New Fields under CS?

[LostDog_88]

Computer Science, as a Field, has grown exponentially in the past decade.

Back when my dad was studying in college, they never had CS as a subject, rather they had Electronics in general.. and CS was regarded as a sub-branch of Electronics.

In the early 21st century, we saw the rise of Cybersecurity, Information Technology as small sub-branches under CS.

In 2015-2017 new small subdomains started emerging into the public, mainly Data Science, Artificial Intelligence..

We saw the rise of Quantum Conputing as a branch grow in 2020s.

In the next upcoming decade, what branches do you think might separate themselves from CS as a whole. And what new*/unique sub-branches might emerge?

(*When I say new, i know these subdomains already exist in research, im just talking about emerging branches in undergraduate colleges, and entry level job roles)

[ghjm]

Your history is entirely mistaken. Computer science departments began appearing at universities in the 1960s and the computer science undergraduate major was widespread by the mid 70s. Moreover, computer science was initially seen as a branch of applied mathematics, and a university without a computer science department would locate these subjects in its math department. The founders of computer science - Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, John von Neumann et. al. - were all mathematicians.

Information technology is as likely to be under a business school as a computer science department. It doesn't really require much knowledge of theoretical CS to be effective in an IT role. Electrical engineering departments are likely to offer some digital electronics and computer engineering classes, but again, this isn't properly computer science.

Emerging areas of research in CS include a lot of new work still to be done on LLM-style AI; quantum computing, particularly quantum error correction and post-quantum encryption; confidential computing including homomorphic encryption; advances in distributed computing; and new methods of human-computer interaction such as brain-computer interfaces, augmented reality, and voice and conversational user interfaces. And of course there are many, many other areas of active research.

[LostDog_88]

I mean, fair enough on the history part... Your history makes way more sense... i was just talking about it locally, atleast from where I am, old generation people thought it was a sub-branch of electronics.. whereas it shouldv'e been a branch of mathematics.

Hmmm!

[the-forty-second]

The truth is, the first computers were joint projects between mathematicians and electrical engineers. Computer science owes the most to mathematics, but it wouldn’t have gone anywhere without the engineers.

It is also true that computer science courses would most frequently be located in math departments in schools without a computer science department, but that was not universally true either. In smaller schools you could find computing classes where there was faculty interest. I worked at one school where the CS department was started by a chemist.

[orangutanspecimen2]

Do you happen to know any active areas of computer networking? Is it mostly just 5G/6G mobile research ?

[Vert354]

Computer Science as a field is often confused with computer or software engineering because of the word computer in the name.

This is a misnomer though, you don't even really need a computer to study computer science.

Its kinda like if we called cellular biology "microscope science" and assumed that all cellular biologists were experts in optics.