Technology Foundation

The first level of the Technology track, and no prior programming or computer science background is assumed. It opens with what a computer is actually doing underneath the abstractions, then works through the layers every technologist needs a working sense of, algorithms and data structures, how software is actually built and shipped, how machines talk to each other over a network, how data is stored and queried, and how systems are attacked and defended. The second half turns to sensing and intelligence (embedded systems reading the physical world, and the machine learning systems increasingly making decisions from that data) closing with the ethical stakes of deploying those systems on real people. Four interactive models, a mission scenario in every chapter grounded in real technology history, and an open-response exercise read by ATLAS.

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