I attended a conference in the 1980s with 600 people in the plenary session. The speaker asked who would recommend engineering to their children. Only six hands went up: 1 per cent. That this was an engineering conference made the result even more alarming. It may go some way to explain why today engineers make up just 9 per cent of the workforce, of which 2 per cent are female. The need to promote STEM subjects in school is well documented, but there is something more fundamental that needs to take place: influencing people with the ability to influence those yet to choose their vocation.

Upgrading legacy HPC systems relies as much on the requirements of the user base as it does on the budget of the institution buying the system. There is a gamut of technology and deployment methods to choose from, and the picture is further complicated by infrastructure such as cooling equipment, storage, networking – all of which must fit into the available space. However, in most cases it is the requirements of the codes and applications being run on the system that ultimately define choice of architecture when upgrading a legacy system.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, businessman and author Tony Schwartz offered an honest yet troubling account of what he calls his "addiction" to technology. The medical and research fields have not yet come to a clear consensus on what constitutes technology "addiction" and which factors distinguish a true technology addiction disorder from problematic use or just bad habits. But the behavior Schwartz describes is remarkably familiar to those of us who are on our devices more than we know we ought to be. It is important to reflect on how our human connections are being altered by our technological connections. The truth is, we simply don't know enough about how the frequency or quality of our technology use is changing basic human interactions and behaviors.

Blockchain - the technology underpinning digital currency Bitcoin - has been in the news lately. Banks think it could be the future of financial transactions, while diamond miners hope it will help end the trade in conflict diamonds. The UK's chief scientific adviser encouraged the British government to adopt the technology. But what exactly is it and why is it causing such a stir? Technology of Business (tries) to explain. Blockchain is a method of recording data - a digital ledger of transactions, agreements, contracts - anything that needs to be independently recorded and verified as having happened. The big difference is that this ledger isn't stored in one place, it's distributed across several, hundreds or even thousands of computers around the world.

Researchers of the Services, Cybersecurity and Safety department of the University of Twente have invented an improved reconstruction method for facial recognition based on camera images. This method yields a better score in ninety percent of the examined cases, and helps forensic investigators with their daily work. The researchers recently published their results in the academic journal IET Biometrics. Facial recognition in a forensic context is a complex discipline. The reconstruction of faces on the basis of a facial model has certain limitations. To be able to use verification and identification based on forensic investigation in the courtroom, the bar for reliability and accuracy must be set very high.

When three distinguished Intel Fellows—Bill Magro, Mark Seager and Al Gara—sat down together to discuss HPC’s Next Phase, the conversation was quite lively because all three are working on cutting edge aspects of the rapidly changing and evolving technology portfolio for the high performance computing ecosystem. Moderating the panel discussion at SC15, Intel’s Mike Bernhardt kicked off the discussion with a question about the current wall for HPC memory and storage technology and how we can move past the limitations. The panelists were optimistic. Al Gara commented, “There is a lot of exciting technology that is feeding into both of those areas.”

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) funds large-scale research programs that address the most difficult challenges facing the intelligence community. Today, intelligence agencies are inundated with data - more than they are able to analyze in a reasonable amount of time. Humans, naturally good at recognizing patterns, can't keep pace. The pattern-recognition and learning abilities of machines, meanwhile, still pale in comparison to even the simplest mammalian brains. IARPA's challenge: figure out why brains are so good at learning, and use that information to design computer systems that can interpret, analyze, and learn information as successfully as humans.

Our choices seem to be freer than previously thought. Using computer-based brain experiments, researchers from Charité -- Universitätsmedizin Berlin studied the decision-making processes involved in voluntary movements. The question was: Is it possible for people to cancel a movement once the brain has started preparing it? The conclusion the researchers reached was: Yes, up to a certain point -- the 'point of no return'. The results of this study have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Miniature glasses have proved that mantises use 3D vision -- providing a new model to improve visual perception in robots. Most knowledge about 3D vision has come from vertebrates, however, a team from Newcastle University, UK publishing in Scientific Reports, confirm that the praying mantis, an invertebrate, does indeed use stereopsis or 3D perception for hunting. In a specially-designed insect cinema, they have shown that it needs to be 'old school' 3D glasses for tests to work on mantises. While in humans that would be with red and blue lenses, red light is poorly visible to mantises so they have custom-made glasses with one blue and one green lens.

Many Asian countries, especially China, have been increasing their investment in scientific research and development at a much faster rate than the United States. That's according to the new Science and Engineering Indicators 2016 report out today from the National Science Board — a group appointed by the president that sets policies for the National Science Foundation. The report details how Southeast, South, and East Asia now account for 40 percent of the world's expenditures in R&D. Asia's advancements are threatening America's leadership in the field, the NSB report argues, as the United States' commitment to science and engineering is wavering.

Antibiotic resistance has been called one of the world’s most pressing health problems, with some studies suggesting that, absent major improvements in drug discovery, by 2050 more individuals will die from drug-resistant bacterial infections than cancer. To help stem this nightmare scenario, a team of researchers – with the aid of the Gordon supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center based at UC San Diego – has identified a class of possible antibiotics with the potential to disable previously drug-resistant bacteria. In essence, these new agents were found to attack the bacteria along two fronts: its external lipid cellular wall and its internal factory responsible for generating cellular energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate or ATP.

You could eyeball it, but science says you'd probably underestimate. You could painstakingly weigh each ingredient in that salad or burger or look up items in a smartphone app, but that requires time and attention to detail. A new laser mapping technology and smartphone app developed by University of Washington electrical engineers called NutriRay3D allows you to point your phone at a plate of food and get an accurate count of the total calories and nutrition. The team launched an Indiegogo campaign this week to transform a research device originally developed for nutritional epidemiologists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center into a consumer product aimed at nutrition-obsessed athletes, health-conscious eaters or people aiming to shed pounds.

Just a few months after coming online as part of the XSEDE network of resources, Comet is making an impact. During the quarter that ended September 30, there were 3,310 gateway users across all XSEDE systems. There were 64,377 research jobs run by all gateways across all systems during the quarter, and 86 percent of them were run on either Comet or SDSC’s data-intensive Gordon supercomputer. “That’s a notable level of usage for a new machine,” said SDSC Deputy Director Shawn Strande.

University of Windsor (UWindsor) researchers are programming technology designed to reduce roadway collisions. The technology connects to a vehicle's navigational system and collects data about acceleration, speed, steering angle, velocity, and spatial location, according to UWindsor professor Arunita Jaekel. The researchers are developing algorithms that turn this information into safety warnings and give drivers alerts about hazards. "Hopefully, we can build the research group up and position ourselves to be a major player in" the development of autonomous vehicles, Jaekel says. The researchers are working with industry partners such as Google, Apple, Arada Systems, and several automakers.

In February, the MIT Technology Review published their list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2015. Recently they released their follow up list, detailing how those technologies have advanced since then.

Today, the landscape of high performance computing is much different than that of 15 years ago. In addition to scientists who use advanced computing systems, there has been a recent influx of researchers, including students from previously under-represented disciplines as varied as the humanities, economics, and social sciences, who are learning to take advantage of HPC for their varying research needs. Those engaged in computational research often reach the point where they outgrow their personal desktops or department computers — programs run slowly, run out of memory, or researchers don't have all the sophisticated software needed to run simulations, and they turn to advanced computing resources like those at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory say they have developed an advanced tool for literature-based discovery that has the potential to accelerate medical research. Oak Ridge Graph Analytics for Medical Innovation (ORiGAMI) is designed to reason with the knowledge of every published medical paper every time clinical researchers use the tool, which will help them find unexplored connections in medical literature. The researchers note ORiGAMI unites big data, graph computing, and the Semantic Web. The ORNL collaboration with the U.S. National Library of Medicine relied on the high-performance computing resources of ORNL's Compute and Data Environment for Science to develop the smart data tool.

Researchers from the University of Franche-Comte in France say they have developed a method of ranking the influence of the world's universities by applying an algorithm used by Google to rank search results in Wikipedia. The Pagerank algorithm works by examining the links between nodes on a network to determine which of the nodes is most important. The researchers applied the algorithm to 24 different language editions of Wikipedia, a database containing 68 percent of all Wikipedia articles. The resulting top 100 list varies in many ways from more traditional rankings of influential universities.

Introducing computer programming to your kids can be a challenge, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the nuances of code. Fortunately, in the last few years, a number of apps, software, and guides have been produced that make the often-complex subject of computer coding easy to grasp for young learners. So where to begin? These are a few resources that parents can share with their kids to help them start learning about programming.

Based on the ScratchJr programming language co-developed by the MIT Media Lab and Tufts University, PBS has released PBS KIDS ScratchJr, a free app to help children ages 5-8 learn coding concepts as they create their own stories and games using over 150 PBS KIDS characters. With the PBS KIDS ScratchJr app, kids can snap together colorful programming blocks to make their favorite characters move, jump, dance, and sing. In the process, they learn to solve problems, design projects, and express themselves creatively. The free app is now available from the App Store on iPad and from the Google Play store on Android tablet.

A recent Code School survey offers information on traits in youth that may indicate a future in computer science. Most programmers find their interest in computer science before age 16 and carry this passion into their professional life, according to a recent survey. A Code School survey of 2,200 coders and developers reveals some specific traits and tendencies that may predict that a youth has a future career in computer science. The survey polled current coders and software developers and asked them to recount personal traits, tendencies and preferences from their younger years.

Five years ago, there were no computer science classes offered by schools within San Diego’s Sweetwater Union High School District, and Arthur Lopez, a teacher at Sweetwater High School in National City, decided to do something about it. Through a joint effort between the school district, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and UC San Diego CREATE, the school today has a number of courses on computer science principles, several of which are Advanced Placement classes that encourage students to continue their education.

Next June, the inaugural distributed and embedded-High Performance Computing Symposium will host the first Indian Student Supercomputing Challenge to introduce the next generation of students to the HPC community and its technology. As part of the competition, 8 to 10 student teams will build a small cluster computer of their own design and will use it to run a series of HPC benchmarks and applications. The teams also will be required to present their findings to a panel of judges to show how fundamentally they understand the applications and results. "I believe ISSC opens up an interesting and innovative platform for the HPC student fraternity in India to experience computer science and computational science," says Indian Institute of Technology Bombay research fellow Umesh Gupta.

These days it seems like “how to learn coding yourself” opportunities are everywhere. There are MOOCs from major universities, code.org has great online tutorials, Facebook just opened a web site called TechPrep to help parents and students alike find resources and tools, and there seems to be a new edtech company starting up every week with online CS resources. The question for many becomes “do we still need computer science teachers?” For those of us who make our living teaching computer science the fact that this question is even being asked is a little scary. OK maybe more than a little. I think most of us believe that there is still a crucial role for computer science teachers though. CSTA is at its heart about teachers for good reason.

In response to growing enrollment and increasing interest in computer science from other disciplines, Princeton University is expanding its computer science faculty by more than 30 percent. The expansion will add 10 tenure-track positions to the current 28, making the computer science department one of the three largest concentrations at Princeton. The department plans to bring in the new faculty members as soon as possible, and the university will support the expansion with funds in the long term. Computer scientists at Princeton regularly connect with a range of collaborators across campus, and enrollments in computer science have tripled since the department was launched in 1985.