The inventor of the worldwide web, Tim Berners-Lee, on Monday announced plans for a "contract" to ensure the internet remains "safe and accessible" for all. "All kinds of things have things have gone wrong," the computer scientist, who in 1989 invented the Web as a platform, said at the opening of the Web Summit, Europe's largest tech event. "We have fake news, we have problems with privacy, we have people being profiled and manipulated," he said. Like other tech pioneers, Berners-Lee saw the internet as a platform that would open new horizons but he is disappointed with how it has evolved.

For many years, quantum computers were not much more than an idea. Today, companies, governments and intelligence agencies are investing in the development of quantum technology. Robert König, professor for the theory of complex quantum systems at the TUM, in collaboration with David Gosset from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo and Sergey Bravyi from IBM, has now placed a cornerstone in this promising field.

Children learn language by observing their environment, listening to the people around them, and connecting the dots between what they see and hear. Among other things, this helps children establish their language’s word order, such as where subjects and verbs fall in a sentence. In computing, learning language is the task of syntactic and semantic parsers. These systems are trained on sentences annotated by humans that describe the structure and meaning behind words.

XSEDE runs an HPC Monthly Workshop Series on Big Data, MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC, and GPUs. These are offered as live multicast workshops to ~25 sites per month. If you are not at a site that offers these workshops or want a refresher, we are happy to say that recordings are being made available on YouTube. There are now three topics available, Big Data, OpenACC, and OpenMP; each as several videos grouped into a playlist available on YouTube.

Since designing and launching a specialized workflow management system in 2010, a research team from the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has continuously updated the technology to help computational scientists develop software, visualize data and solve problems.

An international team of researchers led by The Australian National University (ANU) has invented a tiny camera lens, which may lead to a device that links quantum computers to an optical fibre network. Quantum computers promise a new era in ultra-secure networks, artificial intelligence and therapeutic drugs, and will be able to solve certain problems much faster than today's computers.

Researchers at the University of Geneva have recently developed a new defense mechanism that works by bridging machine learning with cryptography. The new system, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on Kerckhoffs' second cryptographic principle, which states that both defense and classification algorithms are known, but the key is not.

XSEDE runs an HPC Monthly Workshop Series on Big Data, MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC, and GPUs. These are offered as live multicast workshops to ~25 sites per month. If you are not at a site that offers these workshops or want a refresher, we are happy to say that recordings are being made available on YouTube. There are now three topics available, Big Data, OpenACC, and OpenMP; each as several videos grouped into a playlist available on YouTube.

Active learning classrooms have transformed how K–12 schools are delivering their curricula, and universities are starting to take notice. This transformative model creates a collaborative environment through student-centered learning and supported technology. Replacing traditional lectures, active learning gives students a constructive role in the learning process. Research shows that ALC methods provide substantial learning advantages. These benefits include increased self-reliance, more meaningful connections to content and ongoing cognitive development. Many universities are understandably eager to transition, but it needs to be done correctly.

Melinda Gates is convening leading tech companies in an effort to dramatically increase the number of computer science degrees awarded to women of color, part of a broader effort to improve diversity in an industry dominated by white men. Gates’ independent executive office, Pivotal Ventures, and McKinsey & Company released a report Wednesday that shows more work is needed to bring underrepresented groups into technology. That’s the goal of the new Reboot Representation Tech Coalition, a coordinated effort by 12 technology companies to boost funding and align philanthropic efforts. The goal is to double the number of women of color graduating with computer science degrees by 2025.

XSEDE runs an HPC Monthly Workshop Series on Big Data, MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC, and GPUs. These are offered as live multicast workshops to ~25 sites per month. If you are not at a site that offers these workshops or want a refresher, we are happy to say that recordings are being made available on YouTube. There are now three topics available, Big Data, OpenACC, and OpenMP; each as several videos grouped into a playlist available on YouTube.

As France, Japan, China, and the United States vie to build the world’s first exascale computer, application and technology developers and researchers in each country are up against major hurdles. In France, CEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) is racing against a 2021 deadline to modernize its code for its future next-generation computer. As part of its efforts, CEA has been collaborating closely with the University Versailles Saint-Quentin (UVSQ) and Intel as part of the Exascale Computing Research (ECR) Lab.

Advances in structural, chemical, and biophysical data acquisition (e.g., protein structures via X-ray crystallography and near atomic cryoEM, isothermal calorimetry, etc.), coupled with the continued exponential growth in computing power and advances in the underlying algorithms are opening a new era for the simulation of biological systems at the molecular level, and at scales never before reached. In this talk I will discuss how the BlueWaters Petascale computing architecture forever altered the landscape and potential of computational biophysics.

Over the past several years, artificial intelligence has been deployed at a massive scale and integrated into every aspect of our lives. Its use in retail, healthcare, and the home has made everyone more connected than ever before. As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes further incorporated into our society, the need for better security measures at every stage of connectivity grows ever more pressing.

XSEDE runs an HPC Monthly Workshop Series on Big Data, MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC, and GPUs. These are offered as live multicast workshops to ~25 sites per month. If you are not at a site that offers these workshops or want a refresher, we are happy to say that recordings are being made available on YouTube. There are now three topics available, Big Data, OpenACC, and OpenMP; each as several videos grouped into a playlist available on YouTube.

As we are heading towards extreme-scale HPC coupled with data intensive analytics like machine learning, the necessary integration of big data and HPC is a current hot topic of research that is, as Rashid Mehmood notes, “still in its infancy”. Mehmood is the Research Professor of Big Data Systems and the Director for Research, Training and Consultancy at the High Performance Computing Centre, King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia.

Sometimes, a computer science researcher produces a paper whose findings, if published, might lead to societal harm. Now, some experts are questioning the default course of action: publishing the paper anyway, potential damage be damned.

Only 21.9 percent of the students in UT’s Department of Computer Science are female, according to the CS department. The gender gap in computer science is also apparent in its staff — only 4 percent of faculty in the department are women. The CS department desperately needs more gender diversity, but hiring new faculty members is a complex process that requires more than just a symbolic push for equality.

Tucked away amid the back and forth of appropriations debate last week, the Senate honored two female trailblazers in math and computer science, adopting resolutions recognizing Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. Sponsored by Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden and Nebraska Republican Deb Fischer, the measures would designate Oct. 9, 2018, as “National Ada Lovelace Day” and honor the life and legacy of Hopper. “Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper were pioneers in STEM,” Fischer said in a statement introducing the legislation Wednesday, the day it passed. “More Nebraskans and more Americans should know about the lasting contributions they made to our nation and the world.”

For higher education institutions, high-performance computing is essential to enabling academic and scientific research arms to support and improve pathways for their researchers. To help uncover issues in their networks and maintain optimal performance, universities are starting to ask the right questions: Who is using the network? For what? How much bandwidth are projects consuming?

Rescale, the startup that wants to bring high performance computing to the cloud, announced a $32 million Series B investment today led by Initialized Capital, Keen Venture Partners and SineWave Ventures. They join a list of well-known early investors that included Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Peter Thiel and others. Today’s investment brings the total amount raised to $52 million, according to the company.

Cybersecurity researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have helped close a security vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to steal encryption keys from a popular security package by briefly listening in on unintended "side channel" signals from smartphones. The attack, which was reported to software developers before it was publicized, took advantage of programming that was, ironically, designed to provide better security. The attack used intercepted electromagnetic signals from the phones that could have been analyzed using a small portable device costing less than a thousand dollars.

Through innovative use of a neural network that mimics image processing by the human brain, a research team reports accurate reconstruction of images transmitted over optical fibers for distances of up to a kilometer. In The Optical Society's journal for high-impact research, Optica, the researchers report teaching a type of machine learning algorithm known as a deep neural network to recognize images of numbers from the pattern of speckles they create when transmitted to the far end of a fiber.

Basketball players need lots of practice before they master the dribble, and it turns out that's true for computer-animated players as well. By using deep reinforcement learning, players in video basketball games can glean insights from motion capture data to sharpen their dribbling skills. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and DeepMotion Inc., a California company that develops smart avatars, have for the first time developed a physics-based, real-time method for controlling animated characters that can learn dribbling skills from experience.

AI or not AI: that is the question. Computer scientists in Australia teamed up with an expert in the University of Toronto's department of English to design an algorithm that writes poetry following the rules of rhyme and metre. To test their results, the researchers asked people online to distinguish between human- and bot-written verses. The best version of the algorithm fooled people nearly 50 per cent of the time.