The science of computing

"Preface "That's not computer science," a professor told me when I abandoned the traditional computer science and software engineering study tracks to pursue computing topics that I thought to be more societally valuable. Very quickly I learned that the best way to respond to such remarks was a series of counter questions about what exactly is computer science and why. The difficulties that many brilliant people had responding those questions led me to suspect that there's something deeper about that topic, yet the more I read about it, the more confused I got. Over the years I've heard the same reason--"That's not computer science"--used to turn down tenure, to reject doctoral theses, and to decline funding. Eventually I became convinced that the nature of computing as a discipline is something worth studying and writing about. Fortunate enough, the word "no" does not belong to the vocabulary of professor Erkki Sutinen, who became my supervisor, academic mentor, colleague, and friend. Throughout my studies in his group I worked on a broad variety of applied computing topics, ranging from unconventional to eccentric, yet in the meanwhile Erkki encouraged me to continue to study computing's disciplinary identity, and I ended up writing, in a great rush, a thesis on the topic. When my curiosity took me from the University of Eastern Finland to Asia and then to Africa for the better half of a decade, I kept on writing small practice essays on computing's identity"--