More than 120 middle school students, most of them proficient only in either Spanish or English, presented their knowledge Friday of a shared language: code. Students from Worthington Hooker School, St. Martin De Porres Academy, Fair Haven School and Bishop Woods School presented mobile apps they had designed in pairs in the Bishop Woods gymnasium Friday, the culmination of a year of learning about code and computer science concepts.

It will take close to three centuries for gender parity to be achieved among academics working in computer science unless action is taken to fix the imbalance, according to new research from the University of Melbourne. The meta-study – The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented? – estimated the gender of 36 million authors from more than 100 countries publishing some 10 million papers in around 6000 journals, covering the Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) disciplines over the last 15 years.

A paper posted online in January takes theoretical computer scientists halfway toward proving one of the biggest conjectures in their field. The new study, when combined with three other recent papers, offers the first tangible progress toward proving the Unique Games Conjecture since it was proposed in 2002 by Subhash Khot, a computer scientist now at New York University.

Speaking to Computer Weekly on the sidelines of the recent supercomputing conference in Singapore, Bhushan Desam, Lenovo’s global AI business leader, said HPC is moving from the hands of researchers to the broader enterprise market as more organisations require a lot more computing power to crunch large datasets quickly in AI applications.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is looking for a partner to help further develop and commercialize its method for securely processing protected data in high-performance computing clusters. With the growing demand for big data analysis and improvements in hardware, researchers have been running large-scale simulations in HPC and cloud environments.

When the students in Pierre Neuenschwander’s master’s level “Proteins and Nucleic Acids” class prepared for their midterm in March, they were actually following a path that their professor had begun nearly a decade ago. A lab scientist by training, Neuenschwander, an associate professor of biochemistry at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler (UTHSCT), began to experiment in the mid-2000s with computational drug docking, then in its early days.

Researchers are using computational models powered by HPC to develop better strategies for protecting us from bioterrorism. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is leading a proactive effort to ensure a fast, effective response to any future bioterrorist attacks. With $1.7 million in newly awarded funding, a research team at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech’s Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) will head up a five-year project to develop a system public health officials could use to immediately identify the best treatment strategy for anyone exposed to a toxic biological agent.

Here’s a bold prediction for you: machine learning is NOT going to take over the computer science jobs, but computer science will automate machine learning jobs. Well, maybe after I explain what I mean it won’t seem so (figuratively) bold. You see, most of what we call applied machine learning today is actually a relatively unglamorous meta-optimization problem. We’re trying to explore the space of feature representations, sampling strategies, hyperparameters, model types, and model configurations to get the best performance on our test dataset.

Carnegie Mellon University will hire a researcher from the Library of Congress to help it decode a collection that includes two WWII German Enigma machines. The university wants to encourage the study of 19th and 20th century computers, calculators, encryption machines and other materials related to the history of computer science.

Up until Monday, the University of Maryland's computer science department TA handbook instructed female TAs to remain "friendly but firm" and "patient" when dealing with sexist students. Effectively, they were supposed to coddle them. The department removed the handbook from their website after a student pointed it out on Twitter. Nevertheless, as a young male who has rarely been challenged beyond strict academics, and who has experienced near constant affirmation of his own entitlement, I can tell that the handbook's language was written with me in mind.

A national effort led by the White House and Silicon Valley has pushed computer science education onto the radar screens of 70 percent of school principals, according to a new national survey of school leaders by the Education Week Research Center. But one-third of school leaders view computer science as an occasional supplement, rather than the type of comprehensive academic discipline that computer science proponents advocate, according to the survey of principals, assistant principals, and other school-based leaders.

While the buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) can seem ominous, consumers are surprisingly comfortable with the technology in healthcare. A recent survey conducted by SAS, a leader in analytics, found that when presented with a variety of real-world AI scenarios, a majority of people were at ease with AI in healthcare, and more comfortable with AI in healthcare settings than banking or retail.

We all remember learning to ride a bike. Those early wobbly moments with “experts” holding on to your seat while you furiously peddled and tugged away at the handlebars trying to find your own balance. Training wheels were the obvious hardware choice for those unattended and slightly dangerous practice sessions. Training wheel hardware was often installed by your then “expert” in an attempt to avoid your almost inevitable trip to the ER.

Things are getting real for researchers in the UC Santa Barbara John Martinis/Google group. They are making good on their intentions to declare supremacy in a tight global race to build the first quantum machine to outperform the world's best classical supercomputers.

IMAGE IMAGE: THIS IS THE ROADTRACER MAP PROCESS. view more CREDIT: MIT CSAIL Map apps may have changed our world, but they still haven't mapped all of it yet. In particular, mapping roads can be tedious: even after taking aerial images, companies like Google still have to spend many hours manually tracing out roads. As a result, they haven't yet gotten around to mapping the vast majority of the more than 20 million miles of roads across the globe.

Eleven-year-old Hayliee Tat traveled two-and-a-half hours with her family for a sneak preview of what the future looks like with robots in it. Their destination: the robotics open house at the University of Southern California (USC). The annual event draws mainly elementary and secondary school students from Los Angeles and beyond to spark their interest in robotics and computer science.

Efforts to ramp up computer science education in K-12 schools have intensified across the nation, and with good cause—most future jobs will require some form of computational thinking. According to Code.org stats, only 15 states have created K-12 computer science standards. In 35 states and Washington, D.C., computer science can count toward a high school math or science requirement; this is up from just 12 states in 2013.

Following on from the 4th meeting of the Atos Quantum Scientific Council held on Friday at its headquarters, Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, announces unprecedented simulation features in Quantum computing. Researchers at the Atos Quantum Laboratory have successfully modeled ‘quantum noise’ and as a result, simulation is more realistic than ever before, and is closer to fulfilling researchers’ requirements.

NASA researchers are using AI technologies to detect gravitational waves. The work is described in a new article in Physics Review D this month. NCSA Gravity Group researchers, Daniel George, Eliu Huerta and Hongyu Shen leveraged NCSA resources from its Innovative Systems Laboratory, Einstein Toolkit and NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputer. Also critical to this research were the GPUs (Tesla P100 and DGX-1) provided by NVIDIA, which enabled an accelerated training of neural networks. Wolfram Research also played an important role, as the Wolfram Language was used in creating this framework for deep learning.

IMAGE IMAGE: IMAGE OF A BLOOD SMEAR FROM A CELL PHONE CAMERA (LEFT), FOLLOWING ENHANCEMENT BY THE ALGORITHM (CENTER), AND TAKEN BY A LAB MICROSCOPE (RIGHT). view more CREDIT: OZCAN RESEARCH GROUP/UCLA Researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have demonstrated that deep learning, a powerful form of artificial intelligence, can discern and enhance microscopic details in photos taken by smartphones. The technique improves the resolution and color details of smartphone images so much that they approach the quality of images from laboratory-grade microscopes.

Cyber startups and legacy technology companies know exactly how to attract top undergraduates: a six-figure salary, a signing bonus, even a new car. With these luxuries in reach, choosing to forgo the job offer in pursuit of advanced higher education seems irrational for most new grads. However, this is exactly what’s being asked of them by the cybersecurity industry — an industry with zero unemployment and a severe skills shortage in both private sector employment and higher education.

Image manipulation in this advanced stage of the digital age is not as much fun but a dicey weapon, in the shadows of fake news, to sway opinion and spark scandals. Face-swapping, in particular, sounds like fun if you think of it as a chuckle at a family table while kids and adults try out different faces on different people. However, it's also a tool for far worse motives.

One of the eternal challenges of economic development is how to identify the economic activities that a country, city, or region should target. During recent years, a large body of research has shown that countries, regions, and cities, are more likely to enter economic activities that are related to the ones they already have. For instance, a region specialized in the exports of frozen fish and crustaceans can more easily start exporting fresh fish than heavy machinery. This research has illuminated a new chapter in the economic development literature, but also, it has left an important question unanswered: what is the right strategy for countries wanting to diversify their economy?

In 2016, University of California, Berkeley, engineers demonstrated the first implanted, ultrasonic neural dust sensors, bringing closer the day when a Fitbit-like device could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time. Now, Berkeley engineers have taken neural dust a step forward by building the smallest volume, most efficient wireless nerve stimulator to date.

The game-based learning platform Kahoot! is partnering with the nonprofit Code.org to launch specially curated computer science games on Kahoot's popular website and mobile app. By tapping into Kahoot's 70 million monthly active users — more than 50 percent of K-12 students in the U.S., Kahoot estimates — Code.org can further its goal of teaching more girls and underrepresented minorities to code and sparking their interest in computer science.