Charles Wallace combines his experience as a computer scientist, linguist, and software developer to drive his research in exploring how humans can better understand, build, and use software. He has also founded two student-run outreach programs which focus on computer science education in the local Michigan area: BASIC (Building Adult Skills in Computing) and Copper Country Coders. 

 

Introduction

Charles grew up in a small town in northern California. His elementary school teachers, particularly the school librarian, exposed him to a wide diversity of subjects and put an emphasis on exploration and creativity. In this environment, science, art, technology, and literature were all valued and interconnected. In 1979, the librarian took the radical move of buying an Apple II computer for the school, and he turned to Charles to figure out what to do with it. Charles and his friends worked with teachers to develop educational games for students at the school. To him, computing was a new way to be creative, particularly as a tool to encourage learning and communication. But in the exciting mix of subjects at school, he remained keen to explore his varied interests and didn’t settle on computer science just yet.

 

Language and computing

At the University of Pennsylvania, he took a wide range of courses, but with a focus on language and literature. Natural language and its structure had always fascinated him, as was evidenced by being one of the few in his high school English class who actually enjoyed diagramming sentences, that is, graphing the relations between the words of sentences to reveal their underlying structure. This drew him to a major in linguistics. While the connections between linguistics and computer science may seem unclear to some, Charles feels the crossover is quite natural. In particular, the structuralist linguistics of Noam Chomsky and others were a tremendous influence on the development of programming languages. He also got some exposure to interdisciplinary work between the two fields, working on a natural language processing project as a research assistant.

Charles was quite resistant to the notion of career — to him, it seemed limiting, and particularly in the atmosphere of the 1980s, too oriented around making money. He felt more comfortable improvising as he went, but with an eye toward education, inspired by his early years. He’d kept his hand in computing during college, working as a software developer in California during the summer, and then full-time after graduating. He completed a Masters in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz before pivoting back to computing, upon realising that it would better allow him to combine his interdisciplinary interests. He went on to earn a Ph.D in computer science at the University of Michigan, with a large part of his dissertation on programming language semantics. 

 

Life in academia

Charles now occupies a faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at Michigan Tech and is also Associate Dean for matters of teaching and curriculum. His education in linguistics feels to him somewhat like a distant star or planet, yet it did have a strong element of identity-setting for him. Although he struggled for a time with not fitting into the field of computing, he now embraces his position as a semi-outsider, as it gives him a broader, more critical perspective than he otherwise would have. He’s also very comfortable working with people outside of the traditional computer science domain, in psychology, gerontology, environmental science, writing studies, and ethics.

This background in language has also given him a strong attention to well-crafted communication and its importance in software development. When working on a project, how do you identify that moment where you need to have a meaningful discussion with other team members, and how do you design the discussion? How can you include everyone? Can you communicate your ideas effectively? These are questions that students need to grapple with, not just in separate writing courses but also in their technical curriculum. One fruitful means of exercising communication skills is participation in outreach activities, where students employ their computing expertise in ways that help community members.

 

Exploring options

There’s a lot of hype around getting a degree in computer science, and the job security and high salaries that come with it. Charles is sanguine about the prospects of computer science graduates, but he also urges caution. He sees many students who enter computer science for the wrong reasons, motivated by anxiety about the future rather than true interest in the field. He laments the high cost of higher education nowadays, which drives students to rush through their education and makes it more difficult to explore in the way he did. He encourages students to be mindful of options; there’s a big place for experts in other domains who are also well versed in computing.