Foundations of Computer Science are not redundant

School of Electrical Engineering Tel Aviv University

Cutting certain "market oriented" disciplines would be more beneficial. Take your pick.

This is very short-sighted, and the university will regret this eventually: destroying is easy, building is difficult, building a competitive industrial AI research team at a university - virtually impossible.

Computer Science without the Foundations are like building houses on sand. The underlying principles are fundamental to the application of computer science, and more often than not, to the innovations that are about to come!

Extremely short-sighted policies like this damage science, research and technological progress. Stavros Kolliopoulos Professor National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

I cannot understand why the managers at Leicester are dismembering a very successful and profitable Computer Science department! This sounds like staff-cutting for the sake of it (poor financial position elsewhere in the university? but not here!) One of the Computer Science members at Leicester developed the theory behind the most successful model-based software testing method ever, which has resulted in spin-off research and testing products all over the world! Please think again!

I support the petition, since foundational research is important and not superfluous.

Excellent science built on the ground of no foundation? That sounds artificially intelligent!

without basic research there is no progress...

There is no application without foundation...

I signed, but I am not sure whether a petition is the way to go. I believe a massive strike of the Leicester university (and others) should happen. In any case, this is unacceptable, so wish you good luck.

Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Bradford

This decision is beyond dismay, one of the most short-sighted, ill-motivated and self-defeating decisions that can be taken. The group of FoCS in Leicester is well-known and highly reputed in the research community, where its achievements also in applied fields such as software engineering and model-driven development have contributed to shaping the fields as they are known today. Paolo Bottoni Full Professor of Computer Science Department of Computer Science Sapienza University of Rome

Professor of Computer Science, University of Cagliari, Italy Another step towards the irrelevance of the West. Meanwhile, in Asia universities and theoretical research are thriving.

A strong theoretical foundation is a necessity for AI, data science, computational modelling and "digitalisation".

A very short-sighted decision, but relatively unsurprising: in a country where universities are increasingly becoming money churning machines led by an unhealthy mix of accountants and bureaucrats, sad events like this are to be expected.

How could AI flourish if it were not for foundational works by great scholars from UK, e.g., Bertrand Russell, Alan Turing, John Alan Robinson, Robert Kowalski, or Gordon Plotkin, to name just a few?

Foundations of Computer Science are not redundant

I think that who considers applications more important than theoretical studies, or vice versa, has not clear what is the meaning of both.

Professor of Computer Science, University of Wrocław, Poland