Facebook plans to open a new data center in Ireland, the social network said, becoming the latest technology giant to set up an energy efficient center in Ireland’s recovering economy. Ireland is fast becoming a cloud hub helped by its temperate climate and the presence of many of the biggest internet companies, which have been attracted by the country’s low corporate tax rate. Facebook said it had applied for planning permission to build the center, which, after Sweden, is its second in Europe for housing computers that run cloud-computing services, where users store data on secure servers instead of their own network or computer.

Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller, former professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University, hopes her online education platform will expand globally as more universities see online education evolving into a necessary, and inevitable, complement to traditional learning. Although Koller, who in 2008 received the first-ever ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences, does not envision the obsolescence of traditional university education, she says online education "gives people the opportunity to pause and reflect and grapple with the material," as well as offering valuable feedback to instructors.

The recently-launched CSE-based Center for Visual Computing, or VisComp, at UC San Diego, confirmed that its first course on the edX learning platform will be taught by the center’s director, computer science professor Ravi Ramamoorthi. The news was part of a formal announcement by UC San Diego that it is partnering with edX, the leading nonprofit, open-source online learning destination that offers online courses to students around the world. Under the name UC San DiegoX, the campus will host its first free, non-credited course beginning Aug. 17 on edX. The course, Computer Graphics CSE167x, will be taught by Ramamoorthi (at right), a “returning edX professor and early adopter of the edX platform.”

We are constantly hearing about how some piece of new tech will transform teaching and learning in the classroom. We believe that if something is shiny, new, and slick, it will inevitably be good for the classroom. In other words, we believe that technology will solve the ills of the 21st-century classroom. This can, however, lead to blind adoption or ill-planned implementation.

The University of California, San Diego's San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been awarded a three-year U.S. National Science Foundation grant to help three regional school districts create model "villages" for deploying and sustaining up-to-date computer science courses in their curriculum. "Workforce training must evolve with technology innovations to maintain a vibrant economy," says SDSC's Diane Baxter. "The slower pace of K-12 curriculum revision poses a significant systemic challenge to an innovation-driven U.S. economy." Addressing this challenge is the purpose of the Computer Science-Creating a Village for Educators initiative, which investigates a model designed to roll out new, tech-driven curriculum content faster than current systemic cycles of educational reform.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion around the importance of coding in the K-12 classroom. Should it be compulsory for all students? An elective? Reserved for those students considering a computer science major in college? The answer may come down to supply and demand. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2020, there will be 1.4 million computing jobs and only 400,000 computer science students to fill those roles. This represents a gap of one million jobs that will go unfilled and amounts to a $500 billion opportunity lost. In 2015, when more and more schoolwork, from kindergarten up through college, is done in a digital environment, students need to know the fundamentals of how the system they are using functions.

Code.org is collaborating with College Board to work to expand computer science in U.S. high schools and increase the number of female and minority students taking computer science courses. Under the new partnership, high schools in 35 of the U.S.'s largest districts will be encouraged to offer Code.org's computer science course this fall. Targeted school districts are in cities including New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi says the nonprofit will provide the curriculum, tools, training, and funding to school districts that qualify, while the College Board will help fund the work if a school district agrees to use the PSAT to identify students who have potential in computer science.

Google announced plans to debut the latest version of its self-driving car on public roads this summer. The new prototypes look similar to the prototype unveiled last year, but with a more robust feature set. Dimitri Dolgov, head of software for the self-driving car project, says Google's self-driving software has improved in the last year and is much better at classifying objects and predicting the behavior of pedestrians and other cars. However, the new cars will still have limitations. The small electric cars will have a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour (in part because they lack several federally-required safety features such as air bags) and a maximum range of 80 miles.

Researchers from the universities of Washington (UW) and Maryland analyzed gender bias in online image results, and their study found a systematic underrepresentation of women. In occupations that have the same number of women and men, the researchers report women only account for 45 percent of the search images. Moreover, women in the images sometimes appear highly sexualized. When study participants were asked to identify which images showed a more professional and appropriate-looking person for a given occupation, they did not tend to exhibit open sexism in their choices. One surprising finding was that participants more often clung to stereotypes, which meant when an image matched the stereotype of the profession, it was more likely to be chosen by the participant.

Three separate research groups revealed app security flaws that could turn Apple and Samsung devices into cyberintruders' playthings -- allowing them to take control of your phones' cameras, microphones and GPS while stealing all your personal information and listening to your phone calls. The only good news is that the attacks would have to be aimed at specific phones, and attackers are unlikely to target everyday people. The bad news is that German researchers found flaws that could affect every phone.

Facebook and Google are building enormous neural networks—artificial brains—that can instantly recognize faces, cars, buildings, and other objects in digital photos. But that’s not all these brains can do. They can recognize the spoken word, translate from one language to another, target ads, or teach a robot to screw a cap onto a bottle. And if you turn these brains upside down, you can teach them not just to recognize images, but create images—in rather intriguing (and sometimes disturbing) ways.

The Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform has again powered the winning team in a major international student supercomputing competition. And, GPU technology helped another team set a student record in the supercomputing industry’s top performance benchmark. For the third year in a row GPU technologies have helped a team nab the top spot in the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge, the world’s largest supercomputer competition. This year, 152 teams from around the world took part. Sixteen from around the globe made the cut to compete in the finals, which are held in Asia every year.

SpaceX has announced plans to construct a mile-long Hyperloop test track next to its headquarters in Hawthorne, California, scheduled for completion by June 2016. The company also announced an open competition for university students and independent engineering teams to design and build the best Hyperloop pod. Entrants will be able to test their pods on the track. "These tests will provide proof points at a reasonable cost, and will help build support for the project," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

Teachers are already capitalizing on their students’ fascination with the computer game Minecraft to teach everything from math to history. The immersive game lets you create your own mini-universe. The game has many tools, but many players are taking the game a step further by building entirely new features into the game. And, at the same time, they are also learning how to code with a tweak to the Minecraft game called LearnToMod. Modifications like this, called “mods,” are a big part of the game’s runaway success. But this particular mod helps kids learn to create their own mods.

SC15 is excited to hold another nail-biting Student Cluster Competition as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. This year the SCC is proud to host nine teams that will battle it out to showcase their hardware and computing might to battle zombie invasions, hurricanes, exotic particles, gene reconstruction and more. The selected teams are from the following organizations/countries: Arizona Tri-University Team (U.S.), Illinois Institute of Technology (U.S.), National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan), Northeastern University (U.S.), Pawsey Supercomputing Centre (Australia), Technische Universität München (Germany), Tsinghua University (China), Universidad EAFIT (Colombia), and University of Oklahoma (U.S.).

Team "Copernicus Health" won the Nicholson Foundation's Rutgers Healthcare Delivery Challenge for its smartphone app that engages and motivates underserved populations to better manage their type 2 diabetes. The Rutgers Healthcare Delivery Challenge encouraged teams to develop ready-to-implement service delivery or technology innovations that can improve the quality and contain the costs of healthcare for underserved populations. The Copernicus Health app uses gamification techniques to enable patients to receive points for taking their medicine, self-educating about their disease through the apps' embedded learning tools and monitoring important clinical metrics at the doctor's office.

Software development has a well-known reputation for being a male-dominated world. But, despite this, women have made many important and lasting contributions to programming throughout the decades. One area, in particular, where many women have left a mark is in the development of programming languages. Numerous pioneering women have designed and developed the languages programmers use to give computers instructions, starting in the days of mainframes and machine code, through assemblers and into higher level modern day languages.

A multi-university team of researchers has developed a system that can power electrical devices with just a wireless router's signal, even while it provides wireless Internet access to an area. Using a traditional Wi-Fi signal, devices can be powered when the Internet is being used; however, when not browsing, the signal goes quiet. The new software broadcasts meaningless data across several Wi-Fi channels when the Internet is not being used, and small devices could use this signal as part of an Internet of Things, according to University of Reading researcher Ben Potter.

Fourteen faculty members at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been selected to receive one-year fellowships that will enable their research teams to pursue collaborative projects with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NCSA's fellowship program aims to catalyze and develop long-term collaborations between the center and campus researchers, particularly in the center's six thematic areas of research: Bioinformatics and Health Sciences, Computing and Data Sciences, Culture and Society, Earth and Environment, Materials and Manufacturing, and Physics and Astronomy.

The members of NCSA's Advanced Visualization Laboratory and their collaborators are creating “Solar Superstorms,” an ultra-high-resolution digital film that presents the latest digitally enabled research on solar flares, coronal mass ejections and other aspects of space weather. This is just the first of three fulldome shows that AVL and its partners will produce in the next several years as part of a project called CADENS (The Centrality of Advanced Digitally ENabled Science), which is backed by the National Science Foundation. CADENS will also create nine high-definition documentaries for online distribution, via YouTube, Hulu, Amazon, NSF TV, and other outlets. The goal of CADENS is to highlight how essential digital techniques have become across virtually all areas of inquiry.

Computers and water typically don't mix, but in Manu Prakash's lab, the two are one and the same. Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and his students have built a synchronous computer that operates using the unique physics of moving water droplets. The computer is nearly a decade in the making, incubated from an idea that struck Prakash when he was a graduate student. The work combines his expertise in manipulating droplet fluid dynamics with a fundamental element of computer science -- an operating clock. "In this work, we finally demonstrate a synchronous, universal droplet logic and control," Prakash said.

University of Houston researchers have proposed using tiny robots driven by magnetic potential energy from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to advance minimally invasive medical treatments. The new approach is based on sending tiny maneuverable robotic components to a desired location and triggering the conversion of magnetic potential energy into a suitable amount of kinetic energy to penetrate tissue. "Our noninvasive approach would eventually require simply a hypodermic needle or lumbar puncture to introduce the components into the spinal canal, and the components could be steered out of the body afterwards," says University of Houston professor Aaron T. Becker.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have developed a new method of measuring the pain experienced by pediatric patients using facial pattern recognition software. Pain is traditionally gauged via self-reporting, with patients rating their pain on a scale of 1 to 10; however, it can be difficult for medical professionals to accurately gauge the pain that pediatric patients are experiencing because children, especially young ones, are often unable to accurately gauge their own pain. The method described by the UCSD researchers is based on the Facial Action Coding System, which measures facial expressions using 46 anatomically-based component movements and which has proven to be useful in identifying pain-related facial movements.

As part of the Blue Waters project, NCSA is substantially upgrading its networking capacity, giving researchers across the country the ability to move data more quickly than ever before. The center will have four 100-gigabit research connections when the work is completed in summer 2015. “We believe this will make NCSA the most connected supercomputing center in the world,” said Tim Boerner, leader of NCSA’s networking team.

University of Witwatersrand researchers are leading a project to create inexpensive computers or tablets to potentially be used by every student in South Africa in the near future. "We are creating this human capacity to solve complicated problems in software, hardware, electronics, computing, and all that," says Witwatersrand professor Bruce Mellado. The goal of the project is to equip the entire educational system of South Africa with low-cost computers or tablets, a mission that would be made easier with locally designed and manufactured devices.