| Occupation | |
|---|---|
Occupation type | Academic |
| Description | |
| Competencies | Computer science and other formal sciences (e.g. mathematics, logic, statistics, information theory, systems science) |
Education required | Doctoral degree, master's degree, bachelor's degree |
Fields of employment | Universities, private corporations, financial industry, government, military |
Related jobs | Mathematician, logician |
A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science.[1]
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on specific areas (such as algorithm and data structure development and design, software engineering, information theory, database theory, theoretical computer science, numerical analysis, programming language theory, compiler, computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, computer architecture, operating system), their foundation is the theoretical study of computing from which these other fields derive.[2]
A primary goal of computer scientists is to develop or validate models, often mathematical, to describe the properties of computational systems (processors, programs, computers interacting with people, computers interacting with other computers, etc.) with an overall objective of discovering designs that yield useful benefits (faster, smaller, cheaper, more precise, etc.).