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How can children learn faster what brings an ambulance to an emergency sooner how do you get the right man in the right job the answer is computers only computers can cope with the diversity of municipal the mountains and help you understand some of the uses of computers we bring you this series computers and modern city government your host for these programs is deputy city administrator Dr Saunders the topic of today's program is computers on campus doctor's office a modern university today requires more than classrooms teachers and a good library scientists and engineers for example have long needed specialized laboratory equipment in order for them to do their work and in recent years electronic computers have become an absolute necessity in a modern university a necessity for faculty researchers students and administrators our guest today is the most ites are associate University Dean for computers and television systems of the City University of New York. Dr Wright sir is responsible for computer planning and for television systems in our university network in the city here. The most wanted to tell us a little bit in the first place about the what is the city university system how big is it what is it consist of we City University consist of sixteen different units. Including six community colleges a Graduate Center and nine senior colleges we have a total of about one hundred sixty five thousand students and we expect to grow to over two hundred thousand by nine hundred seventy five. What the what about computers in the first place what is the role of computers in a university such as yours for computers take on various roles. From administration and registration of students to instruction by computer to research on the part of the students and faculty to education and training for various types of students at various levels. What the Tommy what what do you have what does a city university system have right now in the way of computers how many computers do you have how much do you pay for them one of them for those have some the gross statistics gross because of US labor we have actually twenty six machines on campus and these are all. The the medium or large size machines we have a large number of tiny machines that we don't count in this particular survey. We value the machines at around seven and a half million dollars worth and the number of machines are growing at a very rapid rate. If not numbers at least the dollar value of the machines because we are expanding existing machines What are some of the more unusual uses to which your computers are being put in the university Well one of the modern uses of the making of computers is for what we call computer aided instruction in which a student is actually instructed. In a particular course by the computer we have we have an example of this one of the earlier programs in the series where we discussed computer assisted instruction in the elementary schools where computers are being used to work to help elementary school pupils do arithmetic trail drill how are we using our computer assisted instruction in a college well at Brooklyn College we've got a system which has been experimented with over the past several years and is now an operation. In which the stakes and German are being taught to for credit and the college level also we are extending this system to include other units of the university by means of telephone lines so that we're going to be doing a bit of teaching by computer but how does that work exactly you have a sense a computer somewhere and a little lot Consols like typewriters it essentially we have typewriters and a student goes up to the typewriter and types in his name and what course he's taking and the typewriter will come back and say Were you finished at Lesson twenty seven today we're starting Lesson twenty eight. And it starts asking questions giving facts asking questions waiting for a response the student responds and if he responds correctly it goes on to the next and it keeps track of the student's progress and if a student should make a mistake it says you would better go back to question twenty four. And this is question twenty four start over very good what are some of the other of the uses of computers in the struggle from the instructional area we move over to what we call education and training in this case when up using the computer to do the teaching but we're actually teaching various phases of computers to students we go all the way from a program in data processing technology or computer technology at our community colleges in which we train students to service and operate the computers and we go all the way through master's programs in business we are planning Ph D. programs in computer science and we actually are offering a bachelor's degree in computer science at the City College in addition there are computer minors at Brooklyn College and Queens College is developing a whole sequence of computer courses and. We expect that every person in the university at some point will be exposed to the computer in one way or another even perhaps it's only through some computer appreciation course like we used to have music appreciation I seem to recall when I was in school one of the important things here that is really worth commenting on is the following You might look from the overall point of view you might look at New York City as being a net exporter of information in other words New York's main business activity in many ways is to serve as a as a headquarters for corporations in America and New York as a great office city among other things and modern business corporations are characterized by computers and by sending out if you will instructions and orders out to branch offices and so on so computers are a vital economic factor really in the in the economic life of New York City and it's encouraging that the university system the City University is is recognizing that and has this kind of emphasis on computer programs computer training programs all the way as you point out from training people to service computers after all computers do break down and do require servicing training people to service them training people to program them training people to use them in training people to take advantage of them for four vans business uses as well it's encouraging as I say to see the City University. Taking this route and emphasizing a computer education and training grooming it's possible now for someone to actually major and get out to get a degree majoring in computer science is that right you can get a bachelor's degree at City College called the School of Engineering in computer science and. In addition you have that one thing that we might want to read We've been training people to design computers in a school of engineering there are several courses directly oriented to the design of computers so we're running a full string for a good what are some of the some of the research uses I know computers are very very powerful tool for certain kinds of research when I was doing our my graduate work I don't have a computer available to help me and I had to kind of laboriously crank through with manual calculations and and do a lot of things that I think of in short the press should be if I had access to computers What are some of the ways in which computers are being used by research people in the university system. We can lump our research into three different categories we'll talk about scientific research we'll talk about human Issac research and we'll talk about data processing research and there's actually activity in all of these areas going on at the present time just as a couple of examples in the scientific area. The physicists are doing experiments involving atomic particles in a bubble chamber What this amounts to is taking thousands upon thousands of pictures of a bubble chamber and then hoping to find a new particle from these thousands of thousands of pictures requires a computation by computer and then we are finding new particle they get a Nobel Prize and that really generally that's the case re. In addition there's an interesting things have been done let me elaborate on this this bubble chamber bubble chambers a device for taking photographs of atomic reactions and identifying Bye-Bye paths and streaks on the photograph identifying the tracks of particles now before computers were used for this there in general colleges and universities to hire a whole batch of people to sit in front of screens project these photographs on the screens and there are thousands of these photographs and when they see certain tracks that that are of interest be used to make labrat measurements of the curvature of the track the length of the track the number of different tracks in the photograph and so on and then that information used to be processed by computer now as I understand it there are devices which are able automatically to examine photographs and to and to make all these measurements quite automatically feeding the computer directly and this has led to a big spurt in says basic particle physics research what are some of the other Rob uses of either claim here isn't physical science or I can think of a rather interesting project in which one of the professors felt that the amount of information contained in speech could really be analyzed by a computer so that the essential part of that speech could be retained and on the basis of his research he was able to show that. He really could carry ten times as many telephone conversations through a single telephone channel if a computer were to process the speech before it went on to the telephone line and the computer where then have to re process the information of the other end of the line but what came out would sound exactly as the same as the person who's Pollock you could easily recognize the man's voice and the weather would sound like playing a thirty three record on a seventy eight turntable now it would sound you couldn't know exactly who was talking if you had three or four people and they all spoke. So someday we may get some benefits of this type of research I'd like to shift here to the humanistic use of computers because this is. A newer area scientists have always tried to use computers but now we're getting the human ists interested I recall a project that was done involving a sixteenth century Spanish manuscript called Lee Brody Alexander in which there were two translations done a century apart and what we did with a computer there was arrow eyes the two different translations of the same work to the side what were the similarities and what changes had undergone had taken place in the language in one hundred years this was a new idea in terms of computers. In addition what exactly did the computer do there in terms of this analysis that sounds rather interesting taking to obscure very real manuscripts and then allies and how it happens cited as a computer which ultimately works with numbers and symbols how does a a a literate literature a professor use a computer in this work what we had to do was actually have a girl sit and retire the two manuscripts they happened to be pones and we compared a verse to the time looking for words it was a sheet she typed the produce punched card she probably set into computer computer. She produced. Punch cards and if I remember correctly there were some twenty four thousand punch cards produced. These punch cards were then compared verse by verse for similarities and where the words were identical We did not consider them where they were different we compared them one next to the other undecided here was a change that ought to be called to the attention of the person who was reviewing this we then proceeded to do what we call a frequency count we counted the number of times each word appeared in this work and as a result of that the. Person doing the research was able to come up with some definitive ideas as to how and why the language was changing. With doing other work in the area of computers and humanities as a matter of fact Queens College publishes a quarterly intitled computers in the humanities. This is a subject that many people are unaware of people usually think of computers as being involved in the space program of being involved in administrative data processing getting out payroll checks and keeping books and that sort of thing and people are not aware very much that that the far sighted researchers in the humanities and in fields of music for instance are taking advantage of computers and using them in rather striking and innovative ways to aid their humanistic research. Got any other examples along those lines Well I'm glad you mentioned music because one of the projects that is going on at Queen's College is the preparation of a. Bibliography in musicology on the computer and here we are actually collecting all abstracts of all articles relating to musicology and we are. Recording women in the computer in such a way that we can easily retrieve the information so that really we are using the computer as a tool for musicology Now when I used to try to prepare a bibliography Occasionally I found it convinced enough to use just plain index cards What's so special about using a computer for Billy Augustine what increased the veil of how does that help you retrieve information more effectively than a conventional index card system but what you can do with this system of course is so very picky keywords that you're looking for this key word mind might be. Riven sixteenth century and then the computer could search through this bibliography and give you all references to those key words where they appear together and essentially. You let your computer do the working That's right and other words instead of having just the conventional law kind of author card subject card title card what you've got in a sense is an entry for every single word that appears in the entire title and maybe a word for an entry for every word and not in an abstract therefore you can do much more sophisticated searching and be much more sure of catching the specific document or the specific reference that you're interested in very good what other kinds of things are going on in the research the research uses of computers well in the City University one of the third areas that we want to talk about is that of data processing per se and in this area we have in our Peru College of the whole program of computer methodology which is a master's program in computer methodology and in this program the research that goes on is in the area of. Their lives in management in modern systems. As a result we are able to teach people to prepare models of. Businesses terms models of municipal systems on a machine and then having prepared a model we go with the what if questions the questions that say what if I were to do this and make this decision what would be the results of that example of a model of Univer a mathematical model in a computer of a college system I suppose well could ask questions like if we had five percent more students enrolling in the freshman year how many more classrooms would we need and how many more faculty members are we needed so on that's quite correct and this doesn't only apply to college systems it applies to businesses terms it applies to municipal systems if the population shifts from one area to the other how many more hospitals and more school rooms do we need and how many fewer hospital school do we need in another area and we're training people to work in these areas and this is the important thing it's people that we're training that. You've discussed the how the city colleges how the city university system is educate is using computers for education and training and educating and training people in the use of computers we've spoken about the use of computers in research in the humanities in the physical sciences and in data processing research itself how about the administrative uses now with a with you mention that there are sixteen different units with six community colleges and nine colleges and one graduate center. I can imagine lots a lot of probably just kind of running the school running the business school or rather running the business of schooling Well one of the things that we do at the present time each of the campuses at least is handling their own affairs by means of the computer so that for example. At. Brooklyn at Queens College there's just been the two did a special computer system which will allow the students to register in which the student fills out a card on the card is fed into the computer and back comes an answer which says yes you have registered or this course has happened to be close this is a completely automated system that. Saves in the long run a lot of money because it requires many fewer people to do the actual registering so the money can be spent for for instructional purposes instead of clerks processing paper let's correct. Why saving money excuse me the most I can imagine a sensational reduction in this interminable process of registering I think remember that registration in college when I went to college it was a three day affair mostly waiting on line for three days well we've got it down to I think on the average much less than half a day they're still waiting on line to get to the computer so that. We can't let them all. In addition to that however because we keep our records on the computer we find that we can get much better results in terms of statistics on what how our students are doing we can very easily ask the data processing organization to give me a list of all students whose grade point average has dropped below a certain level and this group of students can one be called in for counseling to find out why they are doing poorly if they happen to be doing poorly and we find that. As we go to a greater administrative use We're going to be doing more for our students this is part of our job getting providing more services for the students in the community but at a cost that we can which a word which is after all the objective of city government and the objective of the city university system let me ask you what the we recognize the significance and importance of computers in the university when did the City University get its first computer with the historical growth of compilers in the series we started in one thousand nine hundred sixty we got our first machine it was a tiny desk size machine and right now it's sitting we're going to build a glass case for exam there in that area this was number one. By one hundred sixty four we had advanced where we had one relatively large machine and at the present time we have one very large machine and several other large ones. In the future we hope to move over to the approach where. We will have at least one or two very big machines and everybody else will be able to tie to them by means of telephone lines so that we will have a large what we call remote job entry system whereby we can cover the whole city with computing services at a reasonable cost This means that each campus will have a machine which is adequate for its own use and at the same time if there were an overload the large machines can take care of that overload misses our plan these are where our plans for the future look right because I can imagine that on various campuses one professor or one course perhaps has a need for very powerful computing capability and it just doesn't make sense in terms of in light of tight budget and the cost to have very large computing facilities and each year in each campus What about the. Time shared computing could you tell us just very briefly a little bit about the potential for that in the year light of our approach to a dream Ojha Bantry We will also make available in the future some two hundred typewriters which can be placed in classrooms and faculty offices and research areas for the purpose of. People doing their work directly on the computer and this will be as if they have a full computer at their command from their typewriter everybody would have the same computer we have heard once again how the city university system is staying at the forefront as a leading educational institution in utilising computers on campus our guest today has been has been dean the most ites or the associate University dean of the City University of New York thank you Dr Service you have been listening to another broadcast of computers and modern city government if you have any questions about today's program or if you would like a free booklet titled introducing the computer right to computers W N Y Z New York City one hundred most of them.