| Items | Central concern | Key elements |
| Computation | What can be counted and what can’t | The complexity and efficiency of the synthesis problem, evolution, sorted by space and time; computational representation, transformation of expression, state and its transitions; computability, computational complexity theory. |
| Abstraction | Focus on the essential characteristics of the object | Conceptual model and formal model, abstraction level; Reduction, embedding, transformation, decomposition, data structures (such as queues, stacks, tables and graphs, etc.), virtual machines. |
| Automation | Discover algorithms for information processing | From algorithms to physical computing systems, from human thinking to artificial intelligence algorithms; formalization (definition, theorem and proof), procedures, algorithms, iterations, recursion, search, reasoning; strong artificial intelligence, weak artificial intelligence |
| Programming | Build reliability and credibility | Consistency and completeness, reuse, security, compromise and conclusion; modularity, information hiding, class, structure, aggregation |
| Communication | Reliable information movement between different locations | Information and its representation, Shannon’s theorem, information compression, information encryption, verification and error correction, coding and decoding |
| Coordination | Effective use of multiple autonomous computers | Synchronization, concurrency, dead-lock, arbitration; event processing, flow and sharing dependencies, collaborative strategies and mechanisms; network protocols, human-computer interaction, swarm intelligence |
| Recollection | Store and retrieve information | Binding; storage architecture, dynamic binding (names, handles, addresses, locations), naming (hierarchy, tree), retrieval (name and content retrieval, inverted index); locality and caching, trashing jitter, data mining, Recommended system |
| Evaluation | Responsible for performance prediction of systems (including natural and artificial systems such as earthquakes, nuclear weapons) | Visual modeling and simulation, data analysis, statistics, computational experiments; model methods, simulation methods, benchmark; prediction and evaluation, service network model; load, throughput, reaction time, bottleneck, capacity planning |