U.S.-Ukraine Workshop: Information Technology in Ukraine: From a Worthy Past to a Bright Future

University Of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

Abstract

This is a US-Ukrainian workshop, "Information Technology in Ukraine: From a Worthy Past to a Bright Future." The principal investigator is Dr. Anne Fitzpatrick from the University of New Mexico. Her Ukrainian collaborator is Dr. Boris Malinovsky from the Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics in Kiev. This workshop will draw together computing scientists and scholars not only from Ukraine and the U.S. but also from the former Soviet countries of Russia, Armenia, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Georgia. Other participants are expected from Bulgaria, Hungary, Great Britain and Germany. The workshop will allow the participants to compare the evolution of computer technology in two very different cultures and determine what it meant to pursue the field of computer science in the Soviet Union with far more certainty than was ever possible before. It will also allow the scholars to establish contacts, learn, and publish about a very important and little studied part of computer history and the history of Soviet and Ukrainian science and technology. Only the last decade has allowed former Soviet scholars to uncover and openly discuss the historical aspects of significant science and engineering projects undertaken in the USSR, much less give foreigners easier access to this information. The detailed investigation of the success and failure story of the Soviet computing can be instrumental for an orientation in the nature and perils of other hi-tech communities under totalitarian rule of today." This project in the history of science fulfills the program objectives of bringing together leading experts in the U.S. and Central/Eastern Europe to combine complementary efforts and capabilities in areas of strong mutual interest and competence on the basis of equality, reciprocity, and mutuality of benefit.