November 1985 - Vol. 28 No. 11
Features
Modeling california earthquakes and earth structures
Seismology has burgeoned into a modern science—force-fed by federal funding to advance technology for detecting underground nuclear explosions and predicting earthquakes, and by industry to improve tools for gas and oil exploration. Computers, seismic instrument systems, telemetry, and data reduction have played key roles in this growth.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), now being planned at NASA, will require a prodigious amount of highly concurrent signal processing to be done in real time by special-purpose hardware.
Discovering the secrets of DNA
Sophisticated software tools are becoming increasingly important in helping biologists understand how nature operates. Symbolic pattern-recognition and artificial-intelligence methodologies are contributing to the development of such software.
Pilots of the future: human or computer?
As more and more automation is incorporated in aircraft, the essential question becomes one of autonomy: Should the automated system serve as the human pilot's assistant, or vice versa?
Growth of distributed systems has attained unstoppable momentum. If we better understood how to think about, analyze, and design distributed systems, we could direct their implementation with more confidence.
Computing in higher education: the Athena experience
Project Athena at MIT is an experiment to explore the potential uses of advanced computer technology in the university curriculum. About 60 different educational development projects, spanning virtually all of MIT's academic departments, are already in progress.
Toward the domestication of microelectronics
The great challenge for computer science in this decade is to make computers usable by everyone. Computers, long viewed as a dehumanizing force, will become the most powerful means of personal creative expression and communication ever known.
