The Past, Present, and Future of Computing


Michigan Tech President Rick Koubek

You can build a diverse team, but if you don’t build an inclusive team, you’ve wasted your time.

Dianne Marsh ‘86 ‘92
Director of Content Security, Netflix

“Every discipline is being disrupted by computing. Every discipline is deeply connected and advanced by computing. The College of Computing is making sure that all of our colleagues, programs and students across campus, are staying ahead of that transformation,” said Dennis Livesay, Dave House Dean of Computing, at the start of a panel discussion at the opening event of the Computing[MTU] Showcase in April 2022.

The panel, “The Past, Present, and Future of Computing at Michigan Tech,” engaged distinguished alumni and faculty in a conversation exploring the ever-increasing role of computing in everyone’s lives and where it is headed next

“The computer industry’s dream has always been to make computing invisible, to make it like the air we breathe,” said alumnus and major donor Dave House ’65. “It’s necessary for life but we don’t think about it. We do that by making it more capable and more human-centric.”

What stands out to Eric Roberts ’93 is that the College of Computing is evolving in real-time. He says, “I completed my mechanical engineering degree with almost no programming. You can’t do that today. It’s an ingredient of your degree.” Roberts, director of the Traverse City, Michigan, business incubator 20Fathoms, added that in the start-up space, you better know computing. “Your business is going to touch computing. It doesn’t really care if you’re a mechanical, biomedical engineer, or electrical engineer.”

“Having managed large teams of engineering professionals, it’s amazing the degrees that people have,” said House.

“There are a lot of computer engineers, electrical engineers, and computer scientists, but you also see astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers. They earned their way into the system.”

“And the system is craving that level of diversity and that approach from different areas and perspectives,” said Christine Roberts ’91, senior vice president and general manager at Poly. “Because everybody comes at a problem from a different direction, it actually makes it better, faster, stronger when we have folks from all the different areas.”

But we need to do it well. “Knowing how to do computing well is why we need the College of Computing,” said Linda Ott, emerita chair of the Department of Computer Science.

“That’s why we have so many cybersecurity job openings. People need to understand those security issues,” said Fuhrmann. “When we say computing’s like the air we breathe, we have to make sure the air is not poisonous.”

And there’s another contemporary conversation concerning the role of a public university. “It’s to create well-educated citizens who can be a part of a well-informed society,” said Fuhrmann.

“That has been part of the vision for public universities for a hundred years or more. Helping individuals become good citizens is also an important component of higher education.”

What does the future have in store? “Today’s computing is going the same place that computing of the past has gone. It’s going to be obsolete,” said House.

Whatever computing issues become relevant in the future, learning to solve problems and think deeply will be key.

“We’re now educating the next generation who will move into the computing space,” said Fuhrmann. “One of the things I would love for us to stress is how this new generation can change the world.”