Computer Science
jdupuis | September 1, 2009A bunch of recent journal & magazine issues to catch up on. There's lots of cool stuff to highlight, so I'll only list a couple of articles from each issue. Unfortunately, most of it will be behind the IEEE paywall.
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, v31i2
Think Piece: Preserving Records of the Past, Today by Cortada, J.W.
Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine by Roegel, D.IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, v28i2
K-Net and Canadian Aboriginal communities by Fiser, A.; Clement, A.
Communication technology, emergency alerts, and campus safety by…
pontiff | July 29, 2009Rod Van Meter is in search of some summer reading:I'm feeling the need to recharge my store of ideas, and I have the
nagging feeling that my lack of currency in a bunch of fields is
causing me to miss some connections I could use in my own research.
So, I'm looking for a reading list of, say, the one hundred most
important papers of the decade. It doesn't have to be an even
hundred, but I'm looking for a good summer's reading. (Given that
it's mid-2009, now would be a good time to start composing such a list
anyway, depending on where you want to place the "decade" boundary.)
I want these…
pontiff | July 28, 2009Today on the arXiv an new paper appeared of great significance to quantum computational complexity: arXiv:0907.4737 (vote for it on scirate here)Title: QIP = PSPACE
Authors: Rahul Jain, Zhengfeng Ji, Sarvagya Upadhyay, John Watrous
We prove that the complexity class QIP, which consists of all problems having quantum interactive proof systems, is contained in PSPACE. This containment is proved by applying a parallelized form of the matrix multiplicative weights update method to a class of semidefinite programs that captures the computational power of quantum interactive proofs. As the…
jdupuis | July 23, 2009Scott Delman, Group Publisher of the ACM, has responded to my post earlier this month on society publishers and open access. That post generated some very good discussion in the post comments that are well worth checking out.
Delman's article is in the most recent Communications of the ACM (v52i8): Responding to the Blogosphere.
Here are some excerpts, although Delman's article is so interesting that I wish I could quote the whole thing.
The fact that ACM charges both for access to the published information in its Digital Library and also extends the courtesy of "Green OA" to its authors is…
pontiff | July 14, 2009With fast approaching deadlines:
The 2009 Asher Peres International Physics School:Title: "The Edge, twixt quantum and classical phenomena"
30 Nov - 4 Dec, Sydney, Australiahttp://web.mac.com/quests/PeresSchool2009/Welcome.html
The 2009 Asher Peres school provides senior undergraduates and junior postgraduates with a pedagogical introduction from internationally leading scientists on topics ranging from the interface between quantum and classical phenomena through to the role of quantum science in biology and nanomechanics.
The international lecturers for 2009 are
Prof Wojciech Zurek: Los…
pontiff | July 13, 2009Over at the optimizer's blog, quantum computing's younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I'd only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave…
pontiff | July 9, 2009The report from the Workshop on Quantum Information Science has now been posted. Color commentary soon :)
pontiff | July 2, 2009DARPA, you know the people who invented the internet ("100 geniuses connected by a travel agent"), has a new director: The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is the principal agency within the DoD for research, development, and demonstration of concepts, devices, and systems that provide highly advanced military capabilities for the current and future combat force. In this role of developing high-risk, high-payoff projects, DARPA compliments and balances the…
jdupuis | July 2, 2009Via Lance Fortnow's Twitter post, it's interesting to see Communications of the ACM editor Moshe Y. Vardi on Open Access:
First, a point of precision. Open-access experts distinguish between "Gold OA," described earlier, and "Green OA," which allows for open access self-archiving of material (deposit by authors) that may have been published as non-open access. ACM Copyright Policy allows for self-archiving, so ACM is a Green-OA publisher. Still, why doesn't ACM become a Gold-OA publisher?
*snip*
As for ACM's stand on the open-access issue, I'd describe it as "clopen," somewhere between open…
jdupuis | June 24, 2009A thought experiment.
It all started with this Ray Bradbury quote in the New York Times:
"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
I've bolded the chunk that has resonated most strongly around the Internet, especially Twitter where it was widely tweeted and retweeted.
The tweeter that most piqued my interest was…
jdupuis | June 18, 2009Some highlights from the IEEE's very fine Annals of the History of Computing, v31i2. You'll need a subscription to the magazine to access it on the IEEE's site.
Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine by Roegel, Denis
Biographies: Tom Kilburn: A Pioneer of Computer Design by Anderson, David P.
Think Piece: Preserving Records of the Past, Today by Cortada, James W
IBM France La Gaude Laboratory Contributions to Telecommunications: Part 1 and Part 2 by Bastian, Michel; Boisseau, Marc; Cohendet, et al.
pontiff | May 15, 2009Via the CCC Blog, an announcement concerning an NSF funded opportunity for new PhDs in Computer Science, CIFellows (http://cifellows.org):The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), with funding from the National Science Foundation, are pleased to announce an opportunity for new PhD graduates in computer science and closely related fields to obtain one-to-two year positions at host organizations including universities, industrial research laboratories, and other organizations that advance the field of computing and its positive impact on society.
The…
pontiff | April 1, 2009Wow, this is a very cool result:Researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkstown, NY have announced a breakthrough which they feel could revolutionize power consumption in computers. Today's computers are power hungry: a typical computer consumes hundreds of watts of power. Not only does this power consumption add up to a lot of wasted power, but increasingly the amount of heat generated by the machines is a significant barrier to building faster more powerful computers. The researchers at IBM say they've made a breakthrough in how computers consume power which will…
pontiff | March 26, 2009Lately I've been giving a lot of thought to a question that I'm nearly constantly asked: "So...[long pause]...are you a physicist...[long pause]...or are you a computer scientist?" Like many theorists in quantum computing, a field perched between the two proud disciplines of physics and computer science (and spilling its largess across an even broader swath of fields), I struggle with answering this question. Only today, after a long and torturous half year (where by torture, I mean interviewing for jobs, not the eerily contemporaneous fall of the world's finances) in which I have been…
jane | March 24, 2009For my Ada Lovelace Day post, I wanted to focus on someone who is doing interesting and interdisciplinary work in computer science, and whose work has interesting and important applications. Justine Cassell, Director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University, is just such a person.
I first heard about Dr. Cassell's work in this article:
Using "virtual peers" -- animated life-sized children that simulate the behaviors and conversation of typically developing children -- Northwestern University researchers are developing interventions designed to prepare…
sb admin | March 23, 2009Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow, March 24, is Ada Lovelace Day, a day devoted to highlighting women in technology. Get your posts together! (Even if you didn't sign the pledge, please join in on the fun!) Details on how to post and tag are here.
I am so excited about my own post---the woman I am posting about totally rocks, and I can't wait to introduce you to her and her work.
Also, while we are on the subject of reminders: If you're not familiar with fellow scibling Isis the Scientist....well, why the hell aren't you reading her already? Anyway, you definitely want to click…
jane | March 23, 2009Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow, March 24, is Ada Lovelace Day, a day devoted to highlighting women in technology. Get your posts together! (Even if you didn't sign the pledge, please join in on the fun!) Details on how to post and tag are here.
I am so excited about my own post---the woman I am posting about totally rocks, and I can't wait to introduce you to her and her work.
Also, while we are on the subject of reminders: If you're not familiar with fellow scibling Isis the Scientist....well, why the hell aren't you reading her already? Anyway, you definitely want to click…
pontiff | March 16, 2009The New York Times has an article about the CRA Taulbee Survey, which is a survey of computer science enrollments in the United States. (The survey isn't up on the CRA's website, but when it does I'm guessing it will be here.)For the first time in six years, enrollment in computer science programs in the United States increased last year, according to an annual report that tracks trends in the academic discipline.
I call bottom! Oops, a bit late.He noted that seven or eight years ago, few students would think about the possibility of a computer science graduate education, and that it was…
sb admin | March 12, 2009Um, hi. Apparently I've been gone for a while. Yeah. Sorry about that. Life's been a bit crazy around here lately, and I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water. I'm not sleeping. I'm not taking care of myself. I'm sick. I'm stressed to the gills. I have way too much to do. I feel like I work all the damn time. Hmmm, maybe that's because I *do* work all the damn time.
In addition to not having time to breathe blog, I haven't really been in the headspace to blog. I have a ton of stuff on my mind, but I'm not sure how to blog it. It's all about tenure, of course: the…
edyong | March 11, 2009Tigers can no more change their stripes than leopards can change their spots. That's a good thing too, for their unchanging patterns, as individually distinct as a human fingerprint, make it easier to track any single tiger over time.
That process is about to become even simpler with a computer programme that creates a three-dimensional model of a tiger's skin and can compare different shots of an animal taken at different times or angles. The programme is the brainchild of Lex Hilby from an organisation called Conservation Research and it could allow conservationists to track surviving…