Reading 00: Introduction

My name is Nick Rocco and I am a senior Computer Science major at the University of Notre Dame.  I am from Suffield, Connecticut, which is a small town about 30 minutes north of Hartford, the capital of Connecticut.  I have always been interested in sports having played both football and baseball all the way through the end of high school and currently work on campus for the Notre Dame football team in their analytics department.  I decided to study Computer Science because of the flexibility it gives me in deciding what my future career path.  When I came to Notre Dame, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do afterwards and in fact started out as a mechanical engineer.  I decided to switch to CS because I realized that, with the way the world is nowadays, every company can benefit from somebody that knows how to program and how to use computing to their benefit.  This would allow me great flexibility in the career path I decided to choose.  What I hope to get out of this class and the most pressing topics facing computer scientists and engineers are very closely related.  I really look forward to studying the topic of free speech and censorship as I believe, especially given the climate of the country, this is very interesting.  As computer scientists, the way we code a given platform directly impacts the way that people who use this platform view things.  We could have a direct impact on shaping the attitude of the user towards a given topic based upon what we allow them to view by using our platform.  This is an extremely heavy burden and one that we should not take lightly.  This is why I am very much looking forward to talking about this and think it is one of the most pressing topics that computer scientists and engineers face.