Outline of computer science

Mathematical foundations

• Coding theory – Useful in networking, programming, system development, and other areas where computers communicate with each other.
• Game theory – Useful in artificial intelligence and cybernetics.
• Discrete mathematics – Study of discrete structures. Used in digital computer systems.
• Graph theory – Foundations for data structures and searching algorithms.
• Mathematical logic – Boolean logic and other ways of modeling logical queries; the uses and limitations of formal proof methods.
• Number theory – Theory of the integers. Used in cryptography and as a test domain in artificial intelligence.

Algorithms and data structures

• Algorithms – Sequential and parallel computational procedures for solving a wide range of problems.
• Data structures – The organization and manipulation of data.

Artificial intelligence

Outline of artificial intelligence

• Artificial intelligence – The implementation and study of systems that exhibit an autonomous intelligence or behavior of their own.
• Automated reasoning – Solving engines, such as used in Prolog, which produce steps to a result given a query on a fact and rule database, and automated theorem provers that aim to prove mathematical theorems with some assistance from a programmer.
• Computer vision – Algorithms for identifying three-dimensional objects from a two-dimensional picture.
• Soft computing, the use of inexact solutions for otherwise extremely difficult problems:
  • Machine learning – Development of models that are able to learn and adapt without following explicit instructions, by using algorithms and statistical models to analyze and draw inferences from patterns in data.
  • Evolutionary computing – Biologically inspired algorithms.
• Natural language processing – Building systems and algorithms that analyze, understand, and generate natural (human) languages.
• Robotics – Algorithms for controlling the behavior of robots.

Communication and security

• Networking – Algorithms and protocols for reliably communicating data across different shared or dedicated media, often including error correction.
• Computer security – Practical aspects of securing computer systems and computer networks.
• Cryptography – Applies results from complexity, probability, algebra, and number theory to invent and break codes, and analyze the security of cryptographic protocols.

Computer architecture

• Computer architecture – The design, organization, optimization, and verification of a computer system, mostly about central processing units (CPUs) and Memory subsystems (and the bus connecting them).
• Operating systems – Systems for managing computer programs and providing the basis of a usable system.

Computer graphics

• Computer graphics – Algorithms both for generating visual images synthetically, and for integrating or altering visual and spatial information sampled from the real world.
• Image processing – Determining information from an image through computation.
• Information visualization – Methods for representing and displaying abstract data to facilitate human interaction for exploration and understanding.

Concurrent, parallel, and distributed systems

• Parallel computing – The theory and practice of simultaneous computation; data safety in any multitasking or multithreaded environment.
• Concurrency (computer science) – Computing using multiple concurrent threads of execution, devising algorithms for solving problems on various processors to achieve maximal speed-up compared to sequential execution.
• Distributed computing – Computing using multiple computing devices over a network to accomplish a common objective or task, and thereby reducing the latency involved in single processor contributions for any task.

Databases

Outline of databases

• Relational databases – the set theoretic and algorithmic foundation of databases.
• Structured Storage – non-relational databases such as NoSQL databases.
• Data mining – Study of algorithms for searching and processing information in documents and databases; closely related to information retrieval.

Programming languages and compilers

• Compiler theory – Theory of compiler design, based on Automata theory.
• Programming language pragmatics – Taxonomy of programming languages, their strength, and weaknesses. Various programming paradigms, such as object-oriented programming.
• Programming language theory – Theory of programming language design
• Formal semantics – rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programs.
• Type theory – Formal analysis of the types of data, and the use of these types to understand properties of programs — especially program safety.

Scientific computing

• Computational science – constructing mathematical models and quantitative analysis techniques and using computers to analyze and solve scientific problems.
• Numerical analysis – Approximate numerical solution of mathematical problems such as root-finding, integration, the solution of ordinary differential equations; the approximation of special functions.
• Symbolic computation – Manipulation and solution of expressions in symbolic form, also known as Computer algebra.
• Computational physics – Numerical simulations of large non-analytic systems
• Computational chemistry – Computational modelling of theoretical chemistry in order to determine chemical structures and properties
• Bioinformatics and Computational biology – The use of computer science to maintain, analyze, store biological data and to assist in solving biological problems such as Protein folding, function prediction and Phylogeny.
• Computational neuroscience – Computational modelling of neurophysiology.
• Computational linguistics
• Computational logic – Use of logic to perform or reason about computation
• Computational engineering – Field of algorithmic training

Software engineering

Outline of software engineering

• Formal methods – Mathematical approaches for describing and reasoning about software design.
• Software engineering – The principles and practice of designing, developing, and testing programs, and as proper engineering practices.
• Algorithm design – Using ideas from algorithm theory to creatively design solutions to real tasks.
• Computer programming – The practice of using a programming language to implement algorithms.
• Human–computer interaction – The study and design of computer interfaces that people use.
• Reverse engineering – The application of the scientific method to the understanding of arbitrary existing software.

Theory of computation

• Automata theory – Different logical structures for solving problems.
• Computability theory – What is calculable with the current models of computers. Proofs developed by Alan Turing and others provide insight into the possibilities of what may be computed and what may not.
  • List of unsolved problems in computer science
• Computational complexity theory – Fundamental bounds (especially time and storage space) on classes of computations.
• Quantum computing theory – Explores computational models involving quantum superposition of bits.