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Foundations of Computer Science are not redundant

1,046 Comments

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Alexandre Borovik
5 years ago

Professor Emeritus University of Manchester

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Peter Mosses
5 years ago

Professor (Emeritus) Swansea University. To quote my doctoral supervisor, Christopher Strachey: "the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious". It appears that senior management at Leicester is ignorant of this well-established fact. Shame on them!

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Prof Tom Maibaum
5 years ago

Shameful proposals.

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Domagoj Vrgoč
5 years ago

Well, this is what we get for letting people with hedge fund manager mentality run our universities.

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Ulrik Brandes
5 years ago

Either short-sighted or dishonest argument.

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Jesper Nederlof
5 years ago

Very short-sighted

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Prof Peter Olveczky
5 years ago

Looks like you are moving towards being more a vocational/engineering school ...

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Professor Martin Vechev - ETH Zurich
5 years ago

This is an absolutely terrible, terrible idea -- fundamental science should be kept and developed, and complemented, not removed blindly! The very founders of AI have repeatedly stated that the future of AI will not be the hot topics of today but will be something different. The removed fields of logic and foundations are absolutely critical to developing next-generation of AI, when combined with data-driven methods. An absolute mistake to remove them!!! University administrators: please inform yourself!!!

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Clifford Stein
5 years ago

Successful departments include foundations as an important component. Progress requires both foundational and applications work.

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Aleks Kissinger
5 years ago

Associate Professor, University of Oxford

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Prof Philip J Scott
5 years ago

This is a major error to destroy the distinguished groups at Leicester in the Foundations of Computer Science (as well as Pure Maths). Very short-sighted.

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Martin Krejca
5 years ago

Foundations provide an invaluable basis for everything else. They provide the toolbox used for all other aspects of computer science.

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Ulrich Meyer
5 years ago

Professor of Algorithm Engineering, Goethe University Frankfurt/M. Without theory data is just noise. Keep FoCo alive!

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David Hutchison
5 years ago

Foundational work is essential!

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Stephen Gilmore
5 years ago

Please reconsider and recognise the importance of foundational computer science research.

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Thomas Arts
5 years ago

As CTO of a Swedish SME with good collaborations with a number of Leicester staff, I see with great worry that brilliant academics are treated as "resources". Not only is this harming the people involved, it harms the society that needs those brilliant minds to feel happy and produce strong research results.

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Alexander Gheorghiu
5 years ago

Foundations research is essential to enable new methodologies and new technologies to get invented, which in turn lead to shaping "excellence". Consider the words of James Simons: The remarkable thing about basic science — which includes mathematics — is that one never knows where it may lead. This statement comes from the 2019 Annual Report of the Simons Foundation, an organisation set up precisely to increase research in "basic" science. It is naive to ignore such remarks from such successful people.

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Holger Dell
5 years ago

"Excellent" research requires strong foundations.

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Giorgio Filippetto
5 years ago

Ok

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Uwe Wolter
5 years ago

It's sad to realize that autocracy is not only a problem in (former) communistic countries.