Computer Science Vocabulary

Flashcards about key vocabulary terms in computer science.

Ubiquitous Computing

The field that focuses on computing being integrated into everyday objects and activities.

Singularity

A hypothetical point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

Technological Unemployment

The displacement of human workers by technology, particularly computers and AI.

Active learning

Learning techniques where students actively participate in the learning process, enhancing information retention.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Online courses open to a very large number of participants.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems

AI-powered systems that provide personalized instruction by assessing a learner’s knowledge and adapting accordingly.

Domain Model

A formal representation of the knowledge, procedures, and skills of a particular discipline, used in intelligent tutoring systems.

Student Model

A model built and maintained by intelligent tutoring systems to track what a student has learned and where practice is needed.

Bayesian Knowledge Tracing

A technique for determining a student's knowledge by treating it as a set of hidden variables and updating estimates based on the correctness of their interactions.

Latent Variables

Variables whose true values are hidden from an outside observer.

Educational Data Mining

The field of collecting and analyzing data from educational settings to discover patterns and improve learning.

Affordances

The idea that a design should intuitively communicate its function, allowing users to understand how to use it just by looking at it.

Recognition

The ability to easily identify something previously experienced after encountering it again.

Recall

The ability to produce something from memory.

Emotionally Intelligent

Computer interfaces able to adapt their behavior based on a user's emotional state.

Affect-Aware Systems

Systems that use sensors and computational models to recognize and respond to human emotions.

Computer-Mediated Communication

The study of how people interact via computers, including synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Augmented Gaze

Software that adjusts the head and eye movements in video to make it appear as if the instructor is looking directly at the camera.

Human Robot Interaction (HRI)

The study of how humans interact with robots, considering both their appearance and behavior.

Robots

Self-operating machines capable of carrying out a series of actions automatically with computer control guidance.

Automatons

Automated machines that are self-operating.

CNC

Computer Numerical Control, which enable machines to run programs that instruct the machine.

Negative Feedback Control Loop

A control system that measures real-world conditions, calculates errors, and instructs the system to minimize these errors.

Proportional-Integral-Derivative Controller

A widely used feedback mechanism that calculates proportional, integral, and derivative values to control a system.

Lethal Autonomous Weapons

Robots with the intelligence and capability to take human lives.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

A field that combines computer science and linguistics to enable computers to understand and process human language.

Phrase Structure Rules

Rules that codify the grammar of a language, used by computers to generate natural language text.

Parse Tree

Diagram that reveals how a sentence is constructed by tagging each word with its part of speech and identifying the noun focus.

Phonemes

Sound pieces that make up spoken words, used by computers to recognize speech.

Language Model

Contains statistics about sequences of words, improving speech recognition accuracy.

Spectrogram

A graph plotting the magnitude of different frequencies that make up a sound, used in speech recognition.

Fast Fourier Transform

An algorithm that converts waveforms of sound into frequencies, used in speech recognition.

Patches

Small pixel regions considered by computer vision algorithms to identify features like edges.

Prewitt Operators

Edge enhancing kernels used in computer vision algorithms to find edges in an image.

Convolutional Neural Networks

Algorithms that use banks of artificial neurons to process image data, each outfitting a new image digested by learned kernels.

Features

Values used to characterize the things to be classified in machine learning.

Training Data

Data used to train a machine learning algorithm.

Decision Boundaries

Lines or boundaries that chop up the decision space in machine learning.

Confusion Matrix

A table used to evaluate the performance of a classification algorithm, showing where the algorithm fails.

Support Vector Machines

A type of machine learning technique that slices up the decision space using arbitrary lines.

Deep Neural Networks

A type of artificial neural network with multiple hidden layers between the inputs and outputs.

Strong AI

A type of AI that is more human-like.

Weak AI

An AI that can only perform specific tasks.

Reinforcement Learning

An approach where AIs learn from themselves and others over time, gobbling up tons of information.

Defense in Depth

Using many layers of varying security mechanisms to frustrate attackers and protect a system.

Cryptography

The practice of making information secret through the use of ciphers.

Cipher

An algorithm used to convert plain text into ciphertext.

Encryption

The process of making text secret using a cipher.

Substitution Cipher

A cipher that replaces each letter in a message with something else.

Permutation Cipher

A cipher that rearranges letters according to a predetermined pattern.

Key Exchange

An algorithm that lets two computers agree on a key without ever sending the key.

Symmetric Keys

Encryption in which sender encrypts a message with a key and the recipient decrypts it using the same key.

Asymmetric Encryption

Has 2 different keys, a public one and a private key.

White Hats

Hackers who help with security evaluations.

Black Hats

Hackers who have malicious goals.

Hacktivists

Hackers who use their skills to promote social and political goals.

Social Engineering

Tricking someone to let hackers in or manipulating someone into sharing confidential data to allow an attack.

Phishing

Common social engineering technique where a scammer sends a fraudulent message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker.

Pretexting

A social engineering attack in which attackers call a company attempting to be IT, ask to be transferred to a second, and can then instruct someone to configure their computer in a compromising way.

Malware

Malicious software that might steal data, or encrypt files and demand a ransom.

NAND Mirroring

Attaching wires to the memory chip and making a copy of its contents.

Buffer Overflow

An attack that is when the amount of data in the buffer exceeds its capacity.

Bounds Checking

Checks the length of an input before entering to avoid a buffer overflow.

Canaries

Regions that programs create to leave open some buffer space and keep an eye on those values.

Code Injection

Inserting malicious code, commonly used on big websites, and exploits a vulnerability.

Zero-Day Vulnerability

When a new bug is discovered.

Botnet

When bugs are left open on enough systems, allowing hackers to write a program to automatically take over a computer.

Cybersecurity

The protection of computer systems and data from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction.

Secrecy

The idea that only authorized users should access specific computers/data.

Integrity

The goal that only authorized individuals should be able to use and modify systems/data.

Availability

Authorized people should ALWAYS have access to their systems.

Threat Models

Used to protect security goals by profiling attackers.

Authentication

Used to differentiate between right and wrong people.

Brute Force Attack

An attack on computers where it just tries every possible combo.

Access Control Lists

Describe what access each user has for every file, folder, and program on a computer.

Bell-LaPadula Model

A security model that provides key rules for companies with different levels of access.

Security Kernel/ Trusted Computing Base

A minimal set of operating system software that’s close to provably secure.

Independent Verification and Validation

Code that is audited by a crowd of security minded developers.

Isolation

If one part is compromised, the whole system should maintain relative stability. Gives each sandbox application their own memory block.

Network Neutrality

The principle that all internet packets should be treated equally, being sent at the same time and priority.

Packets

Breaking up data into packets, which have to conform to IP.

User Datagram Protocol (UDP)

Sits on top of IP and has it’s own header.

Port Number

A process where the operating system looks at the UDP header and reads the port number to know what application to send it to.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

TCP that rides inside the data payload of IP.

Domain Name System (DNS)

Used to map an IP address to a domain name.

Local Area Networks (LAN)

Small networks of close computers.

Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CMSA)

The term for when a computer wanted to transmit data, it wrote the data as an electrical signal onto the cable. Each computer must have a MAC.

Collison

Term for when network traffic is heavy, the probability that two computers will try to write data at the same time also increases.

Exponential Backoff

The process to have computers wait a 1 second plus a random amount of time before trying again.

Collision Domain

A network can be broken up into two domains.

Packet Switching

Chopping up data and passing them along flexible routes with spare capacity.

Orthographic Projections

When the parallel sides of an object appear parallel in the projection.

Perspective Projection

Occurs when parallel lines converge as they get further from view.

Mesh

A collection of polygons.

Scanline Rendering

Reads the three points that make up the polygon, finding the highest and lowest y values and only considers rows in that.

Antialiasing

Instead of filling pixels of a polygon with all one color, adjust the color based on how much the polycon cuts through each pixel.

Painter’s Algorithm

Sorts all the polygons from farthest to nearest and then renders them in that order.

Z-Buffering

Keeps track of the closest distance to a polygon for every pixel in the scene by maintaining a matrix of values that sits in memory.

Z-Fighting

Flickering that occurs when two polygons have the same distance.

Back-Face Culling

A technique used in 3D computer graphics to improve rendering.