Inside the Rise of Computer Science at Harvard - BostInno

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When Harry Lewis signed on as dean of Harvard College in 1995, an antiquated rule remained in place, forbidding students from running a business out of their dorm room. Before he stepped down from his position in 2003, Lewis got the faculty to rescind the statute, just in time for Mark Zuckerberg to launch this thing called ' thefacebook.com.'

'Being a student meant you were supposed to be studying and not be doing these world-changing things,' Lewis said. 'But that didn't make sense in the Internet Age.'

When Lewis first proposed the idea of a computer science major around 1978 - 'when computer science was barely a science' - he remembers a fellow faculty member asking, 'We never had an automotive engineering major, why have a computer science major?'

By late 2011, however, the Harvard Innovation Lab was opening its doors in Allston, and the University was releasing videos highlighting what innovation at the Ivy League school looked like. Enrollment in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences - where Lewis will serve as the interim dean come January 1, 2015 - saw enrollment increase three-fold, and entrepreneurship became something that didn't need to be kept secret.

'Far beyond computer science, there's a much more positive attitude about entrepreneurship, innovation and disruptive change,' said Lewis, who entered Harvard in the fall of 1964 as an undergraduate - unaware of the power of computer programming, until he took a part-time job in a psychology laboratory at the school.

It's that kind of serendipity, according to Lewis, that makes Harvard's computer science program what it is. Zuckerberg was a psychology major. 'Computer science was walking on the sidewalk,' Lewis said. 'But these kind of creative sparks happen because computer science isn't half the university.'

'Being a student meant you were supposed to be studying and not be doing these world-changing things. But that didn't make sense in the Internet Age.'

With a new, estimated $60 million gift from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will receive a considerable boost. The funding is being used to create 12 professorships, which will grow the computer science faculty by 50 percent.

When news of the gift spread, one word that proliferated with it was 'interdisciplinary.' It's the same word Harvard alumnus David Malan, the professor behind famed introductory computer science course CS50, used to describe how he defines the strength of computer science at Harvard.

'A lot of our students are converts from other academic backgrounds,' Malan said, noting that he experienced the same pattern while studying at Harvard in the mid-90s. He had his mind set on being a government major, until he took CS50 his sophomore year, which was then being taught by Brian Kernighan, a current professor at Princeton. In 2007, Malan took over CS50, which, at 818 undergraduates, represents ' the largest class offered at the College in the last five years.'

'We've been on an exciting trajectory for the past several years,' Malan said, in reference to CS50. 'We have enjoyed wonderful momentum, not only at Harvard, but internationally, as well.'

The course became one of the first to be offered by Harvard after the school debuted edX in May 2012, a massive open online course platform powered by Harvard and MIT. Roughly 100,000 students registered for Harvard's first edX courses, which, beyond CS50, included Quantitative Methods in Clinical and Public Health Research, adapted from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Malan first started experimenting with putting his coursework online in 2006, stating in a previous interview he made one of his Harvard Extension classes available in an MP3 format so his students 'were no longer tethered to their laptops or iPods.' When students outside of Harvard soon started taking interest in the material, he made more of his content openly available via OpenCourseWare.

'I have always treated our on-campus and online courses as one in the same,' Malan said. 'The videos, for instance, are relied upon by students online, but students on campus use those if they miss lectures. ... Students can do problem sets if they're in the course or doing it at home.'

What's changed is the experience is much more multimedia heavy: text is interspersed on richer web pages that feature short video clips; problem sets are more of a narrative, 'as opposed to mere opportunities for assessment,' so students can better understand how computer science relates to them in their world.

(Malan announces CS50's partnership with Yale; Image via YouTube.)

In this semester's final lecture, it was formally announced that Yale University would be offering CS50 in the fall of 2015. The lectures will be streamed from Harvard's Sanders Theater to New Haven, where students will be able to engage with the course in person in real-time, or online on-demand after.

Over the summer, Malan started chatting with Yale's Computer Science Department Chair Joan Feigenbaum about how the conventionally competing universities could collaborate. The idea grew out of that, and now Harvard and Yale are 'teaming up to provide a way for students on both campuses to get something that was more than the sum of their parts,' said Brian Scassellati, who will be leading CS50 at Yale.

'I think that one of the things that has become obvious to everyone in higher education is that we need to teach all of our students some basic ideas about computer science,' Scassellati said. 'CS50 makes that engaging and easy to understand.'

Malan himself noted that the course 'aspires to have a playfulness to it.' He added that, although the class might ask more of students during the semester than they might want, he hopes that when they look back 12 weeks later, they don't regret having taken it, because they were granted unique experiences with their classmates, such as end-of-semester, all-night hackathons or weekly lunches between 50 students, alumni, friends and peers of the program.

'This is an opportunity to test that hypothesis that a student's experience in a course is not defined by the hours they spend in a lecture hall.'

'This is an experiment,' Scassellati said. 'We don't know if this is going to work or not. ... But for us, this experiment is about bringing in an approach that's very open and very accessible to a very broad range of students. This is one of many ways of trying to educate Yale students - not Yale computer science students, but all Yale students.'

To Malan, the partnership will also help highlight how portable a course can be. Do the same walk-through videos need to be retaught live every semester? If you ask Malan, his response would be 'no.' Rather, professors could start reusing material and spend more time instead working one-on-one with students, providing individualized support. And if this experiment goes well, could other courses be shared among different universities?

'This is an opportunity to test that hypothesis that a student's experience in a course is not defined by the hours they spend in a lecture hall,' Malan said.

The work that has sprung out of the Harvard SEAS is proof. Researchers have 3D-printed batteries the size of sand, partnered with New Balance to build a 'wearable robot' and helped robotic insects take flight. The School has produced breakthroughs in learning theory, data management systems, algorithmic economics and artificial intelligence.

And moving forward, sustaining that breadth will be crucial.

(A robot that can fold itself up and scurry away; Image via Harvard University.)

'Because of the breadth of different strengths that the university has to offer, there's just a wealth of computer scientists here to think about what computer science means to other disciplines,' said David Parkes, area dean for computer science at Harvard SEAS. 'Computer science can develop new tools that can be useful for scientists or humanists in other fields.'

At its core, computer science can determine whether or not an economics problem can be solved, thereby helping an economist determine if they're using the right theory to address a market. Rather, there's an increasing amount of data now available in so many fields, that computer scientists can assist other professionals by having them think about their problems in a computational way.

'This really finds good synergy with our students,' Parkes said. 'Harvard students are generally broad-minded; they're looking to get a liberal arts education.'

The opportunity ahead of Harvard SEAS with Ballmer's gift is one administrators know they need to think carefully about. The School will be expanding into new state-of-the-art facilities on the University's Allston campus in the near future, because there's no room left to grow in Cambridge, according to Lewis. Conceptual plans for the building are expected by mid-2015, yet Lewis said the staff won't be moving to Allston for nearly five years.

But how does the School grow strategically?

What's significant about Ballmer's gift is that 'Harvard has decided computer science is important at Harvard.'

'It's a little scary, frankly,' Lewis acknowledged. 'Now that we can grow, we need to choose wisely in what directions we do grow. ... To have this kind of freedom in an academic department is very unusual. Harvard didn't make the kind of investments MIT and Stanford made in the 1970s.'

Rather, Harvard never decided to have a focus solely centered on tech. Added Lewis, 'We have the opportunity to grow, but have the opportunity to grow fully.'

Parkes reiterated how calculated the School's next moves need to be. 'We want to make sure we hire the very best people, and move with a speed that enables us to do that,' he said, noting that what makes this gift significant is 'that Harvard has decided computer science is important at Harvard.'

Neither Parkes nor Lewis would say, however, that the rise Harvard is seeing is unique, given computer science has continued to grow on college campuses nationwide. 'Enrollments are growing everywhere,' Parkes said, 'not just at Harvard.'

To Parkes, it's partially because the field is still so young. 'There are so many problems that haven't been asked yet,' he explained, 'and there will be new problems being asked all the time. ... The job market for computer science is fantastic. The startup scene is very healthy at the moment. Our students have no problem getting jobs.'

Harvard can continue to create a unique opportunity, and leverage their 'late mover advantage,' as described by Parkes. As he said, 'I think that opportunity to innovate undergraduate education is a big outstanding opportunity we need to grab.'

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