Professor and member of the Semantic Web Research Center, Juan Reutter, stressed the importance of researching in computer science to understand the phenomena and establish a limit between what can and can not be done with technology.
Juan Reutter, an academic of the Computer Science Department at Catholic University of Chile (UC), organized a presentation called “Post-truth and Data in Computing: The Importance of Science” for academics and undergraduates of the UC Engineering School. At this talk, Reutter explained the necessity of investigations about Computer Science to understand its phenomena and to establish a limit between what can and cannot be done with technology.
Reutter, who is also a member of the Center for Semantic Web Research (CIWS in Spanish), formulated that people who constantly interact with the algorithms behind every interaction on the web still do not know how to filter the information they obtain, or to verify that the web algorithms they use are working as they need them to work, and furthermore, they are not demanding the removal of information biases that are causing the increase of the so-called post-truth.
“A publication wich states that autonomous vehicles are safer by citing an autonomous vehicle manufacturer as its source, is something unthinkable in sciences like medicine, physics or maths,” said Reutter, who emphasized the high amount of years of research invested by professionals in these fields.
“Just as physics are modelled by calculations and math formulas, computing theory is modelled by logic and we have a whole world of objects yet to model,” he added. In this regard, he spoke about the efforts made by some institutions like CIWS, UC Engineering School, University Santa Maria (USM), and University of Talca (UTalca).
“For students, the need of creating new software and working with different kinds of hardware and information architectures at the beginning of their careers is very common. But we invite them to go beyond that” said Reutter, and reaffirmed the importance of knowing the scientific foundations of computing in order to distinguish true from false concepts. “We would love to do more in our group. So, if you are interested in doing science with us, we would be pleased to accept you,” he concluded.