Rebooting Computing is a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation, through Dr. Peter Denning at the Naval Postgraduate School, to develop awareness and an action plan to tackle the issues surrounding the decline in computer science in the United States. The project is opening up a conversation across a broad computer science community, with both a face-to-face summit with Appreciative Inquiry methodology as well as a broader community of education, government, and industry stakeholders.

The Challenge

It is a time of challenges for the computing field. We are tired of hearing that a computing professional is little more than a program coder or a system administrator; or that a college or graduate education is unnecessary; or that entering the computing field is a social death. We are dismayed that K-12 students, especially girls, have such a negative perception of computing. We are alarmed by reports that the innovation rate in our field has been declining and that enrollments in our degree programs have dropped 50% since 2001. Instead of the solo voice of the programmer, we would like to hear from the choir of mathematicians, engineers,and scientists who make up the bulk of our field.

It is also a time of great opportunities. Big, important ideas and major innovations await discovery by those who decipher information processes in biology, medicine, physics, life science, engineering, economics, social science, and more. We are poised to find cures for intractable diseases, breach computational barriers with quantum computing, secure communications with quantum cryptography, compute with world-scale networks, and manage our natural resources wisely.

We are men and women: educators, researchers, industrialists, seasoned professionals, acolytes, recent graduates, students, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and hardware and software developers. We share a fervent belief in the vitality and future of our field. We believe we can, by working together in new ways, recover the magic and beauty of computer science.