Category Archives: Computer Science
The internets phonebook is flawed and outdated. Its time for an upgrade – Digital Trends
The websites we visit are scattered across a vast, messy web of underground cables, racks of metallic boxes, and a myriad of routers that weve come to call the internet. So when you punch in an address and hit enter, how does your browser know where to look?
The answer is a system thats been around since the days that the internet was so small and so compact, it could all be mapped in a single text file.Its called the Domain Name System (or DNS for short), and although it has kept up with the internets evolving role for decades, it has also crumbled more frequently than ever in recent years and taken down some of the webs biggest sites along with it.
That increasing frequency has led many to call for a better system but replacing the very foundations of the worldwide web is no easy undertaking.
The DNS is one of the internets most vital cogs. It acts as the internets phonebook. Not the thick, physical kind but more akin to the digital one on your phone.
The DNSs job is to translate a website name into its computer-friendly address.
You see, electronic devices like your computer or your modem router dont understand the language we speak. They talk in numbers. So when you type in a domain name like digitaltrends.com, the browser doesnt quite know what it means. It needs that websites unique identification number its physical address (192.0.66.16 for Digital Trends) to navigate through the maze of servers and routers, then trace the websites location and bring it up on your screen.
In other words, the DNSs job is to translate a website name into its computer-friendly address similar to how your phones contacts app lets you access a mobile number or an address by simply entering a persons name. Except unlike your phones contacts app, the internets phonebook has nearly 2 billion entries of websites (and counting).
So every time you enter a URL in the address bar, your browser first calls the DNS and requests it to fetch the websites number. Once the DNS returns that information, the browser can find and connect to the websites server.
This all happens in the blink of an eye, and browsers are able to cut back further on how long the DNS process takes by caching the IDs of the websites you visit often.
Without the DNS, your browser would be lost in the dark without a flashlight. Its essential for pretty much anything that involves a web address, which covers most of your internet activities, from sending someone a text to processing a digital payment. In the span of a single a day, hundreds of billions of DNS pings are exchanged a trillion in the case of Comcast.
The DNS has been around since the 1970s, when the internet was restricted to the walls of a few universities. Unlike todays global, decentralized system, it was just a text file with a list of all the connected computers numerical addresses and it was maintained by a single woman named Elizabeth Feinler.
But DNS has unquestionably evolved far beyond what its original makers envisioned. And as a result of this forced evolution, cracks have begun to appear in its architecture.
The bigger concern is the consolidation in the DNS market.
In July 2021, several banking pages and services like Airbnb, Amazon, and others went offline for over an hour due to a DNS bug. A similar issue disrupted a large chunk of the internet in 2020. In fact, such outages are so common that the phrase its always DNS, which pokes fun at how the DNS is usually responsible for a network snag, has become a popular joke among technologists.
The reason DNS is involved with so many internet outages, according to Dan York, the director of online content at the Internet Society, is simply because it operates at a huge scale beyond that of any other service. There are dozens of moving parts, and since it all works like some high-speed relay race, even when one of them malfunctions, it breaks the entire DNS chain.
In the grand scheme of things, though, DNSs error rate is fairly low (remember: trillions of queries pass through it every day). According to data supplied by Pingdom, a global network-monitoring platform, DNS has been only responsible for 4% of daily outages this year so far.
The bigger concern is the consolidation in the DNS market. One of the original objectives behind moving on from the original text file to the modern DNS was to engineer a distributed database that avoids the problems caused by a centralized database.
But what has happened is that as more people came online and network demands grew, large companies delegated their DNS duties to third-party hosting services like Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services. Most of the top thousand domains have coalesced around just four infrastructure providers. So any time theres a bug in one of these providers, a massive chunk of the mainstream web goes offline.
ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit regulatory body that oversees DNS standards, has no control over which hosting services companies pick. Because of this, Raj Jain, a computer science professor at Washington University, believes theres a dire need for a law against all internet monopolies, including DNS providers and search engines.
A few startups have more ambitious solutions in mind, however. Handshake, a blockchain-powered platform, argues the centralization of the DNS into the hands of a couple of hosting companies and gatekeepers like ICANN has made it vulnerable to cyberattacks and censorship. It wants to decentralize the Domain Name System for good by distributing its root onto a blockchain network, where everyone can truly own their domains instead of trusting a third party.
Handshake lets us create a whole new phone book, Handshakes head of marketing, Jake Schaeffer, told Digital Trends, owned by no one and everyone at the same time.
In reality, though, its close to impossible to replicate DNS ability to scale. Previous attempts similar to Handshakes have come and failed.
DNS processes hundreds of thousands of queries per second, and any new technologies such as blockchain cant keep up with this rapid rate of change, says Eric Osterweil, an assistant computer science professor at George Mason University and former vice-chair of the team responsible for analyzing the DNS security, stability, and reliability.
My view is that the collision-free namespace of DNS is something we would likely never be able to create again, added Osterweil.
An ICANN spokesperson said the coalition doesnt believe there are significant issues with DNS administration or scaling, and that it closely follows the development of new identifier technologies, such as those based on blockchain and peer-to-peer networks.
A blockchain-based alternative to the DNS doesnt have any takers yet. But its a familiar story and one weve seen before in the case of Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin has been in development for over a decade, and its still far from replacing traditional currencies. Its partial success paints a promising picture, though. Whether companies like Handshake can replicate this success to build a reliable DNS alternative remains to be seen.
ICANN, in its strategic plan for the next few years, has identified many of the DNS common issues and allocated more budget to pare down its risks. But if history is any indication, even once updates to resolve these issues are executed, theyll take years to roll out.
Until then, DNS will keep knocking the internets most visited destinations offline once in a while, and the its always DNS chants will continue.
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The internets phonebook is flawed and outdated. Its time for an upgrade - Digital Trends
Congratulations to the 2021 SWE Scholarship Recipients! – All Together – Society of Women Engineers
Congratulations to the 2021 SWE Scholarship Recipients! SWE is proud to award nearly 289 scholarships, totaling more than $1,200,000, to freshman, sophomore, junior, senior and graduate students for the 2021-2022 academic year. The recipients of SWE scholarships are a group of extremely accomplished and driven students who excel both inside and outside of the classroom.
The SWE scholarship program will assist these young individuals in accomplishing their dreams of being engineers who contribute to society. The names of all recipients are posted below and will also be published in the conference issue of SWE Magazine in October.
Alma Kuppinger Forman, P.E. Scholarship
SWE received thousands of applications this year and is very grateful for the SWE members who generously volunteered their time to help judge and award the scholarships!
We would also like to thank SWEs 2021 scholarship team:
2021 Judges:
SWE Blog
SWE Blog provides up-to-date information and news about the Society and how our members are making a difference every day. Youll find stories about SWE members, engineering, technology, and other STEM-related topics.
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Congratulations to the 2021 SWE Scholarship Recipients! - All Together - Society of Women Engineers
Reviewing the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing – InfoQ.com
In a recent article on the Ably Blog, Alex Diaconu reviewed the thirty-year-old "eight fallacies of distributed computing" and provided a number of hints at how to handle them. InfoQ has taken the chance to talk with Diaconu to learn more about how Ably engineers deal with the fallacies.
The eight fallacies are a set of conjectures about distributed computing which can lead to failures in software development. The assumptions are: the network is reliable; latency is zero; bandwidth is infinite; the network is secure; topology doesn't change; there is one administrator; transport cost is zero; the network is homogeneous.
The fallacies can be seen as architectural requirements you have to account for when designing distributed systems. InfoQ has taken the chance to talk with Diaconu to learn more about how Ably engineers deal with the fallacies.
InfoQ: Almost thirty years since the fallacies of distributed computing were initially suggested, they are still highly relevant. What's their role at Ably?
Diaconu: All of the fallacies are pointers to distributed system design pitfalls, and they are all still relevant today. They don't all have the same impact some are more easily accommodated than others. The fallacies that have the most pervasive effect on how we structure our systems at Ably are:
InfoQ: Do you think the evolution of distributed systems in the last thirty years has revealed any additional fallacies that should be taken into account?
Diaconu: I believe the most significant transformation over the last 30 years is the maturity of our understanding of how to deal with them. Thats not to say that the answers are any easier, but they are better understood. We know what approaches are good, what approaches are bad, and the limits of any given approach. There is now well-established scientific theory and engineering practice around these problem spaces. Computer science students are taught the problems and what the state of the art is.
Of course, its important to acknowledge that the fallacies are manifestations of enduring technical challenges; they shouldnt be thought of as easily avoided pitfalls. I suppose you could say that there is, in fact, a new fallacy "avoiding the fallacies of distributed computing is easy."
InfoQ: Some of the fallacies have become meanwhile commonplace, for example the idea that the Cloud is not secure is widely accepted. Still there may be some subtlety to them that makes the process of dealing with them not so trivial.
Diaconu: As previously mentioned, the challenges of distributed systems, and the broad science around the techniques and mechanisms used to build them, are now well researched. The thing you learn when addressing these challenges in the real world, however, is that academic understanding only gets you so far.
Building distributed systems involves engineering pragmatism and trade-offs, and the best solutions are the ones you discover by experience and experiment.
As an example, the "network is reliable" fallacy is the most basic thing you have to address. The known solutions involve protocols with retries; or consensus formation protocols; or redundancy for fault tolerance, depending on the particular failure mode of concern.
However, the engineering reality is that multiple kinds of failures can, and will, occur at the same time. The ideal solution now depends on the statistical distribution of failures; or on analysis of error budgets, and the specific service impact of certain errors.
The recovery mechanisms can themselves fail due to system unreliability, and the probability of those failures might impact the solution. And of course, you have the dangers of complexity: solutions that are theoretically sound, but complex, might be far more complicated to manage or understand whenever an incident takes place than simpler mechanisms that are theoretically not as complete.
InfoQ: If we look at microservices, which have become quite popular in the last few years, they seem to be at odds with the "transport cost is zero" fallacy. In fact, the smaller each microservice, the larger their overall count and the ensuing transport cost. How do you explain this?
Diaconu: Maybe another fallacy is "microservices make it easier to reason about your system". Sometimes breaking things down into components with a smaller surface area makes them easier to reason about. However, sometimes creating those boundaries adds complexity; it can certainly add failure modes, and it can create new things whose behavior also needs to be reasoned about.
Much like the previous answer, the actual design choices, and when and where you deploy the known theoretical solutions, come down to engineering judgment and experience. At Ably, we operate a system with multiple roles that scale, interoperate and discover one another independently. However, splitting functionality out into a distinct role is something we rarely do, and only when there is a particular driver for that to happen. For example, if we want some specific functionality to scale independently of other functionality, that justifies the creation of an independent role, even if it brings additional complexity.
Diaconu's article not only helps you understand where the fallacies originate from, but it also attempts to provide useful hints at current techniques and approaches to address the fallacies, so do not miss it if you are interested in the subject.
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Reviewing the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing - InfoQ.com
Meet the entrepreneur teaching computers to understand human emotions – CNN
Egyptian-American computer scientist Rana el Kaliouby wants to change that.
The 43-year-old co-founded her company Affectiva while undertaking a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Specializing in "Emotion AI," a subsect of artificial intelligence, Kaliouby wants to teach computers how to recognize and quantify human emotions.
Technology has created an "empathy crisis," Kaliouby says -- and her mission is to humanize it.
The company has grown from a university spin-out into an international, multi-million dollar enterprise with headquarters in Boston. But Kaliouby maintains close ties with Egypt, and Affectiva employs about 60 people at its Cairo office, including software engineers and machine learning scientists.
Life-saving tech
One area where Kaliouby believes Emotion AI could have life-saving applications is the automotive industry, where driver monitoring systems that use AI-powered cameras in cars could potentially detect driver distraction and drowsiness, preventing accidents.
In May 2021, Affectiva was acquired by Smart Eye, a leader in eye-tracking technology for driver monitoring, and the two companies are now combining their technologies.
There are other applications for cars too, says Kaliouby, including cameras that can view the full cabin to customize the driving experience. "If my baby in the backseat is falling asleep, it can dim the lights, or stop the music; it could change the temperature," she says. "You can personalize the car based on who's in it, what they're doing, and how they're feeling."
Surveillance or safety?
Aware of the many concerns surrounding Emotion AI, Kaliouby says Affectiva has a strict opt-in policy for data collection and transparency around how data is being used and stored.
"Anywhere where people's data privacy considerations are not respected, we're not going to do," says Kaliouby, adding that the company turns down those wanting to use the software for surveillance, security or lie detection.
With 11 million facial responses from 90 countries around the world, Kaliouby says Affectiva is trying to create a diverse database that removes age, gender and racial biases from its system. Affectiva is working on a model which includes facial expression and tone of voice, and accounts for nuances such as culture and context.
In the years to come, Kaliouby hopes Emotion AI can help create a more human, empathetic digital experience.
"The mission is to transform what a human-machine interface looks like, because that's not going to just improve our interactions with technology, but it's going to make our own connections with each other in a digital world so much better," she says.
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Meet the entrepreneur teaching computers to understand human emotions - CNN
Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan will share their vision of our AI-powered future at Disrupt – TechCrunch
Weve had visionary investors onstage before, and weve had science fiction authors onstage but never at the same time, let alone a pair who collaborated on a unique book of stories and essays that make an optimistic prediction of our AI-infused future. Sinovation founder Kai-Fu Lee and author of Waste Tide and others Chen Qiufan will join us at Disrupt (September 21-23) for a discussion of the fiction and fact of todays hottest technology.
Lee, born in Taiwan, attended CMU and obtained a PhD in computer science, working initially on speech recognition before working for Apple, SGI and Microsoft, then establishing Google China as its president. His research and investment company, Sinovation (originally Innovation Works) has been his focus since its founding in 2009, and he has grown to become a leading mind and influential figure in AI.
When we last spoke with Lee, at Disrupt SF 2018, he emphasized that China was catching up to the U.S. on AI research, and had surpassed it in some ways. And certainly his own investments have contributed to that. Since then, as someone who thinks frequently about what the future holds, he has found a kindred spirit in Chen Qiufan.
Qiufan is a Chinese author whose 2013 novel Waste Tide propelled him to literary fame, though like many authors, that wasnt enough to make him quit his day job until a few years later (Wired only just ran a profile on him). But by that time he had attracted the attention of Lee, who proposed a novel project: a collaborative book where the two would put their heads together to create a fictitious future informed by fact and realistic extrapolation.
The result is AI 2041: 10 stories by Qiufan set in the titular year, all over the world, with people from all walks of life encountering AI in the many ways that the authors speculate it may come to shape society over the next two decades. Each is followed by an explanatory essay by Lee that goes into the technical aspects and why they might lead to that future.
Ill be posting a full review of the book ahead of the event, but I can certainly say that its unlike any collection Ive read before. Each story is independent but takes place in something like a shared world, and each illustrates a potential application, conflict or change in thinking that AI could lead to. And, importantly, the AI is recognizable as descended directly from existing technologies.
For instance, one story concerns a talented deepfake creator working out of Lagos, one who knows the ins and outs of generative adversarial networks, image inspection, media pathways and so on. Hes tasked with creating a video of a long-dead celebrity that fools not just people watching it but the hosting services automated scanners, the governments facial recognition algorithms and all the rest but he begins to suspect theres an unsavory motive behind it all (I wont spoil the rest).
What follows the story is Lees essay on GANs, facial recognition and deepfakes that explains the concepts in an understandable but not patronizing way, then explores the risks and benefits in a non-narrative way. It helps ground the stories as real possibilities, not just imagined situations.
With both Qiufan and Lee onstage (virtually this time), the discussion of the book and the issues it brings up should be a lively one not least because it will be moderated by yours truly. But to catch this session, youll need to grab a pass to attend Disrupt happening September 21-23. Get yours today for less than $100 for a limited time!
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Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan will share their vision of our AI-powered future at Disrupt - TechCrunch
Is an expectation that students mask too little, too late? – Inside Higher Ed
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., expects all students and employees to wear masks indoors, no exceptions, it said Tuesday -- the same day that a former department chair published his account of resigning over the universitys lack of a mask mandate.
Yesterday, on the first day of classes for the 21-22 academic year, I resigned from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University after 21 years and a few days because the universitys COVID policies were wrong, Timothy Wilson, former chair of electrical engineering and computer science, wrote on LinkedIn. Embry-Riddle would not allow faculty members to require those in their classrooms and those in their offices to require masks, and the university would not allow faculty with specific concerns about their own or others health to teach remotely.
Feeling back to normal for a brief period in the late spring and early summer was great, Wilson explains in his piece, but the rise of the Delta variant changed things. Embry-Riddles COVID-19 policies, meanwhile, have not changed. Thats a problem, especially at an institution dedicated to science and aviation safety, he said.
Engineering ethics starts with protecting the health, safety and well-being of the public, Wilson wrote. Requiring masks in classrooms and close spaces like offices is a cheap and effective strategy to reduce COVID transmission, as ERAUs experience during the 20-21 academic year demonstrated.
Among other COVID-19 prevention measures, Embry-Riddle required masks last academic year. In a May memo announcing the resumption of normal operations, the university continued to encourage vaccination but said masks were now optional.
Earlier this month, the university made several announcements encouraging masking indoors, especially in classrooms.
It did not announce a mandate, despite pleas from the Faculty Senate and other groups and individuals for it to do so.
Wilson said in his resignation account that hed spoken at an orientation event last week where just about 20percent of attendees wore masks. He said he was also directed to remind a colleague that it was against university policy to say students were expected to mask up in class.
Wilson did have that chat with the colleague, he said, but he was disgusted with myself.
The university says its new policy -- an expectation that students, employees and visitors wear masks indoors -- is not related to Wilsons resignation. It also denies that the policy is a mandate, or that it constitutes any reversal from its prior stance on masking.
Ginger Pinholster, university spokesperson, said Tuesday that Embry-Riddle does not have a mask mandate and did not issue one today. University leadership today made it clear that wearing masks indoors and in aircraft is a cultural expectation at Embry-Riddle, consistent with our strong aviation safety culture.
The university is continuing to partner with our exceptional faculty members to improve safety and uphold our mission of education, Pinholster added.
Embry-Riddle accepts state funds for some programs, but its a private institution. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, published an executive order against school mask mandates in July. But in announcing an emergency school voucher program for students fleeing school districts that have adopted mask mandates anyway, DeSantiss administration acknowledged that these vouchers can be used both ways -- meaning that vouchers can be used at private schools, which can enforce masks.
Embry-Riddle, whose governing board is chaired by DeSantis donor and adviser Mori Hosseini, has resisted any mandate this year.
Tuesdays message on masks says, From this moment forward, in light of the latest guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Embry-Riddle leadership expects everyone -- whether you are vaccinated or unvaccinated -- to wear a mask over your nose and mouth at all times whenever you are inside any university facility or aircraft.
Sadly, the announcement says, the aeronautical safety-first mindset was not on display during the first day of classes yesterday, and therefore we are making our expectations more explicit: Wear a mask indoors and on the flight deck.
The guidance does not include details on what happens if students, employees or visitors defy this expectation.
Wilson said Tuesday evening that the announcement didnt change his mind about leaving Embry-Riddle, and that hes moving forward.
Asked about his colleagues who remain on campus, who will in many cases be on the front lines of expectation enforcement, Wilson said, Its a crappy position to have to enforce this. And if theres no backup for it, is it really a policy?
Wilson, who was otherwise content at Embry-Riddle, said that he would have expected the institution to put something more data-driven in place. There would have been an empirical aspect of this; they would have been looking at the policy to see what the impact was. And if Delta disappears, he said, we can go back to being vaccinated and not wearing masks.
Wilson clearly saw a disconnect between the universitys science-based mission and its policy decisions. He said in his LinkedIn piece that universities also have a duty to protect their people. As someone who is HIV positive, he said he understands this as well as anyone.
A university should protect its most vulnerable.
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Is an expectation that students mask too little, too late? - Inside Higher Ed
On the Bridge – August 2021 | Penn State University – Penn State News
A compilation of recent news, highlights and achievements from the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) community.
IST well represented at IJCAI-21
IST co-authors had eight papers accepted to the 2021 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21), a premier international gathering of artificial intelligence researchers and practitioners and their presentation of cutting-edge scientific results. Those papers include three by Hadi Hosseini, assistant professor; one by Fenglong Ma, assistant professor; one by Xinyu Xing, assistant professor, along with doctoral students Xian Wu and Wenbo Guo; and three from Zhenhui Jessie Li, former associate professor, along with former IST graduate students Hua Wei, Porter Jenkins, Chacha Chen, and Guanjie Zheng. IJCAI-21 was held virtually Aug. 19-26.
Seven IST papers accepted to KDD2021
IST research was well represented at this years Association for Computing Machinerys Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), held Aug. 14-18 in Singapore, with seven papers involving IST co-authors accepted to the conference. IST researchers on the accepted papers include Dongwon Lee, professor; Amulya Yadav, PNC Career Development Assistant Professor; Fenglong Ma, assistant professor; Suhang Wang, assistant professor; and doctoral students Enyan Dai, Yiwei Sun, Thai Le and Maryam Tabar. On one paper, Lee, Yadav and Tabar collaborated with experts from PlantVillage, an app developed by Penn State researchers to help farmers diagnose crop diseases and monitor pests. PlantVillage co-authors on Lee, Yadav and Tabars paper include David Hughes, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Global Food Security and PlantVillage; Annalyse Kehs, PlantVillage operations director; Derek Morr, data scientist for PlantVillage; Fei Jiang, postdoctoral researcher; and Jared Gluck and Anchit Goyal, Schreyer Honors Scholars who earned bachelors degrees in computer science this year.
Gamrat selected as an EDUCAUSE expert panelist
Chris Gamrat, instructional designer, was selected from a record number of worldwide applications to serve as an expert panelist for the EDUCAUSE 2022 Teaching and Learning Horizon Report. Comprised of global leaders from across the higher education landscape, the panel offers perspectives on key trends and emerging technologies and practices that shape the future of teaching and learning to be published in the annual report. The report also envisions a number of scenarios and implications for the future. EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association and the largest community of technology, academic, industry and campus leaders advancing higher education through the use of information technology.
Encyclopedia of AI includes eight entries by IST authors
Frank Ritter, professor, and five members of the Penn State Applied Cognitive Science Lab, have a total of eight entries in the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence: The Past, Present, and Future of AI. Other authors from the lab include David Schwartz, Raphael Rodriguez and Jacob Oury, doctoral students in the College of IST; Farnaz Tehranchi, doctoral student in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Mat Brener, a post-doctoral scholar in the lab.
Summer 2021 iConnect magazine available online
The summer issue of iConnect magazine, the College of ISTs biannual magazine for alumni and friends of the college, is available to read online. This edition highlights Sara Weston, an alumna who launched a nonprofit to support and empower female emergency dispatchers, and explores ethical challenges facing the technology sphere, as discussed by IST experts. The magazine can be read at ist.psu.edu/iconnect.
On the Bridge highlights accomplishments by faculty, staff, students and alumni of the College of Information Sciences and Technology. Share your news with us and the IST community by emailingwebmarcom@ist.psu.edu.
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On the Bridge - August 2021 | Penn State University - Penn State News
Statisticians put odds of asteroid Bennu hitting Earth into perspective – Harvard Gazette
Even Harry Stamper would probably like these odds.
Recently NASA updated its forecast of the chances that the asteroid Bennu, one of the two most hazardous known objects in our solar system, will hit Earth in the next 300 years. New calculations put the odds at 1 in 1,750, a figure slightly higher than previously thought.
The space agency, which has been tracking the building-sized rock since it was discovered in 1999, revised its prediction based on new tracking data.
Even with the small shift in odds, it seems likely we wont face the kind of scenario featured that in the 1998 science-fiction disaster film Armageddon when Stamper, played by Bruce Willis, and his team had to try to blow up a huge asteroid that was on an extinction-making collision course with the Earth.
(In an unrelated development, NASA plans to launch a mission in November to see whether a spacecraft could hit a sizeable space rock and change its trajectory just in case it ever needs to.)
This begs the question of just how good should we feel about our odds? We put that question to Lucas B. Janson and Morgane Austern, both assistant professors of statistics.
They compared Bennus chances of hitting Earth to the approximate likelihood of:
Bottom line? Janson, an affiliate in computer science, says that if he were a betting man, he would put his money on our being just fine. Then again, he points out, if he is wrong, Paying up would be the least of my worries.
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Statisticians put odds of asteroid Bennu hitting Earth into perspective - Harvard Gazette
School of Informatics: Tech-focused, career-advancing education – Study International News
The University of Edinburgh has a long history of international leadership in computer science (CS) and artificial intelligence (AI). They founded the first AI lab in Europe in 1963 and have been developing groundbreaking research in the area ever since. Their AI and CS degrees were established in the 1970s and continue to this day in the School of Informatics.
This School is world-leading in its research and regularly ranked in the top 25 departments internationally in university rankings. Further attesting to its prowess in CS are its rankings. The University of Edinburgh were ranked 22nd and 26th respectively by both the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2021 by subject and the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2021. They were also ranked 16th in the QS World University Rankings 2022 and 30th in the Times Higher Education University Rankings 2021.
Being at the forefront of research means that both undergraduate and postgraduate students get the opportunity to learn cutting edge science and technology from experts in the field, through a curriculum that is regularly revised to reflect the state of the art and the interests of employers.
The School of Informatics offers undergraduate and postgraduate courses and degrees in Informatics, AI, Cognitive Science, Computer Science and Software Engineering. Source: The University of Edinburgh
The curriculum includes courses as diverse as computational cognitive neuroscience and quantum security, machine learning and natural language processing. This allows each student a wide choice of courses and the opportunity to craft their degree to reflect their interests and career aspirations. The School is home to a vibrant community of staff and students who are drawn from all corners of the globe there are currently more than 100 nationalities represented amongst them. Thus, the School brings together the brightest and best from around the world and creates wide-ranging opportunities for everyone to fulfil their potential.
As a School of Informatics, rather than Computing, they encompass the study of creation, processing, storage and communication of all forms of information, both natural (e.g., DNA, neurons, etc.) and artificial (e.g., computers and communication networks).
Cutting edge research in topics such as robotics, biomedical AI, natural language computing, cyber security and quantum computing are reflected in the courses that are available for third and fourth year undergraduate and masters students, whilst first and second year undergraduates study a range of fundamental topics that support later development in a variety of directions. The Schools lecturers are also passionate about their topics, and many receive nominations in the Edinburgh University Student Association teaching awards, which students nominate.
There are currently more than 100 nationalities represented amongst the students and staff. Source: The University of Edinburgh
In addition to the taught curriculum, students have the opportunity to get involved in a wide range of student societies. The Edinburgh Hoppers, for instance, is a student-run, women and gender minorities in technology group. They organise various events such as workshops, tech talks and socials, often in collaboration with various companies.
Subject-related societies such as CompSoc a diverse community of computer scientists, programmers and people passionate about the IT industry are also available and are run by students of the University of Edinburgh. Student societies promote interactions with industry, including invited talks and CV clinics. The Schools team of dedicated business development executives are on hand to support and advise students interested in creating their own startup.
The School is at the centre of a rich technology ecosystem in Edinburgh, with a number of large industrial collaborators such as Amazon and IBM close by, as well as many startups and SMEs. This ecosystem provides input into the student experience in the School as well as a gateway into employment at the end of degrees.
Calton Hill in Edinburgh is famous for its collection of historic monuments. Source: The University of Edinburgh
The School and the University are situated in the centre of historic Edinburgh, the home of the Seventeenth Century Enlightenment. As the capital city of Scotland, Edinburgh combines old and new, in a stunning physical location, offering the best of all worlds. The city hosts numerous festivals each year, including the internationally renowned Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Despite being a capital city, Edinburgh is reasonably compact and easy to get around, with much to offer in terms of culture and experience. Moreover, it is surrounded by the beautiful Scottish countryside, easily accessible by public transport.
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School of Informatics: Tech-focused, career-advancing education - Study International News
Western Sydney Uni and Intel to jointly develop brain-inspired computer system – ZDNet
Researchers from the International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS) at Western Sydney University (WSU) have teamed up with Intel to build a scalable, open-source, and configurable neuromorphic computer system proof-of-concept, so they can learn more about how the brain works and how to build better AI.
Neuromorphic computing aims to use computer science to develop AI hardware that is more flexible and can emulate the functions of the human brain, including contextual interpretation, sensory applications, and autonomous adaptation.
See:What is neuromorphic computing? Everything you need to know about how it is changing the future of computing
"We don't really know how brains take signals from our body sensors and processes it, and make sense of the world around it. One of the reasons for that is we can't simulate brains on regular computers -- it's just way too slow, even simulating like a cubic millimetre of the brain takes weeks to simulate for just a few seconds -- and that's stopping some of the understanding of how brains work," ICNS director Andr van Schaik told ZDNet.
"Therefore, we need to build a machine that can emulate the brain rather than simulate with the difference being, it's more of a hardware implementation where these things run faster and in parallel."
He added that to be able to understand the brain is just one of those "final frontiers in science".
"You can't just study the human brain in humans at the right level of detail and scale or do an EEG where you get brainwaves but get no resolution of what the individual neurons are doing in somebody's brain, but with this system you can do that. Hopefully we can find out how brains work and then scale, but also how they fail," van Schaik said.
At the same time, van Schaik believes the solution could improve the way AI systems are built, describing current methods used to train AI models as "very brute force methods".
"They're really just learning from lots of examples [but] learning about brains work very differently from what we call AI at the moment. Again, we don't quite know how that works and again, holding us back is that we are unable to simulate this on current computers at any scale," he said.
According to van Schaik, the team envisions the proof-of-concept setup would look much like current data centres. It would consist of three compute racks in a cool environment, incorporate Intel configurable network protocol accelerator (COPA)-enabled field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and be connected by a high-performance computing (HPC) network fabric. The system would then be fed information, such as computational neuroscience, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology.
The system would be coming off the back of work Intel's Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) has been doing with its Loihi neuromorphic computing process.
Van Schaik said while the Loihi chip is very power efficient, it's also less flexible as it's a custom-designed chip and therefore non-configurable, compared to using FPGAs that can be configured and reconfigured using software.
"We want to offer this more flexible system, and more power-hungry system as a separate pathway for that community," he said.
"We are currently able to simulate much larger networks than they can on that platform."
There's also a sustainability aspect to the research as well, with van Schaik explaining that the system to be built would be able to process more data, with less power. The projected thermal design power of the system is 38.8 kW at full load.
"[In] the advent of AI and machine learning and smart devices we're collecting so much data when that data goes to the cloud, it consumes electricity and we're actually on a trajectory [where] data consume as much electricity as everything else in the world," he said.
"If we look at data centres at the moment that processes data they consume massive amounts of electricity. The human bran is about 25 watts we hope by building AI and data process more like brains, we can do it at much less power."
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Western Sydney Uni and Intel to jointly develop brain-inspired computer system - ZDNet