Interdisciplinarity is becoming increasingly important in education. With the rapidly evolving job market, an interdisciplinary education can prepare students for the flexibility and broad knowledge base required to adapt. At the University of Pisa, we recognized the value of an interdisciplinary educational environment during our participation in…

In this article Allan Rossman shares a conversation with Nicholas Horton, Beitzel Professor of Technology and Society and Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Amherst College. Horton is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Some topics of discussion included where…

Informatics education has been in a cul-de-sac for several years (not only in Hungary), being less and less able to meet the needs of the industry and higher education. In addition, the latest PISA survey shows that--to put it a little strongly--the majority of the x-, y- and z generations are digital illiterates. The aim of this paper to examine…

This book highlights new scientific research about how people learn, including interdisciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, the social, cognitive and behavioural sciences, education, computer and information sciences, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and engineering. These new developments offer fascinating new perspectives, based on…

Bioinformatics--the so-called shotgun marriage between biology and computer science--is an interdiscipline. Despite interdisciplinarity being seen as a virtue, for having the capacity to solve complex problems and foster innovation, it has the potential to place projects and people in anomalous categories. For example, valorised…

It is now well-established that intrinsic variations in human neural and behavioral activity tend to exhibit scaling laws in their fluctuations and distributions. The meaning of these scaling laws is an ongoing matter of debate between isolable causes versus pervasive causes. A spiking neural network model is presented that self-tunes to critical…

Issues surrounding gender discrimination have been addressed over the past 40 years with various pieces of legislation and federal policies that have made such discrimination illegal. The number of women in higher education as students and faculty has steadily increased since the 1950s, though only in certain disciplines and in the lower faculty…

A new approach to information science, activity theory emphasizes the centrality of practice as doing and activity and foregrounds setting and context as essential orienting concepts. It can provide information science with a rich, unifying, and heuristically valuable vocabulary and conceptual framework that will facilitate the continual…

Presents issues relating to the future direction of information science. Investigates the history and scientific basis of information science. Discusses the change from its genesis as an academic discipline in the 1950s to its practitioner base in the 1990s. Concludes that information science will make a significant contribution to other…

Describes different conceptual foundations and orientations of the two major approaches to metadata: bibliographic-control approach (origins and major proponents in library science); and data-management approach (origins and major proponents in computer science). Examination of efforts to establish metadata standards and comparison of different…

Stanford University's new Symbolic Systems Program is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program focusing on understanding the nature of intelligent behavior. It brings together the disciplines of cognitive psychology, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence, philosophy, and linguistics in a newly emerging field of research concerned…