventually, we'll use it for socializing, making friends, all that kind of stuff. So they've really become central to everyday life, as opposed to just the work environment. And that's one thing that makes them extremely interesting in the future. Well, your specialty, the interaction, you started out as a social scientist, a psychologist. Right. And so you come at it from the point of view, is this going to work for me, for a user, for the public, for, you know, for a purchaser, a consumer? Yes, right. Yes. And, you know, it strikes me that that is really important because you can sit at two o'clock in the morning and code all night and come up with a product that nobody gives a rip about, that nobody wants. It's like design thinking, it's like you have to figure out what the world really wants, you can't dictate that, and you have to be responsive to it, and so forth. And what comes to me in this conversation with you now, Scott, is that if there's one area of activity, of course, if you study business and you learn how to make a million billion, you know, buying and selling things and inventing companies, that's one thing. But in terms of creativity and the possibility of making uku bucks with software that nobody thought of before, of finding creative opportunities that nobody thought of before, there's no better area to do that. And you have famous graduates, do you ever think about going and doing projects yourself? Do you have some patents going on? I don't have anything going on at the moment, but I do have a couple of patents in the past. And they really have to do with application areas, not so much the, so there's the inside of computing, say, algorithm, new algorithms or new programming languages or theory and things like that. But what's really popping right now are the applications, writing an app of some kind. Do I need to have a degree in computer science to write an app? Well, there's a lot of kids out there, they don't have degrees and they do that. That's right. So I would say yes, of course, because I'm in the business of giving people an education. So there's a difference between an app that does something very quick and a larger, you know, piece of software that's very complicated, a large, complicated piece of software needs a team. And that team needs to be organized. And that team needs to have a goal and a direction and some input about what users want and all that stuff. So it's very different from making a quick game or a quick map or something like that. You know, I mean, it really was Steve Jobs most brilliant thing to leave the world with the notion of a cell phone with an open platform for apps. You know, what's emerged at least in my observation since that time is that, sure, an app was a cute, a cute play toy at the beginning. Now an app is the entry way to enterprise software that can rule the world and it is happening. Yeah, programming has changed quite a bit because now they're with with open source software. A lot of it is looking for a library, looking in libraries or things that people have already written. There's no reason to write the same thing over a thousand times. So there are lots of shared libraries and open source software and people, they have to know what they're looking for, of course, but then they look for it and they piece it together more than writing it from scratch now. Yeah. So really the critical thing they have to learn is what am I building? Not how am I building it? They have to learn that a little, but what they really have to learn is why am I building this? Who's going to use it and for what purpose? Yeah, and is it a good purpose or not? Yes. Right after this break, I want to talk about good purposes and bad purposes. I want to talk about hacking, taking these skills and this kind of, you know, open source collaboration and having and doing the wrong thing with it because that happens and increasingly it's in our news. We'll be right back. You'll see. Hey, has your signal just been taken over or am I supposed to be here? 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Bingo, we're back with Scott Robertson, PhD professor of computer information and computer science at UH Minoa. So important, so important not only for the university, not only for industry, but for the future of the human race. May I say that? I think that's right. Yes. Yes. We had said earlier that computer systems are becoming part of everyday life, not just isolated in small pockets like your work or whatever. And so I think one area where that's really important, where that's really changed recently is social media. So that's what I happen to have been studying lately is social media and you know Twitter, Facebook, Reddit. It's amazing what's happened only in the past 10 years on social media. It's changed the way human beings conduct themselves. All around the world, it's gone viral in every way it can and it rules in so many ways and it has the promise of being much more of the same and those kinds of things that go 50 years out, they boggle your mind. Yeah, so you said earlier what's going to happen in 50 years. So this graph that's up right now is the growth of social media, how many, the percentage of U.S. adults who use social media. And that top line is 18 to 29 year olds, young people. And you can see starting in around 2005, 2006. That's around the period when Facebook and Twitter were invented or became online. And you can see incredible growth there and you can see now 2016 we have something like 90, 85, 90% of young people use some kind of social media. The other lines are different age groups. So you can see that 30 to 49 year olds are almost right up there with the teenagers. Well, it's a bell curve. You know, as the young people get older, they carry the skill and the interest with them. Our last show, not an hour ago, Carlene McKay talks about workforce. She's 80 years old and she makes her living on social media. Very Akamai. So it's not just limited to the young people. Oh, absolutely not. That's right. And in fact, at the moment, the fastest growing sector are older people, as we might want to call them, and call us. Because it's almost saturated by young people. Really interesting. So how many thoughts about where it's going to go in the next 50 years? Well, I was going to talk about one thing I'm studying now is how it's used in understanding politics. And so I know that's especially we just had an election and social media played a large role in it. And I started studying this when Obama ran the first time. He's considered to be the first Facebook, ran the first Facebook campaign, and was very successful in raising money. And more importantly in building a community and starting dialogue. He really believes in it, and he would he opened that door for the world. Yes, and he had a fantastic social media team. And what's interesting about it is that it creates a community of people who are, I hope, interested in politics and voting and so on. Hopefully young people. I remember hearing a thing from him when he first took office where he said, you know, do we really need the electoral college? Oh, well, why don't we have direct voting? You know, off your telephone, whatever. Sure, there's something I think that we should be looking forward to in the future. That we will have direct voting and direct democracy, no electoral college, and vote on our smartphones or vote on in our virtual environment or something like that. Yeah, which means it has the prospect and likelihood, if you ask me, of changing the way our government works, changing the way we govern ourselves, or we rule our ourselves. It also in the process has the prospect and possibility and likely possibility. In fact, it's already demonstrated of changing humanity's way of dealing with itself. Changing our world, our social structures, you know, your social psychologist person, and making a world that we could, we would never have imagined in 1940 ever. That's right, it certainly does, because now you can talk to anybody in the world, you can tweet something, and anybody can find it. So it's really a broadcast medium from person to person. I do have, I have another slide up here on sources of online news. So news is a big thing right now. Where do people get their news? And for sources of online news, oh well, this particular one is how social media users feel about political posts and discussions. So you're seeing a lot of things about Trump saved right now or something, and you can see that 37% of people say they're completely worn out from political posts and news. And politics. And politics, yes. It turns out now that people get about almost 40% of their news from social media. So no longer do people go to, well, as much to say the New York Times even online or the Washington Post or whatever happens to be, or even CNN, but they get it through their social media contacts. And this is a whole new domain, because when they get their news that way, they also get it embedded in all of their friends' comments, you know, so your friend tells you what they, for breakfast that day and your next friend tells you, you know, how they feel, and then the next one posts something from Donald Trump, and then the next one, so how does that weird context affect the news you read about Donald Trump? So that's something I'm interested in now. Well, yeah, and I think it's very, very interesting. I mean, it's across, we talk frequently with the journalism program at the School of Communications right down the way from you. Oh, yes. The fellow named Brett Opegard, he's one of our regular contributors. Oh, good. And it's very interesting to see how journalism is changing. But going to the social media impact of journalism in journalism, number one is you get the headlines. You don't get the news story. And you wind up making your opinions on the basis of very limited information, the headline rule, writer's rule, just the way they do in the paper. So, yes, you get the headline and you get what your friends have said about it. So we have looked at why do people go to stories and why do people not go to stories. So you see the headline and you see the picture, why do you either decide to go to it or you decide not to. So people look at the number of likes that it's gotten and whether their friends, who posted it, was it one of their friends that they agree with, and that will cause them to go to a story. And this takes us in the last few minutes of our show to the whole notion of hacking, you know, political systems. This week, Boris Johnson, who was one of the big political people in Britain, made a statement to Russia. They said, stop hacking our system. Do not try to manipulate our political process, which opens the whole notion that not only have the Russians been involved in trying to hack our system here in the United States, but they've been doing it in Europe. And we have a European correspondent who, you know, revealed that at least, as far as most Europeans are concerned, this has been an issue with Russia for a long time. This is what they do. It opens a whole new world. It's the technology that you work on. It's the social media. And it's an intersection with politics and geopolitical issues and agendas. And what's going to happen, what is happening, is the science of computer science is turning into the science of geopolitical manipulation. Sorry to say. Well, it is. And this is why it's important for people who are computer scientists to also think about things like political science or civics or history or all the various kinds of humanities disciplines that they should know about. And also just regular people who are using computer systems should also be aware of those things. Because there's there's an eroding of trust right now in, say, the news and in voting systems and a lot of things that are electronic. So people are afraid, afraid of them. They think their security is in jeopardy. And this is not a good thing for democracy. You know, Facebook was faced with this whole notion of fake news and trying to, you know, remodel itself so that people could discern the real news from the fake news because regrettably, there are a lot of people who put fake news out and including Russia. You heard it here. Well, we all hack each other. That too, yeah. And it's those comments you talk about, you know, that you read the comments. Some of them are fake or misleading. So what they did, and this is my question to you, they did what Facebook did, I think today or yesterday, they created this thing called disputed. It's a disputed flag. So if you think, if you, you know, the consumer of news, if you think that something you saw on Facebook or elsewhere, well, especially Facebook, is disputable, disputed, questionable, perhaps fake, you can say so. And then they're going to take a demographic of that and going to figure out if a lot of people are saying it's disputed, then there's real question as to whether it's fake news. Is this enough on the demographic basis, you know, on a large databases, on a computer science basis, is this enough? Or is there something more we can do, you know, to clean up, you know, the fake news from the news that comes in us? So my opinion on that is that that's a technology solution, which is not going to be sufficient. It's an interesting idea, but it's a technology solution. And I think this requires some kind of a human solution. So the technology solution, first of all, it's going to be questioned. People still have to trust, do I trust it, what Facebook thinks or not? It's also going to get hacked. I predict it will not be any time at all before people start disputing, you know, a news story and then there's an organized disputing of a news story and Facebook is going to go crazy trying to figure out how to separate, you know, fake disputes from real disputes, I guess. So that, the technology solution is part way there, but not enough. And what I think is the real solution is a human one is education. So how can we get people to look at these stories and make a judgment on their own, you know, think about who, who, what the source is and what's the plausibility of what's being said and is there an agenda behind it? All the things we would like to teach people about how to consume news, we need to do it in the online world because now they're getting that force fed to them. They, they really need the, the knowledge tools to be able to sort it out for themselves. So I think it's really a human solution, not a technology solution. Oh, I agree absolutely. You know, in the world now it's so easy to manipulate somebody who's not educated. If you're educated it's more difficult to manipulate you. Well, there's a future issue is robots, chat bots, which will start discussing things with you and introducing things into your newsfeed, become your friend, they're not even real possibly. So these are, I feel we're going to see a movie about this. Yes, these are. It's fiction come true. Thank you, Scott. Scott Robinson. Oh, this was really fun. Thank you very much. Great, great fun. Great to have you here.