What Is CS&E?

Most science and engineering fields are not intrinsically defined by the use of computers or computation--but computers and computation are becoming more and more important to enable scientific and engineering progress. Computational methods provide a powerful means for investigating scientific problems or achieving engineering design objectives. Computer science is a distinguished discipline in the sense that it is centrally concerned with questions that address issues of computation, e.g., the design and analysis of algorithms, the development of computer networking technology, the study of parallel computer architectures, or the analysis of algorithm complexity. The Committee interprets CS&E as the field concerned with the development, analysis, and utilization of computational methods for practical science and engineering problems. The rapidly increasing importance of CS&E is due to the widespread and growing realization that computation can greatly augment or replace some of the traditional means for scientific investigation and engineering design. Computation is now widely available throughout the physical sciences and engineering, and it can provide a relatively inexpensive alternative for traditional scientific investigation, i.e., theoretical and experimental investigation. Computation is not just a relatively inexpensive alternative, but it also provides a third distinct mode of investigation (adding to theory and experimentation). Computation can also lead to insights that are difficult or impossible to gain otherwise. The massive amounts of data being produced cause additional problems: How to organize these massive amounts of data? How to ``mine'' and analyze them? How to define what to look for in the data and how to visualize them? Ideally, a person in CS&E should be focused on at least one specific field utilizing computational methods, and should be active in that field or closely follow the computational problems and activities in that field. Equally important, that person should make substantial contributions to the development, analysis, or application of computational methods that benefit that field. Many CS&E fields can have impact on and relationships with several application areas. This, for example, is the case with visualization, which, broadly speaking, is concerned with the development of rendering technology for the analysis of scientific and engineering data. The same is true for a variety of other CS&E fields concerned with the development of algorithmic methods that are applicable to a large number of applications. CS&E is much broader than the traditional numerical-based computations, which are of fundamental interest in scientific computing. CS&E methods are not exclusively numerical, and they are not necessarily based on ``deep mathematics.'' CS&E also overlaps with computer science, but it differs from it in the sense that a strong connection to an application area is a ``must'' for CS&E. Many computer science departments support research and education in CS&E fields, which, for example, includes the study of scientific computing libraries, data visualization, or methods simplifying parallel computing for specific application domains.