Category Archives: Computer Science
SEAS teams net top honors at President’s Innovation Challenge – Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) had a banner night at the recent 2023 Presidents Innovation Challenge Awards Ceremony at Harvard Business Schools Klarman Hall. Three SEAS-affiliated ventures won a combined $105,000 in Bertarelli Foundation prize money at the annual Harvard Innovation Labs event, taking both the grand prize and runner-up in the Student Open track, as well as one of several $5,000 Ingenuity Awards.
The space is such a good magnet for all the founders in the broader Harvard community, said Rohan Doshi, whose venture Penguin.ai won the $75,000 grand prize. It makes entrepreneurship, which is typically a lonely journey, a more communal one. It serves as a keystone position within the broader ecosystem by allowing founders to interact with each other and build a community.
Doshi, an M.S./M.B.A. candidate at SEAS and Harvard Business School, began developing Penguin.ai towards the end of last summer. The venture uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create high-quality visual assets, greatly reducing the time and cost associated with working with separate design agencies.
Penguin.ai already has multiple enterprise pilots in place, including with the Kraft Heinz Company.
I see AI as a tool, not a replacement, Doshi said. When youre writing text, theres an AI spell-checker or autocorrect that helps you move faster and do more. I see AI in a similar capacity, where it augments your ability to express yourself.
The $25,000 runner-up prize went to Stochastic, co-founded by SEAS postdoctoral researcher Glenn Ko and computer science Ph.D. candidate Yuji Chai. Stochastic equips companies with a secure, customizable AI-assisted data management platform that uses a chat-based interface similar to ChatGPT.
Large language models like ChatGPT are a way to compress a really large amount of data into a single model that you can interrogate, ask questions and receive answers, Ko said. They can aggregate information from different data sources, absorb all that knowledge, and allow users to access the knowledge instantaneously. At the same time, AI can act upon that knowledge by generating reports, documents, and emails to actually boost productivity. Because the language models inherently use a natural language interface, it gives wider access to AI for non-technical people.
Halo Braid, founded by M.S./M.B.A. candidate Yinka Ogunbiyi, is an automated hair-braiding device. Braids are an extremely common hairstyle for Black women, and Ogunbiyi devised her venture after learning how time-consuming braiding can be for professional stylists, her target market.
It started to make commercial sense when I did the math on how much stylists earn, how much time they spend braiding hair, and what would happen if they could effectively triple the number of clients they could see, Ogunbiyi said. When you do those numbers, its potentially a hundred thousand extra dollars they could earn per year.
Penguin.ai and Stochastic continued the success of SEAS ventures at the Presidents Innovation Challenge. Recent prize winners affiliated with SEAS include Limax Biosciences in 2022, Beacon Bio in 2021, Fractal in 2020, and ReThink in 2019.
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Is College The Real World? – Forbes
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Her Connection To The Crown Explained","uri":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2023/05/05/why-is-katy-perry-performing-at-king-charles-coronation-her-connection-to-the-crown-explained/","date":"5 hours ago","index":10,"contentBadge":{"class":"content-badge"},"image":"https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/6455176d03173cf52a76b6f2/960x0.jpg?cropX1=176&cropX2=3121&cropY1=0&cropY2=1655"}},"id":"2ijc9pricgg000"},{"textContent":"WHO Ends Covids Global Health Emergency Status After More Than 3 Years","scope":{"happening":{"title":"WHO Ends Covids Global Health Emergency Status After More Than 3 Years","uri":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/05/05/who-ends-covids-global-health-emergency-status-after-more-than-3-years/","date":"6 hours 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Climbing Mount Everest of computer programming – EurekAlert
Aleks Nanevski, researcher at IMDEA Software, discovered his passion for mathematics at the age of 10 when a teacher at his school in Macedonia saw his aptitude and started giving him extracurricular classes. He began to participate in regional competitions and by the age of 13 he was already on the podium in national competitions.
The mathematically gifted boy asked his parents for a computer. During a family trip to France, his parents were finally able to buy him one, the one they could afford, and Aleks began to delve into the world of programming. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, the instruction book for that machine was in French and he didn't know the language. For a while he also couldn't connect the computer to his TV, because of different TV standards. But the book showed example programs in the BASIC programming language along with the output of their execution. That sufficed for him to learn to program in his mind, without actually typing anything on a computer. This got him drawn into programming as an abstract mathematical activity that is independent of any computers.
His career as a researcher began with his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University, followed by a postdoctoral position at Harvard University. He then spent a couple of years at Microsoft Research in Cambridge U.K., following which he joined IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid, where he was awarded an ERC grant worth two million euros for the project "MATHADOR: Type and Proof Structures for Concurrent Software Verification". The project, funded by the European Unions Horizon 2020 program, has lasted 6 years and ended on March 31st. His research, as the European Research Council indicated at the time of the grant award, is high-risk because it proposes new foundations for concurrent software verification, but it is also high-gain, since concurrent software verification is one of the most important open problem in current research onprogramming languages and semantics.
For example, a computer program of an electric car has millions of lines of code and may work at launch, but that doesnt mean it can't have errors. Finding the errors can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, as it involves time and resources. If, in addition, the error arises from the faulty interaction between simultaneously running components, e.g., the car connects with GPS, safety sensors or a music application, the difficulties multiply. One can consider searching for the errors in principle, but in practice this requires infeasible amount of work. To really address the problem, a radical approach is needed.
Enterfunctional programmingandtype theory; centered in the academic world, these subjects have roots in philosophy, logic, and constructive mathematics. Functional programs may not be as fast to execute asimperative programs---the ones used by software industry---but they are much easier to write and understand. An imperative program with hundreds of lines of code can often be reduced to just a few lines in the functional idiom. When programmingimperatively, we adapt to the machines. When programming functionally, we have the machines adapt to us. The idea of functional programming is to use a mathematical language that is so minimalist, concise and effective that it makes it easy to spot the programming errors, and thus not even make errors in the first place.
Courage, patience and faith are characteristics required of someone who chooses the long path: "I started with an intuition that concurrency should fruitfully be addressed by functional programming and type theory, because I applied these previously to non-concurrent programming, which uncovered deep connections with so-calledSeparation Logic, animportantand well-known idea in computer science. Somewhat amazingly, this intuition has so far always materialized, even when it temporarily looked like it has no chance. However, there is still a long way to the top.", according to Nanevski.
Aleks explains that his research is related to "Everything and nothing at the same time. It is a foundational problem, which implies that it is highly idealized. It takes its challenges from existing practices and technologies and removes the messiness of the real world, while striving to distill the basic core issue. That makes it related to nothing directly. But it also makes it related to everything, because that core issue is what it means for programs to interact and coordinate with each other, and this interaction arises in Artificial Intelligence, in Internet of Things, and everywhere in-between. Because of its universality, understanding the issue mathematically will open possibilities for the technologies of the future that today we can't even imagine."
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. [724464])
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
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Charles Isbell Named Provost at University of Wisconsin-Madison | News Center – Georgia Tech News Center
He has truly been a transformational leader and a constant and enthusiastic champion for excellence, strategic growth, accessibility, and creating an exceptional teaching and learning environment here at Tech, said Provost Steve McLaughlin
Charles Isbell, dean and John P. Imlay chair of Computing, has accepted the position of provost at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His last day at Georgia Tech is July 31.
Isbell is a Georgia Tech alumnus (B.S. ICS 90), and came back to join the College of Computing as a junior faculty member in 2002. He served as an architect for innovative Threads curriculum, and of the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program. He became the dean of the college in 2019. Under his leadership the college maintained top-10 rankings while doubling in enrollment. He has worked to make the field of computing aware of its social responsibility, winning this years prestigious Richard Tapia Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Dean Isbells students, colleagues, and the Institute have all been witnesses and beneficiaries of his love for his alma mater as he has served in varying faculty and administrative roles over the last two decades, said Steve McLaughlin, Georgia Techs provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs.
He has truly been a transformational leader and a constant and enthusiastic champion for excellence, strategic growth, accessibility, and creating an exceptional teaching and learning environment here at Tech. We will miss him greatly, and we offer him our warmest congratulations as he embarks on this next chapter.
Although he is leaving the deans office, Isbell said he will always be an active member of the Georgia Tech community.
Tech is my alma mater, which in Latin means mother of my soul.I grew into adulthoodor something close to itas an undergraduate at Tech, learned how to be a professor here, and I have had the joy of helping to work with all of you to build the community in positions of leadership. This community has in factnurtured my soul, and I will always give back to it any way I can.
As provost, Isbell will hold the second-highest office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The university, which at nearly 50,000 students is one of the largest universities in the country, ranks #14 among national public universities in U.S. News and World Report.
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The Annual Computer Science Fair – AVC – Musings of a VC in NYC
Ten years ago, a small group of folks in the K12 Computer Science Education community in NYC decided to put on a mock job fair for high school students who were taking computer science classes in the NYC public schools. That was the start of an annual day of engagement and learning for high schoolers considering a career in tech.
Yesterday we got the Fair back in person after three years of not doing it or doing it remotely. And it was so great to be there. This is a picture of all of the students making their way around the various booths learning about careers in tech.
Most everyone in the tech sector would like to have more diverse companies but there are no easy ways to accomplish that. Ultimately we need to get young people interested in careers in tech much earlier in their schooling and show them what those pathways look like.
This photo is of a team from Justworks doing exactly that.
I want to thank all of the sponsors who made this event possible:
And most of all I would like to thank Jennifer Klopp, Executive Director of Gotham Gives, who led the effort to get the Fair back in person this year and the team at the NYC Public School System, TEALS, and Tech:NYC who helped get the students and the tech companies there.
Yesterday was one of those days for me where a lot of the work I do across different areas of interest comes together in a single place and time. And those are great days for me.
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The Annual Computer Science Fair - AVC - Musings of a VC in NYC
To inspire local kids, Brown computer science students teach coding in Providence, Central Falls schools – Brown University
Now the Providence Public School District alum is concentrating in computer science and education studies at Brown. As a first-year student, Arrazola joined IgniteCS to help lead the coding club at Classical and teach computer science classes at Nathanael Greene Middle School, which he also attended. Arrazola hopes he can represent one potential path forward by returning to his former schools.
Part of what Im doing as a mentor is to show kids, Hey, Im someone from this community, and Im a Brown student, and you can study CS here too if thats something that you are interested in, Arrazola said.
The Robot Block Party offers Rhode Islanders a chance to learn about the robotic technologies being developed in the Ocean State.
Arrazola is among many eager computer science students, faculty and researchers committed to bringing creative learning experiences to local public schools. The coding classes and clubs cap a lengthy history of community outreach initiatives led by the Universitys computer science department. Brown faculty and students have taught the Hour of Code program in local schools since 2013, reaching more than 1,000 K-12 Providence and Central Falls students. Other outreach efforts in years prior have included a robot block party, a coding club for middle school girls and school field trips to Browns robotics lab.
Sophia Academy, a tuition-free independent middle school serving girls from low-income families in Providence, is among the newest schools to partner with IgniteCS. Guided by Brown undergraduates, seventh and eighth-grade students meet every Tuesday after school to create and design websites. Each week, the clubs lessons build on previous sessions to allow the middle schoolers to expand their technical skills and customize their sites with new pages, text, links and images.
Without a formal computer science curriculum, middle school director and math teacher Melissa Moniz sees partnerships with local institutions and community organizations as critical connections for introducing and exposing girls to cutting-edge science and technology. Other partners have included Black Girls CODE and Winners Circle XR Academy, an education nonprofit that creates immersive learning experiences using virtual reality. Moniz, a Providence native and Brown graduate, wants her students to understand that the University is accessible to them.
Its important that our students see a world outside of the classroom and connect to different organizations and community resources that are here in their community, Moniz said. Brown is right down the street from us, and often our students drive by. We want them to know that this is a school in your community that you can access and that the coding club is one way you can access it.
In its collaboration with the Brown student group, Nathanael Greene Middle School asked IgniteCS members to lead an in-school program, where teams of University students would guest-teach a full day of computer science classes. Leading two days of classes during the fall and spring, IgniteCS members instructed more than 200 middle school students each day on the uses of computer science in everyday life. And, while the middle school has expanded its STEAM curriculum in recent years to include coding, robotics and 3D printing, the guest teachers from Brown created lesson plans that supplemented the schools curriculum and focused on theoretical computer science topics, including algorithms and cryptography, among other topics.
For Darshell Silva, librarian and maker education teacher at Nathanael Greene, the Brown students are important real-life figures representing potential careers and pathways.
We like our students to see the real-world application of things that were teaching in the classroom as well as to see the people involved in it, Silva said. Theres no better way to show them that than to show them whats going on at Brown.
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Computer science allows ASU grad to bridge creativity and logic – ASU News Now
April 28, 2023
Editors note:This story is part of a series of profiles of notablespring2023 graduates.
College can be extremely challenging, even for students in families steeped in higher education. For a family who has never experienced college, even getting their arms around the nomenclature can be a struggle. ASU School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning Dean's Medalist Marcus Stafford. Download Full Image
My folks didnt know what undergrad meant, said Marcus Stafford,let alone bachelors or associate degrees. It was a learning process for all of us.
The California native initially went to community college for one year before applying at ASU. Upon acceptance, he continued to knock out his general education requirements before selecting his first of four majors (geographic information science, geography, history and anthropology).
This May, he graduates as the Deans Medalist for Arizona State UniversitysSchool of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.
Question: What was your aha moment when you realized you wanted to study the field you majored in?
Answer: I grew up in a family that, for many of us, had little means of transportation. Public infrastructure, such as government services, public buses or community centers were lacking. Both with members of my family, and where I grew up.
I grew up in a rural area when I moved to Arizona, and with no car, this severelylimited my opportunities for education, work or a social life. My family had difficulties in affording cars and reliable transportation.
In entering SGSUP, I realized that I could turn my attention towards urban planning and GIS-related work that could impact people. I realize the lack of access to public infrastructure can do, and how much it matters in people's lives, as I lived it on my own.
Q: Whats something you learned while at ASU in the classroom or otherwise that surprised you or changed your perspective?
A: How many different aspects of thought can be brought into problem-solving. There can be perspectives from people who study business, engineering, statistics, law and history, who all can contribute to a project or idea in unique ways.
Q: Why did you choose ASU?
A: I chose ASU because of the opportunity that they gave me. My grades in high school were never great, so I was always going to be limited in the colleges who would accept me and give me that opportunity. However, ASU did.
They welcomed me and gave me every opportunity to succeed. All that I had to do was put in the effort, get help when I needed it, and believe in myself. Every bit of help that I gained from ASU went into my success, because there's no way that I could have done it on my own.
Q: Which professor taught you the most important lesson while at ASU?
A: Dr. (Wen-Ching) Chuang fromSGSUP made me understand that the process of problem-solving is going to be complicated, messy and difficult. However, the key is persevering through the issues. In my major in GIS, I tackled many projects that were, plainly, frustrating.Data that was difficult to work with or results that were not what I expected. She gave me encouragement, and the advice, and the context of what I was doing, to give me the fortitude to keep moving through any issue that I had.
Q: Whats the best piece of advice youd give to those still in school?
A: Take time for yourself. Eat something, hydrate, go to the gym, have a hobby that is completelyoutside of school. You need to take care of yourself first before you can take care of and complete your coursework.
Q: What was your favorite spot on campus, whether for studying, meeting friends or just thinking about life?
A: While I was an online student, I was on ASU's campus here and there. My favorite spot is the Nobel Library. It had good vibes. Outside, I would choose the ASU Herb Garden, between the Moeur Building and the InterdisciplinaryA building. It's usually quiet over there, and there's lots of tree cover.
Q: What are your plans aftergraduation?
A: I will be attending graduate school at UCLA in the fall of this year.
Q: If someone gave you$40millionto solve one problem on our planet, what would you tackle?
A: While $40 million couldn't solve a single problem, I do believe that it could be used to help a portion of the planet. I think public infrastructure would be a wise investment, as that is an investment into a community which has long-term impacts long after the project would be completed. One could do a project on water or sewage systems in developing countries.
Stafford and all the Deans Medal winners will be formally recognized during The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences convocation.
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Computer science allows ASU grad to bridge creativity and logic - ASU News Now
USC Computer Scientists Are Tackling Dental Health and Birth … – USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Photo credit: USC
Roughly half of all birth defects involve the face and skull, yet scientists remain unclear about why most occur.
The way to address tough medical challenges like this one is through data lots of it. But how to best manage the data, integrate it into meaningful information, and create a comprehensive picture that is useful and accessible to researchers is another question. FaceBase offers an answer.
FaceBase is a research resource that provides open access to genetic, molecular and imaging data to the dental, oral and craniofacial (DOC) research community.
Through FaceBase, USC is playing a role in the next generation of dental and craniofacial research, saidCarl Kesselman, FaceBases co-Principal Investigator, who is the William H. Keck Professor of Engineering and a Professor in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Director of the Informatics Systems Research Division at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
He continued, We are assembling all of the data, organizing the research community, and providing this service to the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research [NIDCR] and the research community at large.
FaceBase is a collaborative NIDCR-funded project that houses comprehensive data in support of advancing research into craniofacial development and malformation.
Kesselman, who is an ISI Fellow, leads the team of researchers and staff at ISI who run FaceBases coordinating center (i.e., the Hub).
The Hub is where large datasets are curated and shared. Researchers in the DOC community can submit their projects to FaceBase, and datasets from approved projects are added.
How does a large database help research?
Rob Schuler, the technical lead for FaceBase and Senior Computer Scientist at ISI, gave examples of how some researchers are using FaceBase data: to have a larger patient cohort; to compare their own clinical results with research being done on animal models; some of them do analysis and use the large datasets to train neural networks and produce models that can, for example, predict a phenotype based on a patients face.
But FaceBase is more than just an ever-growing database.
We dont think of FaceBase as a data repository, although we do operate a repository as part of FaceBase. But really, we are an overall data resource, said Schuler.
One of the missions of the project is to facilitate cooperation and collaboration between the Hub and the craniofacial research community.
Theres a desire to be able to use a data resource like FaceBase to assist researchers in making connections to other people who are possibly working on a similar disease, said Schuler.
Kesselman said, We connect the dots. In the absence of something like FaceBase, you have a little piece of data over here and a little piece of data over there, and you cant figure out how they connect. But we do that. We take all these different aspects and research projects, we integrate them so that theyre more cohesive, and it represents more of the total knowledge of the community rather than isolated silos.
Kesselman and Schuler, along with Computer Scientist Alejandro Bugacov, Research Engineer Cris Williams, and USC Ostrow School of Dentistry Associate Dean of Research Yang Chai (Co-PI of FaceBase), recently made a big impact at the American Association of Dental and Craniofacial Research (AADOCR) conference in Portland, Oregon.
From March 15 to 18, 2023, the team showcased their innovative work in the FaceBase platforms data sharing and management. Bugacov presented a poster and provided demos at the NIDCR Trainee Research Presentation, which highlighted the platforms user-friendly interface and powerful search capabilities.
Meanwhile, Schuler presented two talks: an interactive talk on building FAIR data sharing communities (where he also served as session co-chair); and an invited talk in the Knowledge and Database Symposium.
The AADOCR conference also included a celebration of the 75th anniversary of NIDCR.
The National Institute of Dental Research which would later become the NIDCR was founded as one of the earliest institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); created in response to the tooth decay epidemic during World War II. At the time, oral health was an issue of national security, as potential military recruits were being disqualified from service due to tooth decay.
Today, the mission of NIDCR is to advance fundamental knowledge about DOC health and disease and translate these findings into prevention, early detection, and treatment strategies that improve overall health for all individuals and communities across the lifespan. It has an annual budget of $475 million, funding approximately 770 grants, 6,500 researchers, 350 trainees and 200 organizations
With NIDCR being such a major player in the DOC research community, the FaceBase team was particularly excited to hear how their project is valued by the institute. In a video commemorating 75 years of NIDCR, current NIH director and former NIDCR director Lawrence Tabak mentioned FaceBase as one of the top achievements during his tenure an endorsement that speaks volumes about the impact FaceBase has had in advancing the field of dental and craniofacial research.
Were in the third phase of FaceBase right now, and weve opened it up to more projects, said Williams. She continued, Previously, we had specific spoke projects around us, the Hub. Ten to 12 projects were contributing data at a time. But now its open to the community, which has definitely widened the scope even further of what were taking in and how were building up our database.
How wide of a scope? Kesselman gave examples of two current projects: Weve got a large dataset contributed by colleagues looking at the genetic foundations of tooth enamel. And another large set of data from researchers studying oral health in Appalachia. Theyve looked at social factors, along with all kinds of various health factors associated with oral health.
In addition to opening it up to more research, the FaceBase team is also looking at applications for clinicians, the people who are actually treating and diagnosing patients. Williams explained, Thats not something FaceBase had focused on before. Were working on a pilot project about what it would take to serve the clinician community, and that opens up a whole new frontier.
Kesselman said, Weve been working with people in the Ostrow Dental School for the last eight years now, applying very sophisticated computer science and research that weve developed at ISI. And by applying it in this area we are ultimately making a real impact on dental health and childhood development.
Carl Kesselmanis the William H. Keck Chair of Engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and is a Professor in theDaniel J.Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He also holds joint appointments as Professor inComputer Scienceat theUSC Viterbi School of Engineering, theDepartment of Population and Public Health Sciencesin theKeck School of Medicineand in theHerman Ostrow School of Dentistry. He is the director of theInformatics Systems Research Division at ISI and an ISI Fellow, the institutes highest honor.
Yang Chai is a University Professor and he holds the George and MaryLou Boone Chair in Craniofacial Molecular Biology. He is the director of the Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology and is Associate Dean of Research in the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry.
Published on May 1st, 2023
Last updated on May 1st, 2023
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USC Computer Scientists Are Tackling Dental Health and Birth ... - USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Scientists use fMRI and AI to decode language signals in the brain … – NPR
This video still shows a view of one person's cerebral cortex. Pink areas have above-average activity; blue areas have below-average activity. Jerry Tang and Alexander Huth hide caption
This video still shows a view of one person's cerebral cortex. Pink areas have above-average activity; blue areas have below-average activity.
Scientists have found a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence.
The system reconstructs the gist of what a person hears or imagines, rather than trying to replicate each word, a team reports in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"It's getting at the ideas behind the words, the semantics, the meaning," says Alexander Huth, an author of the study and an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at The University of Texas at Austin.
This technology can't read minds, though. It only works when a participant is actively cooperating with scientists.
Still, systems that decode language could someday help people who are unable to speak because of a brain injury or disease. They also are helping scientists understand how the brain processes words and thoughts.
Previous efforts to decode language have relied on sensors placed directly on the surface of the brain. The sensors detect signals in areas involved in articulating words.
But the Texas team's approach is an attempt to "decode more freeform thought," says Marcel Just, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the new research.
That could mean it has applications beyond communication, he says.
"One of the biggest scientific medical challenges is understanding mental illness, which is a brain dysfunction ultimately," Just says. "I think that this general kind of approach is going to solve that puzzle someday."
The new study came about as part of an effort to understand how the brain processes language.
Researchers had three people spend up to 16 hours each in a functional MRI scanner, which detects signs of activity across the brain.
Participants wore headphones that streamed audio from podcasts. "For the most part, they just lay there and listened to stories from The Moth Radio Hour, Huth says.
Those streams of words produced activity all over the brain, not just in areas associated with speech and language.
"It turns out that a huge amount of the brain is doing something," Huth says. "So areas that we use for navigation, areas that we use for doing mental math, areas that we use for processing what things feel like to touch."
After participants listened to hours of stories in the scanner, the MRI data was sent to a computer. It learned to match specific patterns of brain activity with certain streams of words.
Next, the team had participants listen to new stories in the scanner. Then the computer attempted to reconstruct these stories from each participant's brain activity.
The system got a lot of help constructing intelligible sentences from artificial intelligence: an early version of the famous natural language processing program ChatGPT.
What emerged from the system was a paraphrased version of what a participant heard.
So if a participant heard the phrase, "I didn't even have my driver's license yet," the decoded version might be, "she hadn't even learned to drive yet," Huth says. In many cases, he says, the decoded version contained errors.
In another experiment, the system was able to paraphrase words a person just imagined saying.
In a third experiment, participants watched videos that told a story without using words.
"We didn't tell the subjects to try to describe what's happening," Huth says. "And yet what we got was this kind of language description of what's going on in the video."
The MRI approach is currently slower and less accurate than an experimental communication system being developed for paralyzed people by a team led by Dr. Edward Chang at the University of California, San Francisco.
"People get a sheet of electrical sensors implanted directly on the surface of the brain," says David Moses, a researcher in Chang's lab. "That records brain activity really close to the source."
The sensors detect activity in brain areas that usually give speech commands. At least one person has been able to use the system to accurately generate 15 words a minute using only his thoughts.
But with an MRI-based system, "No one has to get surgery," Moses says.
Neither approach can be used to read a person's thoughts without their cooperation. In the Texas study, people were able to defeat the system just by telling themselves a different story.
But future versions could raise ethical questions .
"This is very exciting, but it's also a little scary, Huth says. "What if you can read out the word that somebody is just thinking in their head? That's potentially a harmful thing."
Moses agrees.
"This is all about the user having a new way of communicating, a new tool that is totally in their control," he says. "That is the goal and we have to make sure that stays the goal."
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Scientists use fMRI and AI to decode language signals in the brain ... - NPR
LANL Report Looming Fortran Talent Scarcity is Threatening – HPCwire
A new report from Los Alamos National Lab sounds alarms over the declining number of Fortran programmers, the shrinking number of efforts to teach Fortran, and the reduced appetite of scientists and developers to learn Fortran. Developed by IBM in the mid 1950s, Fortran was a foundational programming language for scientific computing. In recent years it has been largely overtaken by modern programming languages such C++ and Python.
This latest report (An evaluation of risks associated with relying on Fortran for mission critical codes for the next 15 years) paints worrisome picture.
We judge it is very likely that we will be unable to staff Fortran projects with top-rate computer scientists and computer engineers, and that there is an even chance we will be unable to staff Fortran projects with top-rate computational scientists and physicists, write the LANL researchers, Galen Shipman and Timothy Randles. They offer the following supporting bullets:
Looking at modern HPC hardware infrastructure, the report says, We judge it is very unlikely that codes that rely on Fortran will have poor performance on future CPU technologies, it is likely that codes that rely on Fortran will have poor performance for GPUs, and it is very likely that Fortran will preclude effective use of important advances in computing technology. (emphasis added)
Zeroing in on vendor support, Shipman and Randles write, The vendor ecosystem of Fortran compilers is worrying. Intel and GCC communities have the most robust Fortran compilers for modern Fortran (Fortran 2008) on CPU technologies but have less mature support for GPU technologies. Nvidia has good support for GPU technologies but lacks support for modern Fortran needed by LANL.
Open-source efforts around an LLVM compiler for Fortran, known as Flang, are inadequate to meet either requirement (robust support for modern Fortran and GPU technologies). Complicating things further, there are competing Fortran technologies for GPUs including standards such as OpenACC and OpenMP and vendor proprietary technologies such as Cuda Fortran. While similar diversity exists for other languages (such as C++) there are no infrastructures for portability like Raja and Kokkos for Fortran.
Ouch.
The relatively short report is best read directly. On balance, its message isnt new but part of long-term chorus of worry about Fortrans decline and the impact of that decline on HPC and legacy scientific codes.
Link to LANL report, https://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lareport/LA-UR-23-23992
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LANL Report Looming Fortran Talent Scarcity is Threatening - HPCwire