Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon proffessor, is a virtual reality pioneer, a human-computer interaction researcher and a co-founder of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment technology center.

• What is a decision problem? According to Wikipedia a decision problem is a “ yes or no question on an infinite set of inputs”. Meaning we find out if a specific statement is true or false on an infinite set of inputs.

• What does it mean for a decision problem to be decidable? A decision problem is decidable when we can develop an algorithm that will help us solve the problem correctly.

• What is the class P? What is the class NP? Class P includes all problems that can be solved in ‘polynomial’ time. Their solutions are easy to find and often tractable. Class NP includes all problems that can be solved by ‘non-deterministic machine in polynomial time’. Their solutions are hard to find. (referenceTypes of Complexity Classes | P, NP, CoNP, NP hard and NP complete - GeeksforGeeks)

• What is the intuitive meaning of the “P versus NP” question? A simple meaning to the ‘P vs NP” question is whether questions that are quickly verified if they can also be quickly solved. Since P are questions that are easily solved and NP involves difficult questions, it would mean that hard problems do actually have an easy way to be figured out.

• If you resolve the P versus NP question, how much richer will you be? Once you have the answer, you will be a million dollar more richer because of how important it is to be solved in the world of computing. You could be even more richer depending on your scruples.

1. What is Big Data? Big data is a large amount of information that is analyzed on the computer, to extract patterns and results at high speed, which cannot be done quickly on a traditional system from how complex it is.

2. What is cloud computing? Cloud computing refers to a “centralized storage space” that provides services to business organizations such as saving files to a remote databases ,servers, and networking. Usually for the purpose of efficiency, speed, and security.

3. Is cloud computing a novel technology per se or an amalgamation of several traditional technologies? “Cloud native computing is a combination of several cloud native technologies” Reference: What is Cloud Native (c-sharpcorner.com)

4. What are the 3 major cloud computing service models?

• Software as a service SaaS
• Platform as a service PaaS
• Infrastructure as a service IaaS

5. Name at least 3 real-life problems that cloud computing can help solve them. - Can access the cloud from any device anywhere as long there is an internet connection, don’t need to depend on a single device - Reduces cost of storing data since it’s based on subscriptions and host provider does everything - Increase in transparency as businesses have access to the latest technology in services that include networking and applications. Reference: Five Business Problems that Cloud Computing can solve (orchestrate.com)

6. What is the economic/business model of cloud computing? A method of generating revenue through cloud computing services. Helps companies by supplying service on demand at a much lower price than the normal; such as Microsoft. Additionally, because you don’t have to own your IT infrastructure it has been advertised a lot to use. Reference: Cloud Computing Business Model (thecustomizewindows.com)

Prof Riley Security: 1. Qatar national massive leak • What did attackers break into? In 2016, there was a massive data leak where 1.4gb of information was posted online. This included multiple documents with customers information and bank corporate files. • How did the attackers break into it? Unknown hacker was able to access the banks software and extract from it large amounts of information. • Who was impacted? The data leaked was confidential to customers such as pins, account details etc. One almost attempted to successfully use someone’s details to create big purchases • How was it investigated? Through security workers they found out it was legitimate details which then led to an official investigation. 2. Hacking of Qatar’s state run news agency • What did attackers break into? Hacked the QNA platforms and posted incorrect information • How did the attackers break into it? Under investigation, could be through many ways such as phishing emails. • Who was impacted? Saudia Arabia and its allies believed that Qatar was supporting terrorism, so Qatar was impacted as a country due to the blockade. • How was it investigated? Doha released an inquiry to blame hackers for publishing fake news related to Sheikh Tamim on QNA’s applications. And it was investigated by FBI and British law enforcement officials.

Prof Giselle/PL:

1. Why did we move from punch cards to programming languages? What does that tell you about the purpose of programming languages? Programming languages are more efficient than punch cards, because if there was a “bug” in the punch card you would have to discard it and also if the cards were unsorted you have lost all your code. They also consumed a lot of storage and were liable to damage by liquids. Hence they were replaced by programming languages Programming language’s main purpose is to communicate with computers to develop several types of applications.

2. There are hundreds of different programming languages out there. Why do you think we need so many? Each type of language has its own purpose since many new fields are being evolved within the industry such as software development, security, games etc which have different requirements. Some languages don’t have the capability of doing what the other language does due to its nature. Each developer has different needs for their project, one language could be superfast and one could be useful to do a specific task etc. Reference: Why Multiple, & Why Not One?. There are so many programming languages… | by Harshith Raj | Nerd For Tech | Medium

3. What are some drawbacks of a programming language you use? How would you like it to be different? Think of specific examples. I use python and I think the main problem with is it, is how slow the running speed is. When I was doing image processing and text files. I felt that it took a long time until code was done execution. Its also a simple programming language so not much exploring can be done.

If you were going to create a new programming language, how would you start? What do you need to define? I would first see what kind of problems I want to fix, and the goals for this language to suit my needs. Then create the syntax, the standard library, the supporting tools and creating a compiler

1. How do you define AI? Artificial intelligence refers to computer machines that mimic human intelligence to preform tasks and eventually improve themselves based on the information they get. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? | Oracle (reference)

2. Can you name at least three different sub-fields of AI?

• Machine learning
• Neural language processing
• Robotics
• Vision
• Natural language processing
• Speech recognition

3. AI has been around since about 70 years so far. Why is it booming right now?

• We finally have new advanced systems that have a strong enough power to operate AI in that doesn’t cost as much as it used to be before
• AI helped data to be available and accessed by major organizations to help provide the right services to their customers
• We now have enough data to feed the machines to be able to train them well for AI
Artificial Intelligence Beginners Guide - Why is AI Booming now? (onpassive.com)

4. Can you name at least three application sectors where robots are being largely employed? What are the reasons?

• Healthcare: more precise in surgeries, robotic lifting machines help patients who are immobile
• Manufacturing: increases productivity and efficiency of repeated tasks while attempting to lower production costs, it is also safer to operate.
• Military: uses drones for surveillance in war and in general

5. Can you identify three major challenges for a wheeled autonomous robot performing a 24h surveillance task in a large facility? (e.g., something like Mall of Qatar)

• Difficult to program the right software that considers things like tight spaces and hard routes
• Could be potentially disrupted by humans and other edge cases may not be taken into consideration
• Extremely expensive and requires a lot of technical care

1. What is a genome/DNA and why is it important to know?

DNA contains the instructions necessary for life. It provides directions on how to make proteins that are vital for our growth, development, and overall health. It carries our genes, and it is what makes us unique. They basically are made of blocks called nucleotides.

2. Does CS have a significant role to play in studying why we are tall, organized, athletic, or healthy?

Helps us create software tools to help us understand biological data which includes our DNA on a large scale.

3. What are some of the important questions in biology and medicine that can be addressed with computer science?

- “How can we learn and use models of biological systems constructed from experimental measurements?” - What certain changes occur in the genes that lead to a particular disease? - How can we search and compare information from biological observations efficiently?

Reference: reference"

4. Is it enough to study humans and the human genome?

With computational biology, we can also study social, behavioral and ecological systems and not just biological systems.

5. Is the industry interested in computational biology, or is it largely academic research?

It is one of the most growing research areas in modern biology and industry is interested as it helps bio researchers understand things better.