The National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program has named the fifth cohort of Fellows for its Campus Champions (CC) program, pairing a Champion with a member of XSEDE’s Extended Collaborative Support Services (ECSS) staff to work on real-world science and engineering projects for about one year. Campus Champions are local faculty, staff and researchers at over 200 U.S. institutions who advise researchers on the use of high-end cyberinfrastructure (including XSEDE resources) at their respective campuses. The goal of the CC Fellows program is to increase expertise on campuses by including CCs as partners in XSEDE’s ECSS projects.

At the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Thursday morning, an audience was shown a series of short films in the annual New Directors Showcase, which highlights emerging talent. One of the entries had AI as a director. A few days ago, I saw Eclipse, a pop video featuring a French band, at the offices of Saatchi and Saatchi, which runs the Cannes showcase and commissioned the AI entry. What is remarkable about it is not the production values - it is actually a rather dull piece of work - but a process that involved AI at every stage. All the computer had been given was the track, Saatchi and Saatchi director of film and content Andy Gulliman said.

At the dawn of the universe – just after the Big Bang – all matter was in the form of a hot-flowing soup called quark-gluon plasma, or QGP. Large-scale computations have been critical to the theoretical study of QGP’s novel characteristics. As part of a theoretical effort funded by the Department of Energy, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Swagato Mukherjee and his colleagues are using an allotment of 167 million processor hours from the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge to better understand QGP. Their findings will help physicists plan the next wave of experiments.

Using deep learning techniques, a group of researchers has trained a computer to recognize events in videos on YouTube - even the ones the software has never seen before like riding a horse, baking cookies or eating at a restaurant. Researchers from Disney Research and Shanghai's Fudan University used both scene and object features from the video and enabled link between these visual elements and each type of event to be automatically determined by a machine-learning architecture known as neural network.

If you wanted to write a history of the Internet, one of the first things you would do is dig into the email archives of Vint Cerf. In 1973, he co-created the protocols that Internet servers use to communicate with each other without the need for any kind of centralized authority or control. He has spent the decades since shaping the Internet’s development, most recently as Google’s “chief Internet evangelist.” Thankfully, Cerf says he has archived about 40 years of old email—a first-hand history of the Internet stretching back almost as far as the Internet itself. But you’d also have a pretty big problem: a whole lot of that email you just wouldn’t be able to open. Many of these older technologies are being phased out.

The U.S. plans to have a supercomputer by early 2018 with roughly double the performance of China's newest and most powerful system. The Chinese system, Sunway TaihuLight, was announced in the latest release of the Top 500, the biannual ranking of publicly known supercomputers. Sunway TaihuLight can reach a theoretical peak speed of 124.5 petaflops, and has achieved 93 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark, used by the Top 500 to assess the performance of supercomputers. The latest ranking of the world's publicly disclosed supercomputers was released at a supercomputing conference in Germany. The U.S. Dept. of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is expecting an IBM system -- named Summit, capable of 200 petaflops -- in early 2018.

A supercomputer named Santos Dumont has been partially switched off in Rio de Janeiro due to government spending cuts. It was meant to be genetically mapping the Zika virus. "It seems nonsensical, at a moment like this when everyone is talking about the Zika virus," Antonio Tadeu, head of a government group responsible for high performance processing, told Reuters. "The financial problems have meant Santos Dumont is running below capacity since last month," he added. In the midst of Brazil's worst recession since the 1930s, funds to Santos Dumont's home at the National Laboratory of Computer Science have been cut by 20 percent, according to the Ministry for Science and Technology.

Neural Networks are already beating us at games, organizing our smartphone photos, and answering our emails. Eventually, they could be filling jobs in Hollywood. Over at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a team of six researchers created a machine-learning system that matches sound effects to video clips. Before you get too excited, the CSAIL algorithm can’t do its audio work on any old video, and the sound effects it produces are limited.

Bluetooth is so ubiquitous, it's easy to forget it's still an evolving technology. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) defines the standard, and late last year teased what's coming in the next major version change since 2009. Today, the body shared a bit more about what we can expect from the release of Bluetooth 5, expected in late 2016 or early 2017. For starters, the next version will quadruple the range of connections and double their speeds, too, with no increase in power consumption over the current, low-energy standard. The immediate benefits of these particular improvements are quite easy to grasp.

What makes Olli, the car that’s now rolling through the streets of National Harbor, Maryland, important isn’t that it drives itself, that it’s electric, or even that Local Motors made it from 3-D printed parts. What sets Olli apart is its gift of gab. Upstart automaker Local Motors and IBM teamed up to create the autonomous van-like shuttle, which launches today, carries twelve passengers, and uses the tech stalwart’s Watson supercomputer to chat with passengers. That may seem a step down from fighting cybercrime, predicting the weather, and whooping human butts at Jeopardy!, but it’s a clever use of Watson’s cognitive speech capabilities to solve one of the more devilish problems blocking our path to a world of autonomous vehicles: how to make people trust them.

In a show of strength leading up to ISC the OpenACC standards group today announced its first OpenPOWER implementation, the addition of three new members – University of Illinois, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Stony Brook University – and details of its expanding 2016 training schedule. Michael Wolfe, technical director of OpenACC, also talked with HPCWire about thorny compiler challenges still remaining as the number of processor (all types) cores grows and memory management issues become more complex.

For Obama administration officials, computer science education has become almost a moral issue. During a panel discussion at the New America Foundation, Melissa Moritz, deputy director of STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math -- at the Education Department, noted the ethnic and gender imbalances in computer science education. Still a rarity at schools across the country, computer science classes are disproportionately unavailable to low-income students, according to Moritz, who argued that biases -- conscious or unconscious -- deter many minority and female students from pursuing the field that is accounting for more wage growth in the U.S. economy than any other sector.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is helping change the way genetic medicine is researched and practiced in Africa. Members of the Blue Waters team recently made it possible to discover genomic variants in over 300 deeply sequenced human samples to help construct a genotyping chip specific for African populations. NCSA's Blue Waters is the largest and most powerful open access supercomputer in the world, and is unique in being housed at an academic institution. It is designed to perform very wide computations involving tens of thousands of nodes and petabytes of distributed memory, as frequently required in physics, manufacturing and meteorology.

Creating more efficient lighting solutions and solar panels requires materials that let light pass through and conduct "missing electrons," or the charged holes created when an electron leaves. Scientists created just such a material by altering a transparent insulating oxide by chemical substitution. Even though conducting missing electrons and transparency were considered mutually exclusive, this new material both efficiently conducts missing electrons and retains most of its transparency to visual light. This new material could lead to more efficient solar cells, light-emitting diodes, light detectors, and other transparent electronics.

Social dynamics and "culture fit" are a key reason why female engineers tend to leave the profession sooner than men, according to a new study released by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the University of California, Irvine; the University of Michigan, and McGill University. "It turns out gender makes a big difference," says MIT professor Susan Silbey. "It's a cultural phenomenon." The research involved having more than 40 undergraduate engineering students keep bi-monthly diaries, providing the study with more than 3,000 entries to analyze.

A microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The energy-efficient "KiloCore" chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors. The KiloCore was presented at the 2016 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits in Honolulu on June 16.

A facial recognition database compiled by the FBI has more than 400 million images to help criminal investigations, but lacks adequate safeguards for accuracy and privacy protection, a congressional audit shows. The huge database—which enables investigators to search images to match those of criminal suspects—"is far greater than had previously been understood" and raises concerns "about the risk of innocent Americans being inadvertently swept up in criminal investigations," said Senator Al Franken, who requested the study. "I will be asking tough questions about the FBI's use of facial recognition technology," the Minnesota senator said as he released the Government Accountability Office report on Wednesday.

The auditory Turing test has been defeated. When MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab researchers showed videos of a drumstick hitting and brushing through various objects, subjects were fooled into believing that the sounds they heard actually came from the objects and materials on screen. They did not. Instead, a computer programmed to analyze the video and apply the correct sounds from its own library of samples chose the audio clips for all the videos. And the subjects were none the wiser. The team’s work is described in a new paper released Monday and being presented next week at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Las Vegas.

The first Patrick Feng knew about a cyberattack on his university was when one of his colleagues told him that her computer had been infected by hackers and rendered unusable. Feng, who studies technology and sustainability policy at the University of Calgary in Canada, immediately checked the Dropbox folder that he was sharing with that colleague — and found that it, too, had been compromised. “The hackers had created encrypted copies of all my Dropbox files and deleted the originals,” he says. “And there was a ransom note demanding bitcoin to unlock them.” Bitcoin is an online, anonymous currency, making it an attractive option for cybercriminals.

When considering the challenges of exascale computing, power is right at the top of the list and the major leadership-class centers want to make sure they’re doing everything they can to manage the demands of power today – which can run as high as 10 MW at peak for the largest machines – and in the coming exascale era, when the number could be three times that high. At loads of this magnitude, the largest HPC facilities need to have all the relevant power data within arm’s reach. Managing power demands is a priority at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Department of Energy center entrusted with ensuring nuclear security for the nation.

You would be hard pressed to read the news and not know that fintech is seemingly at a crossroads — from Lending Club‘s CEO resigning to reports of other peer-to-peer lending platforms reducing their workforce to headlines that state that, after a boom in funding, venture capitalists are looking to other sectors out of fear. Indeed, some are already declaring financial technology dead as a space for the near-term. Not so fast. Here’s what we know. These signals are actually the chaotic realities of a space that is maturing. Yes, government regulation is on its way, but that doesn’t mean the sky is falling.

At Computex the focus this year shifted to contemporary tech: virtual reality, home robotics, the connected home and the internet of things. In hardware, there were two-in-one notebooks and gaming rigs. Microsoft made a far-reaching announcement that wearers of virtual reality headsets such as HTC’s Vive would be able to manipulate the same holograms that wearers of its HoloLens accessed. It demonstrated a person with a VR headset and another with a HoloLens working together designing the same holographic motorbike.

NVIDIA today unveiled a comprehensive global program to support the innovation and growth of startups that are driving new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and data science. The NVIDIA Inception Program provides unique tools, resources and opportunities to the waves of entrepreneurs starting new companies, so they can develop products and services with a first-mover advantage. “Startups worldwide are taking advantage of deep learning for its superhuman speed and accuracy in applications like radiology, fraud detection and self-driving cars,” said Kimberly Powell, senior director of Industry Business Development at NVIDIA.

Many of the Texas Advanced Computing Center's feature stories highlight the impact of advanced computing for a specific research project. But for one of TACC's users, the introduction of advanced computing and computational expertise resulted in a fundamental shift in the direction of the institute. Jing Su researcher in CBSB and assistant professor in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology. For over five years, the Center for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, has worked with TACC to advance numerous projects and found inspiration to design and build their own supercomputing cluster.

For 30 years, researchers have pursued the universal quantum computer, a device that could solve any computational problem, with varying degrees of success. Now, a team in California and Spain has made an experimental prototype of such a device that can solve a wide range of problems in fields such as chemistry and physics, and has the potential to be scaled up to larger systems. Both IBM and a Canadian company called D-Wave have created functioning quantum computers using different approaches. But their devices are not easily scalable to the many quantum bits (qubits) needed for solving problems that classical computers cannot. The Google prototype combines the two main approaches to quantum computing.