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A Learning Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Abilities
In Belgium, an Encryption Powerhouse Rises
Why Google's New Quantum Computer Could Launch an Artificial
Intelligence Arms Race
New Education Bill to Get More Coding in Classrooms
Growth in Computer Science Driven by Student Interest, Societal Need
Tiny Chip That Powers Itself From Radio Waves
Super-Literate Software Reads and Comprehends Better Than Humans
Wikipedia-Mining Algorithm Reveals World's Most Influential Universities
This Is How You Count All the Trees on Earth
First Indian Student Supercomputing Challenge Coming This June
A Cure for Medical Researchers' Big Data Headache
Tech Breakthroughs Are Giving Animals the Power to Speak
New PBS KIDS ScratchJr App Launches
A Learning Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Abilities
The New York Times (12/10/15) John Markoff
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York
University, and the University of Toronto have disclosed an artificial
intelligence (AI) advance in which a computer-vision program surpassed a
group of people in identifying handwritten characters based on a single
example. The AI uses Bayesian Program Learning (BPL) to quickly assimilate
the characters in a range of languages and generalize from that knowledge.
BPL differs from machine learning based on deep neural networks in that it
can grasp new handwritten characters after "seeing" a few or only one
example. The researchers suggest the software program learns in a manner
similar to human learning. Meanwhile, on Thursday the organizers of the
Imagenet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge reported a successful
reduction of the error rate in software for finding and classifying objects in
digital images. The winning team from Microsoft Research's Beijing lab halved
the number of errors in a task requiring their program to classify objects from
a set of 1,000 categories. These and other innovations reflect the increasing
concentration on AI in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, but computer scientists
warn against concluding that such advances imply a challenge to human
intelligence.
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In Belgium, an Encryption Powerhouse Rises
The Wall Street Journal (12/10/15) Amir Mizroch
Belgium's University of Leuven has become a stage where privacy and
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surveillance advocates are fighting over digital encryption, which is researched
at the school's prestigious Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography
group (COSIC). The center is led by professor and privacy proponent Bart
Preneel, who has drawn criticism from those who think his work at Leuven
complicates law enforcement and government efforts to foil or trace criminals
and terrorists. "Academics have to be aware of the need to act responsibly
when their discoveries can lead to harm," argues former GCHQ director David
Omand. Preneel counters he is not working against government agencies, but
he emphasizes "citizens need to be able to do some things in secret
legitimately." COSIC's researchers develop new encryption for corporate
clients, or assess their in-house antihacking technology. Preneel reports Intel
is one client, partly underwriting COSIC's work in protecting different apps on
a smartphone so they cannot steal data from each other, or siphon off data
from the device's user. A team from Preneel's lab is testing encryption
protecting chip-enabled passports, SIM cards, and other kinds of digital
identification. Another group is hacking medical devices to boost their
security. The highly popular Advanced Encryption Standard also has roots in
Leuven, created by two university graduates in 2001.
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Why Google's New Quantum Computer Could Launch an Artificial
Intelligence Arms Race
The Washington Post (12/10/15) Dominic Basulto
The new D-Wave 2X quantum computer, recently announced by Google and
the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), could help
set off an artificial intelligence (AI) arms race. Google says the D-Wave 2X is
100 million times faster than any other machine, enabling it to theoretically
complete calculations within seconds to a problem that might take a digital
computer 10,000 years to calculate. Google, which claims the D-Wave 2X
represents a major advancement for computing and AI, refers to its research
being carried out at NASA's Ames Research Center as "quantum artificial
intelligence" because machine-learning problems that are too hard or complex
for today's computers could be solved almost instantaneously in the future.
The technology is competing against IBM's Watson supercomputer, which is
working to optimize the research and development process for a range of
industries, as well as the consumer realm. In addition, University of California,
San Diego researchers recently developed the memcomputer, which mimics
the way the human brain works, storing and processing information
simultaneously. Meanwhile, Yale University recently launched its Quantum
Institute, which also is working to develop quantum computers. Going
forward, Google hopes to show it has learned how to make practical quantum
computers for the commercial market.
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New Education Bill to Get More Coding in Classrooms
The Wall Street Journal (12/10/15) Yoree Koh
The Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law by U.S. President Barack
Obama on Thursday, recognizes computer science (CS) as important an
academic subject as math and English, potentially introducing it into more
classrooms across the country. The new law includes CS in the definition of
well-rounded education subjects, putting it on the same level as other
subjects when state and local policy makers decide how to distribute federal
funds. "This week marks a watershed moment for computer science in U.S.
schools," says Code.org founder Hadi Partovi. "In just two years, this field has
been adopted by all the largest cities, almost 100 school districts. It's great to
see the federal government finally recognize this field as a foundational
academic subject." Computer science is specifically mentioned in the bill with
language relating to curriculum and support around professional development.
For example, the law will provide CS educators with the same level of access
to professional development opportunities as teachers in other subject areas
such as math and science. Partovi notes computer science's acknowledgement
in the bill also could prompt states to provide funds for CS education, as many
states tend to copy federal law verbatim.
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Growth in Computer Science Driven by Student Interest, Societal Need
Princeton Engineering News (12/09/15) John Sullivan
In response to growing enrollment and increasing interest in computer science
from other disciplines, Princeton University is expanding its computer science
faculty by more than 30 percent. The expansion will add 10 tenure-track
positions to the current 28, making the computer science department one of
the three largest concentrations at Princeton. The department plans to bring
in the new faculty members as soon as possible, and the university will
support the expansion with funds in the long term. "Computer science brims
with intellectual excitement, offering new insights into age-old questions and
novel ways to solve major societal challenges," says Princeton president
Christopher L. Eisgruber. Computer scientists at Princeton regularly connect
with a range of collaborators across campus, and enrollments in computer
science have tripled since the department was launched in 1985. In addition,
among students on track to graduate in 2017, 35 percent of Princeton
computer science majors are women, nearly twice the national average of 18
percent. The introductory computer science course, called General Computer
Science and started 20 years ago by Princeton professor Robert Sedgewick, is
the university's most popular class. Sedgewick created the course because he
believed there were core principles of computer science that could be taught
to a general group of students.
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Tiny Chip That Powers Itself From Radio Waves
BBC News (12/08/15)
Eindhoven University of Technology researchers have developed a tiny sensor
powered by the radio waves it uses to communicate information, a
development the researchers say could help advance the Internet of Things
industry. The sensor is designed to measure temperature, but Eindhoven
professor Peter Baltus says similar sensors could be developed to measure
light, movement, and humidity. The sensor is two square millimeters in size
and weighs 1.6 milligrams. The device has an antenna that captures energy
from a wireless router, and stores the energy up to a certain threshold, at
which point it can measure the temperature and send a signal to the router.
Although the current model has a range of just 2.5 centimeters, Baltus thinks
it can be extended up to one meter, and possibly even five meters. The
sensor can operate beneath a layer of paint, plastic, or concrete, making it
ideal for incorporation into buildings. The cost of an individual chip will be
about 20 cents, according to Baltus.
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Super-Literate Software Reads and Comprehends Better Than Humans
New Scientist (12/09/15) Hal Hodson
New software is learning to read and comprehend the nature of relationships
between characters, the passage of time in the text, and whether the
characters get what they want. One example of this technology is Columbia
University's Declassification Engine software. It is sifting through and
analyzing declassified cables from the U.S. State Department ranging across
five decades--4.5 million documents--to plot out social connections and look
for new narratives concerning the behavior of U.S. diplomats overseas,
according to Columbia computer scientist Owen Rambow. "If we could extract
social networks from these cables then we can study how the networks of the
U.S. changed over time," he notes. University of Maryland, Baltimore County
researcher Snigdha Chaturvedi says current natural-language processing
systems are proficient at answering fact-based questions, but less capable
with opinion. She is developing software designed to understand people's
opinions via their writings. Computers equipped with such software will be
compelling tools based on their ability to read faster and more widely than
humans, says Carnegie Mellon University's Tom Mitchell. "They could acquire
experience that could far surpass what we could ever get in our lifetime," he
notes.
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Wikipedia-Mining Algorithm Reveals World's Most Influential
Universities
Technology Review (12/07/15)
Researchers from the University of Franche-Comte in France say they have
developed a method of ranking the influence of the world's universities by
applying an algorithm used by Google to rank search results in Wikipedia. The
Pagerank algorithm works by examining the links between nodes on a
network to determine which of the nodes is most important. The researchers
applied the algorithm to 24 different language editions of Wikipedia, a
database containing 68 percent of all Wikipedia articles. The resulting top 100
list varies in many ways from more traditional rankings of influential
universities. It tends to favor older universities that have had a greater
cultural impact, granting universities more credit for their importance in the
arts and humanities than traditional rankings, which favor achievements in
science. It also is more diverse. Although U.S. universities still account for
more than a third of the schools on the Wikipedia list, they account for more
than 50 percent in traditional rankings. Universities from non-Englishspeaking countries such as Japan and India feature more prominently on the
Wikipedia ranking. However, the top 20 is still dominated by U.S. and U.K.
universities, with a top five of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Columbia, and
Princeton.
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This Is How You Count All the Trees on Earth
The Register (UK) (12/09/15) Drew Cullen
Modern algorithms have estimated there are about 3 trillion trees on Earth,
but a more specific analysis requires new methodologies. Researchers at the
U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space
Flight Center and the University of Minnesota have proposed a tree-counting
project that combines better algorithms with less costly and faster data
processing. The latter would utilize a mix of NASA Goddard's private cloud, as
well as the public cloud by way of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The
researchers tested the algorithms in sub-Sarahan Africa because of the lack of
deforestation. The project used images from four commercial satellites, but
for the trial the project leaders concentrated on data captured by only one.
The data was organized into 225 one-kilometer-square chunks, and NASA
scientists first had to create a mosaic of those images to produce a single
seam and then make this "stand up" before deploying the counting algorithm,
a process known as orthorectified mosaicing. The data presents as a parallel
problem, making it suitable for parallel processing on general-purpose server
clusters, or processing via cloud services. After mosaicing, the data was prestaged in AWS and processed in 200 instances using AWS spot pricing.
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First Indian Student Supercomputing Challenge Coming This June
HPC Wire (12/07/15) Tiffany Trader
Next June, the inaugural distributed and embedded-High Performance
Computing (de-HPC) symposium will host the first Indian Student
Supercomputing Challenge (ISSC) to introduce the next generation of
students to the HPC community and its technology. As part of the
competition, eight to 10 student teams will build a small cluster computer of
their own design and will use it to run a series of HPC benchmarks and
applications. The teams also will be required to present their findings to a
panel of judges to show how fundamentally they understand the applications
and results. "I believe ISSC opens up an interesting and innovative platform
for the HPC student fraternity in India to experience computer science and
computational science," says Indian Institute of Technology Bombay research
fellow Umesh Gupta. The de-HPC symposium will be a full-fledged conference
highlighting HPC-based research in various domains, along with an
opportunity for HPC vendors from around the world to introduce their latest
products. "The idea of the de-HPC initiative is to bring the entire HPC
community of the country, be it academics, government organizations, and
vendors with top HPC products, under one roof and give them a platform to
collaborate and work towards solving bigger inter-disciplinary challenges,"
says Syncthreads Computing director Rhushabh Goradia.
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A Cure for Medical Researchers' Big Data Headache
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (12/07/15) Jonathan Hines
Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) say they have
developed an advanced tool for literature-based discovery that has the
potential to accelerate medical research. Oak Ridge Graph Analytics for
Medical Innovation (ORiGAMI) is designed to reason with the knowledge of
every published medical paper every time clinical researchers use the tool,
which will help them find unexplored connections in medical literature. The
researchers note ORiGAMI unites big data, graph computing, and the
Semantic Web. The ORNL collaboration with the U.S. National Library of
Medicine relied on the high-performance computing resources of ORNL's
Compute and Data Environment for Science to develop the smart data tool.
ORiGAMI is a free online application capable of delivering health insights in
less than a second based on the combined knowledge of a worldwide medical
community. Georgia Tourassi, director of ORNL's Health Data Sciences
Institute, describes the tool as "computer-assisted serendipity" because it
enhances instead of replaces the person making the discovery. Tourassi says
the tool will guide researchers in certain ways to enable those moments of
epiphany. ORiGAMI could potentially boost the efficiency of medical research
by directing researchers toward the right questions, an outcome that could
reduce costs and speed up delivery of new treatments.
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Tech Breakthroughs Are Giving Animals the Power to Speak
Wired (12/07/15) Clive Thompson
Scientists are developing new technologies to enhance human-animal
communication and interaction. One example is the work of the Georgia
Institute of Technology's Melody Jackson. She is equipping service dogs with
computerized vests to help summon emergency assistance via audio
messages. The wearable computer can help dogs find people when their
owner is incapacitated or in distress, and then pull a lever to trigger
emergency messages. Such messages include an SOS alert that also provides
global-positioning system coordinates. When Jackson created an
accompanying touchpad for service dogs to be used in tandem with the vest,
the animals learned it would detect a signal if they hovered their nose over
the pad. Meanwhile, Open University's Animal-Computer Interaction Lab has
developed a sensor that measures the sniffing pattern of cancer-detecting
canines as they evaluate samples. Other animal-computer interaction
technologies under investigation include a system for helping humans and
dolphins communicate, video games that cats can play with humans, and
sensors developed by Jackson to monitor horses and broadcast signals of
impending lameness.
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New PBS KIDS ScratchJr App Launches
MIT News (12/03/15)
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has released an app designed to help
kids between the ages of five and eight learn the basic concepts behind
coding. The PBS KIDS ScratchJr app, based on the ScratchJr programming
language co-developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media
Lab and Tufts University, tasks kids with using colorful programming blocks to
create their own stories and games using more than 150 PBS KIDS
characters. Kits can snap the programming blocks together to make
characters jump, move, dance, and sing. The app is now available for free on
the iOS App Store and the Android Google Play store. The app was developed
as part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS Ready to Learn
Initiative, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education and aims to
promote computer science education for children. The app will be promoted in
underserved communities in the U.S. through programs and partnerships with
Title I schools supported by PBS member stations, the Verizon Foundation,
and the Ready to Learn Initiative. The promotional efforts will include afterschool activities, a summer camp, and teacher-training pilot programs.
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