The Impact of Computer Science

Hmm, been a while since I last blogged in any meaningful way - and I had such high hopes for this blog, too! I promise I'll be better over the summer.

Anyway, I feel moved to post about something I came across just this morning: a project to place the names of victims of 9/11 on a memorial in New York. The concept for the memorial was that names should be arranged not alphabetically, but rather according to where people were and who they were with when they died - linking victims through "meaningful adjacencies", in the words of the architect. It's a wonderful idea, but how could such a thing be achieved?

This is, of course, precisely the kind of problem that computer scientists like to tackle. I won't go into the details here, other than to note that guy implementing this, Jer Thorp, made some interesting use of Processing for the visualisation of victim relationships and name placement. You can read Jer's blog entry if you want to know more.

What strikes me most about this work is that it represents a very human and emotionally significant application of computer science. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that CS makes an impact only by improving technology, but this little project demonstrates brilliantly that it has the capacity to connect with human beings more directly than that.

Live train and tube maps

One of the nicest mashups I've seen shows approximately live maps for UK mainline trains and the London Underground.

I was particularly taken by a view of trains to and from Leeds (especially after checking the box to move trains at 10x normal speed).

Gnuplot in Action

I've used gnuplot for a long, long time without ever truly getting to grips with its intricacies - but I'm rectifying that with the aid of Philipp Janert's Gnuplot in Action. So far, I've learned three interesting and useful new things in the first thirty pages: a good sign!

The one that wasn't a game...

Following on from yesterday's post about the recent graphics programming assignment done by my first-year students, it is worth noting that one of our students was adventurous enough to implement something other than a game.

Alex Hawdon wrote a very interesting program that invokes p0f to analyse incoming attempts to establish TCP connections with your machine, interprets IP addresses using a GeoIP database and then serves up the results as a KML file over HTTP - the latter then being monitored via Google Earth, of course.  The net result: a 3D, real-time visualisation of attempted hacks against your machine.