A new study presented at the American Educational Research Association's 2015 annual meeting found although interest in computer science among both men and women has fluctuated over the last four decades, women have consistently been underrepresented. The study is based on the responses of first-year, full-time students at four-year institutions drawn from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's Freshman Survey.The study found interest in computer science among both men and women spiked in the early 1980s and the late 1990s, but the share of women expressing interest in computer science has been in decline since the early 1980s.

Machine intelligence researchers Shoou-I Yu and Lu Jiang, working with colleagues on Carnegie Mellon University’s Alexander Hauptmann’s Informedia project and at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have developed E-Lamp, a system of “event detectors” designed to search for events in videos without human intervention. E-Lamp consists of a series of tools that start with a definition of a kind of event and then scans videos for sounds or images that are associated with those definitions. The machine can’t know—it can only make statistical guesses. So, the final step is to rank the possible “hits,” with users providing feedback that help the system learn.

IBM researchers, for the first time, have figured out how to detect and measure bit-flip and phase-flip quantum errors simultaneously. They also outlined a new, square quantum bit circuit design that could scale to much larger dimensions. “Quantum computing could be potentially transformative, enabling us to solve problems that are impossible or impractical to solve today,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “While quantum computers have traditionally been explored for cryptography, one area we find very compelling is the potential for practical quantum systems to solve problems in physics and quantum chemistry that are unsolvable today. This could have enormous potential in materials or drug design, opening up a new realm of applications.”

Code Camp is the capstone event for Females Excelling More in Mathematics, Engineering and Science (FEMMES). An offshoot of a club founded at Duke in 2006, FEMMES is a student organization devoted to helping local middle school girls develop key skills in computer science. The FEMMES team hopes to help students see past the stereotypes about what kind of person can be a programmer; they want them to learn that you don’t have to be a math genius to write code.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research have developed a three-dimensional (3D) printer that layers laser-cut sheets of fabric to form soft, squeezable objects. Although the fabric printer is similar in principle to laminated-object manufacturing, fabric presents cutting and handling challenges, which the researchers addressed in the design of the new printer. The printer includes an upper cutting platform and a lower bonding platform. Fabric is fed into the device, where a vacuum holds the fabric against the upper cutting platform while a laser moves below it, cutting a rectangular piece out of the fabric. The laser then cuts the layer's desired two-dimensional shapes within that rectangle.

Apple’s iPhone is just about the best smartphone camera you can get, but a new patent application provides a good indication of how it could get even better. The patent is for a “small form factor telephoto camera (via AppleInsider) and describes how the company might make a camera with a narrower field of view, but a much higher magnification factor, as well as how such a camera might be paired with a wider angle unit like the one that’s already used in your current iPhone to give you a range of options on a single smartphone device. The patent describes the mechanics behind creating a small lens suitable for use in a device like the iPhone, or the iPad and mobile Macs.

Intense fighting, sequesters and threats of shutdown are what many people associate with the current government in the United States. If it seems that this tension has become more amplified, that's because it has. Since 2010, when Republicans gained control of both the House and Senate, gridlock in government has been even more pervasive and damaging to enacting legislative change. Eric Svensen, a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin, is working to understand why government often seems incapable of solving many issues facing the country. He's analyzing how spending affects partisan conflict in Washington.

First, the technology sector gave us Google's bean bags and Facebook's feted ping-pong tables. Now these companies are raising jousting skyscrapers into the Silicon Valley skyline. Facebook has just this month moved into new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry, designer of Spain's Guggenheim Museum. Its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, describes it as the largest open-floor plan in the world. Atop it lies a nine-acre rooftop park. Google, Amazon, and Apple are also creating their own new colossal headquarters. Amazon's Seattle glass-dome biospheres, planned to open in 2016 and 2017, play none-too-subtly on its name. Each is a stab at capturing an imaginative futuristic high ground - and employees - from competitors.

Thermal imaging, microscopy and ultra-trace sensing could take a quantum leap with a technique developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “By pushing the noise limit lower than ever before, we enable these sensors to see things they couldn’t see,” Pooser said. “Imagine an image taken with so low contrast that all you see is a big gray square. Now imagine a technique that enhances the contrast to allow discernible features to emerge from that background.” Their work overcomes fundamental limitations of detection derived from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that the position and momentum of a particle cannot be measured with absolute precision.

Nearly one year after the Department of Energy inked a $70 million contract for the exascale-relevant Cori system, news of a second, smaller system has come to light. In an interesting turn of events, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) revealed that it will be acquiring a “Cori Phase 1” system, a 10-cabinet Cray XC40 machine outfitted with Intel “Haswell” parts to be installed this summer. Named after American biochemist Gerty Cori, the next-gen Cray XC system with 9,300 self-hosted Intel Knights Landing (KNL) takes a manycore approach that is a distinct departure for the leading-edge of supercomputing.

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) researchers have found many video games can have meaningful entertainment experiences for players. They studied 512 participants' experiences with video games, and learned players not only enjoyed playing games, but also frequently appreciated them at a deeper, more meaningful level. Participants suggested story details in the game were critical to feelings of appreciation, indicating more meaningful games were associated with heightened feelings of insight or enrichment. In addition, video games may provide players the opportunity to experience valuable situations and emotions that other forms of entertainment may not do as frequently, according to the researchers.

In a contest that echoes Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov and Watson beating two Jeopardy! Champions, computer poker software developed at Carnegie Mellon University will challenge four of the world’s best professional poker players in a “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence” competition that began on April 24 at Rivers Casino. Over the course of two weeks, the CMU computer program, Claudico, will play 20,000 hands of Heads-Up No-limit Texas Hold’em with each of the four poker pros.

A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison's Wisconsin Center for Education Research found men, and in particular white men, do not have the advantage many presume they have in science, technology, engineering and math, at least in academia. The study examined data from the national Survey of Doctorate Recipients gathered from 1993 through 2010, focusing on the amount of time it took academics to obtain a tenure-track position and then earn tenure. The study found black and Latino Ph.D.s were more likely than their white counterparts to be hired promptly, while Asian doctoral recipients were significantly less likely to be hired.

The nonprofit African-American Male Achievers Network (A-MAN) was founded in 1991 to provide year-round science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)-related programs to students in K-12 using computer labs as well as hands-on activities with laser beams and robotics. The goal is to encourage underserved African-American and Latino students to enter STEM careers. A-MAN's STEM education currently comprises students who are 50 percent African-American, 49 percent Latino, and 1 percent Asian-American.

Ever since computers have been small enough to be fixtures on desks and laps, their central processing has functioned something like an atomic Etch A Sketch, with electromagnetic fields pushing data bits into place to encode data. Unfortunately, the same drawbacks and perils of the mechanical sketch board have been just as pervasive in computing: making a change often requires starting from the beginning, and dropping the device could wipe out the memory altogether. As computers continue to shrink--moving from desks and laps to hands and wrists--memory has to become smaller, stable and more energy conscious.

On a unanimous vote of 22-0, the Senate HELP Committee approved a bipartisan bill that rewrites the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind). This means the bill will go to the Senate floor for final consideration, although floor time has not yet been scheduled. During Senate markup of the bill, known as the Every Child Achieves Act, 60 amendments were debated, 21 amendments offered and withdrawn, 29 amendments were passed and 8 amendments failed. Most of the amendments were adopted via voice vote with little controversy or withdrawn out of respect for maintaining the bipartisan nature of the legislation.

A shortfall in workers with information and communication technology skills could keep Europe from enjoying the economic and social benefits of trends, such as big data and cloud computing. The European Commission's Andrus Ansip described Europe's current state of affairs as alarming in a recent speech in Belgium. He said the rapid growth of the technology sector has led to the creation of 120,000 new jobs a year. However, Ansip noted Europe could face a shortfall of more than 800,000 skilled technology workers by 2020. "We still see big differences in skills levels between [European Union] countries, and different implementation of national skill programs designed to minimize Europe's digital divide," he said.

The Hubble Space Telescope launched 25 years ago. It’s easy to forget how revolutionary the project was, given that an entire generation of Americans has grown up accustomed to it beaming down stunning images of the cosmos on a regular basis. The first space telescope was proposed in 1923 by Hermann Oberth. Even then, it was clear that Earth-based telescopes operated at significant disadvantage. Not only are they impacted by light from cities, the atmosphere itself attenuates and blocks stars that would otherwise be visible. If you want to look at space on Earth, you need much larger telescopes than you’d need in space, and some spectra (infrared and ultraviolet) are difficult to observe from Earth at all.

Gender bias appears to be a key contributor to the scarcity of U.S. women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), according to new studies. Recent research in conjunction with the Association for Women in Science suggests bias drives women from STEM--and the mechanism of this prejudice can vary according to a woman's race or ethnicity. For example, interviews with and polls of female scientists found 66 percent of respondents had to prove their competence repeatedly, with black women significantly more likely to contend with this type of bias than other women.

The Indian government has approved a seven-year supercomputing program worth $730 million (Rs. 4,500-crore) intended to restore the nation’s status as a world-class computing power. The prime mandate of the National Supercomputing Mission, first revealed last October, is the construction of a vast supercomputing grid connecting academic and R&D institutions and select departments and ministries. The National Supercomputing grid will be comprised of more than 70 geographically-distributed high-performance computing centers linked over a high-speed network, the National Knowledge Network (NKN).

SpaceX is on a quest to get things into orbit and be less wasteful doing it. After a less than successful test a few months ago, SpaceX is set to test its reusable Falcon 9 first stage again as it launches a new International Space Station resupply mission. SpaceX will attempt to land that first stage vertically on its “spaceport drone ship” in the Atlantic Ocean after seeing the Dragon capsule safely to orbit. Most of the launch platforms developed thus far have relied upon at least one or two stages, which decouple from the payload during the assent and drop harmlessly into the ocean.

Together with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), the Jeopardy! winning computer has created perhaps the world's first-ever cookbook co-created by computer algorithms. "Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson" is a collaboration that began three years ago when IBM began building an "idea-generating tool" using Watson's artificial intelligence. The teams settled on trying to innovate food because it's something everyone appreciates, according to the book's introduction.

The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) is pleased to announce that Ms. Lisa Arafune will be joining the organization as Director. Ms. Arafune comes to the position with a wealth of experience in government relations, including more than a decade representing higher education and university-based research interests on Capitol Hill. She has advocated for the research community and major federal science agencies, including NSF, DOD, USDA, NIH, DOE, and NASA. Ms. Arafune holds a Master’s of Science in Management from Purdue University and an MBA from Budapest University of Economic Sciences.

This month, Springer announced the creation a new tool meant to combat nonsense paper submissions. Called SciDetect, the tool was developed in partnership with Cyril Labbe, a computer scientist at Grenoble's Joseph Fourier University. The tool uses a statistical technique similar to those used by email spam filters to automatically detect papers created with SCIgen and similar programs.

When you're strapping on the latest smart watch or ogling an iPhone, you probably aren't thinking of Moore's Law, which for 50 years has been used as a blueprint to make computers smaller, cheaper and faster. Without Moore's Law it's quite possible that new types of computers like Microsoft's HoloLens, a holographic wearable with which users can interact with floating images, would not have been developed. For decades, Moore's Law has been a guiding star for the development of modern electronics, though in recent years its relevance has been subject to debate.