The exascale challenges of power and resiliency are the focus of two projects that recently received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Program. The funding recipients are University of Chicago professor Hank Hoffmann and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Christian Engelmann. "We are going to build computer systems that are so complicated that very few people can optimize them, so we need to make the machines intelligent to handle some of this, or we'll have machines that are not useful," Hoffmann says. He earned his award for work on Constraint Language and Optimizing Runtime for Exascale Power Management, whose goal is enabling an exascale system to intelligently distribute power to optimize application performance via self-awareness.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University recently released their 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). Since 2003, the school has used a transparent methodology to crunch third party data into their popular list. This year, nine of the 10 top engineering schools are located within America. A lot of funding is pouring into the STEM movement which looks to ensure that America leads the world in technological professionals. As a result, it could be argued that the list is artificially inflated. This should be good news for the USA’s STEM movement as The Chronical of Higher Education noted that the ARWU list is “the best-known and most influential global ranking of universities.”

When massively open online courses (MOOCs) first became available several years ago, proponents expected them to revolutionize education and shake up the established higher-education system. Although this has not yet happened in the U.S and Europe, MOOCs have taken off in a big way in India, where they are meeting a need for education, particularly technical education, with which the rapidly developing country's network of technical schools and institutes cannot keep up. Indian students now account for the second-largest group using MOOCs from leading providers Coursera and edX.

As recent Twitter campaigns like #ILookLikeAnEngineer have shown, stereotypes are powerful — perhaps especially in high school, where students are quick to pigeonhole each other into cliques like jocks, cheerleaders, brainiacs and so on. High school also happens to be where people start to think seriously about what they want to do when they grow up. In practical terms, according to new research, that means many teenaged girls who might otherwise consider a career in STEM are turned off by the computer-geek image. A pair of experiments with 270 14-to-18-year-old students in two different high schools shows that three times as many girls were interested in enrolling in a computer science classes if the classroom where it was taught was “less geeky,” the study says.

Jeannette Jones, dean of education at Schaumburg-based for-profit American InterContinental University, told of a time she sat in on a middle school class and a student asked the teacher a question. She said the teacher didn't know the answer — but on the spot posed the question to her Twitter followers. The teacher in seconds received responses from several experts in the field, Jones said. That’s an example of how technology is changing education forever. Other examples include increased use of iPads and management software in the classroom and programs that include 3D printers and other 3D technology.

Ten STEM students have been named to the XSEDE Scholars program, an outreach and educational effort that reveals the full reach and potential of XSEDE’s resources and services to undergraduates and graduates. This 2015-16 cohort is the fifth generation of this program, which aims to engage with underrepresented groups in computational science. As part of the XSEDE Scholars program, the scholars attended the Blue Waters Petascale Institute, participated at the XSEDE15 conference.

This summer, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) hosted 50 rising high school juniors and seniors for its innovative and inaugural STEM program, CODE@TACC. With support from Mellanox and the Central Texas Summer STEM Funder Collaborative, which includes the KDK-Harman Foundation, TACC’s Life Sciences and Education and Outreach (E&O) teams designed a program that introduced students to principles in high performance computing, life sciences, and robotics.

In cooperation with computational journalist Nick Diakopoulos, IEEE Spectrum has released its second annual ranking of programming languages. Forty-eight languages were included this year and are ranked based on weighting and combining 12 metrics from 10 data sources, including the IEEE Xplore digital library and Github. The rankings are weighted to broadly represent the interests of IEEE's members, but users can apply filters to tailor the rankings to their specific situation using the Top Programming Languages Web app. The first half of the top 10 remains the same as last year, with Java ranked number one, followed by C, C++, Python, and C#. The biggest move in the top 10 is statistical computing language R, which jumped from number nine last year to number six this year.

When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet of excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they’ll do the rest. At first, it seemed as though the grownups were more excited than the kids, creating all sorts of wacky Pi-based projects. Fortunately, those grownups - eager for the respect of their peers - shared everything they learned, posting to blogs, StackOverflow, and thousands of other websites. Want to know how to blink an LED? Drive a motor? Read a sensor? Set up a web server? Within the first year, all of that was out there, all of it indexed, searchable, and useful to kids.

Users and cybersecurity engineers celebrated the open source cybersecurity defense/forensic software Bro's landmark achievements as a real-world tool as part of its 20th anniversary. Bro's success owes a lot to long-term backing by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and early adoption by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which saw its practical applications almost immediately, given that LBNL and other research centers are under near-constant cyberattack. Bro not only supports a network monitoring and traffic analysis architecture, it also enables security experts to perform forensics so they can examine attack patterns, evaluate the harm, and design better countermeasures.

New virtual reality headset technology developed at Stanford University provides a more natural viewing experience. With current "flat" stereoscopic virtual reality headsets, each eye sees only one image and the depth of field is also limited. However, Stanford professor Gordon Wetzstein says in the real world, people see slightly different perspectives of the same three-dimensional scene at different positions of their eyes' pupil. Wetzstein also notes people focus on different depths, and the disconnect between what people see and feel can cause motion sickness. The Stanford team used light-field technology to create a sort of hologram of multiple, slightly different perspectives for each eye, enabling users to freely move their focus and experience depth in the virtual scene.

Matthew Tirrell, the Founding Pritzker Director of the Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME) at the University of Chicago, has been appointed to an additional scientific leadership role at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, in a move that will strengthen the two institutions’ combined efforts. Tirrell, a pioneering researcher in the fields of biomolecular engineering and nanotechnology, will maintain his leadership of the IME, which is a scientific partnership between the University and Argonne. In his new role, effective September 1, he also will serve as Argonne’s Deputy Laboratory Director for Science.

Smartphone users will be able to generate a three-dimensional duplicate of themselves by using a new process developed by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). Alexandru Ichim from EPFL's Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory and colleagues say they have condensed an expensive and complex Hollywood studio process into an application for use on smartphone cameras. "We wanted the process to be fast and easy: all you have to do is take a video of yourself and then snap a few more shots to get facial expressions, and our algorithm does the rest," Ichim says. He notes users will be able to display their digital double on a screen and animate it in real time with a video camera that follows their movements.

President Obama has signed an executive order to announce the National Strategic Computing Initiative, which will be responsible for building the world's fastest supercomputer.The Defense and Energy Departments along with the National Science Foundation will lead the research on the development of a new high-performance computer. The technology will be used for better "economic competitiveness and scientific discovery," according to Obama's order. Supercomputers are used for many purposes, some critical to national security and the country's economic viability. U.S. scientists could use the new supercomputer to pioneer research into all fields ranging from nuclear energy to climate change.

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) and its lead scientist, Thomas Jordan, use massive computing power made possible by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve our understanding of earthquakes. In doing so, SCEC is helping to provide long-term earthquake forecasts and more accurate hazard assessments. One SCEC effort in particular, the PressOn project, aims to create more physically-realistic, wave-based earthquake simulations using an earthquake model they developed called CyberShake, which calculates how earthquake waves ripple through a 3-D model of the ground.

Barely days after announcing the $5 million, five-year NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform (PRP) project led by Calit2 director Larry Smarr, Smarr was in Australia where he signed an agreement with Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet) to link Australian researchers to PRP. The agreement is with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) on a partnership to connect Australian researchers to the PRP, a "next generation data sharing network linking research universities and supercomputing centres at unprecedented speeds."

The Exploring Computer Science (ECS) project, affiliated with UCLA Center X and the University of Oregon, has just announce it has been granted program status approval as a “G” elective with the University of California Office of the President. The ECS course is an excellent choice for the “first” course on a career pathway because it introduces students to the breadth of subjects found in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector. The course was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation by UCLA researcher Dr. Jane Margolis, the ECS team and staff from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Department of Computer Science has received funding from Google for two of its ongoing research projects. The first program is Mobile First, a three-year, $1-million project focused on mobile research and education. Mobile First will support professor Robin Kravets' research into heterogeneous mobile computing and distributed systems, with a focus on cross-device power management and efficient collaborative communications in crowded bandwidth-constrained environments such as concerts or sporting events. Mobile First also will enable the university to integrate Android as the primary mobile platform for three of its critical freshman and sophomore computer science classes.

Microsoft Research and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have launched a new contest with the goal of exploring the impact of climate change on the U.S.'s food system. The Innovation Challenge for Food Resilience encourages developers and researchers to build applications that make use of USDA data to provide actionable insights to farmers, agriculture businesses, scientists, or consumers. USDA will make key datasets available on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, enabling complex models to be processed in a timely manner and results to be delivered remotely to users on laptops and mobile devices. Participants can combine the data with data from other government agencies.

The XSEDE User Portal Project launched two mobile apps to provide powerful features to help researchers' better use XSEDE resources and services. The XSEDE User Portal is a powerful, virtual cyberinfrastructure used to share computing resources, data and expertise for researchers across the nation. The new mobile apps allow users and staff to access the XSEDE User Portal at their fingertips — the free apps are now available in Google Play and the Apple App store.

It’s uncommon for computer geeks to show sentiment when decommissioning a machine. More attention is devoted to the bigger, faster replacement, with supercomputers having lifespans of guinea pigs. Ralph Roskies, one of the center’s two scientific directors, heralded Blacklight as “a remarkable machine.” It outlived its expected existence. “In terms of the lifetime of these machines, four years is becoming long, and Blacklight at 5½ years has been productive all the way to the end,” he said. “It filled a need in the national community computer infrastructure that no other one could satisfy.”

As new big data technologies advance and the challenges of extracting meaning from these massive data sets shift, it seems likely computer scientists will need an entirely new vocabulary to define these various trends. For example, big data enthusiasts sometimes categorize storage units as "brontobytes," each of which adds up to 1,000 trillion terabytes. A unit of 1,000 brontobytes is called a "geobyte." Accompanying the new lexicon of big data storage units are new terms for data professionals, which include specialists in building data models or data architects; managers of data sources or data stewards/custodians; translators of data into visual form or data visualizers and those who change how a company does business based on analyzing company data, or data change agents.

Learners around the world now have the opportunity to enroll in a series of courses designed for biologists eager to gain computational skills and for computer scientists who want to explore the frontier of bioinformatics. UC San Diego will launch its six-course Specialization in Bioinformatics on Coursera, which culminates in a Capstone Project using software tools and big data provided by Illumina, a leading company in genome sequencing and the emerging field of personalized medicine. The new Bioinformatics Specialization will allow learners to earn a Specialization Certificate that serves as a mini-degree in this fast-growing, cutting-edge field.

When HBO decided to take the Internet seriously, it was only a matter of time before it started getting interested in your kids. The deal for rights to premiere the next five seasons of Sesame Street on HBO's cable channel and streaming services, alongside other Sesame Network content produced exclusively for HBO, shows just how important children's programming has become to anyone who wants to build and maintain a massive subscriber base in a marketplace being reshaped by cord-cutting behavior. To prove the point: Both Amazon and Netflix are launching new kids' shows as well.

"A" is for new Google parent company "Alphabet," for Sundar Pichai's "ascension" to CEO, and for a slimmed-down search engine company that seeks to become more "agile." After Google cofounder Larry Page's Tuesday announcement that he and cofounder Sergey Brin were stepping back to manage Google's divisions through the newly formed Alphabet Holdings, consumers may wonder if that "A" also stands for "altruism." Page and Sergey had been in search of a perch that would give them a better vantage point on Google and all of the companies that comprise it. They promoted Sundar Pichai to head of Apps and Chrome last fall, in an effort to step away from day-to-day duties, but that wasn't enough.