MIT researchers have developed a computer interface that can transcribe words that the user verbalizes internally but does not actually speak aloud. The system consists of a wearable device and an associated computing system. Electrodes in the device pick up neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face that are triggered by internal verbalizations -- saying words "in your head" -- but are undetectable to the human eye.

Many economists call the current era of technology growth a boom era, not unlike previous gold rushes such as the Dot-com bubble. But the thing about bubbles is, they usually pop. And that has some people concerned. Is another bust on the horizon? It’s not only tech employees who are paying attention to these patterns. In higher education, the number of computer science bachelor’s degrees follows market trends in finance and technology in particular—growing when times are good and plummeting when economies crash.

While the industry has woken up to the immense potential AI holds, it is still not clear about where high performance computing (HPC) ends and where AI begins. What is powering the AI juggernaut is the wide availability of compute and GPUs that make parallel processing faster and more powerful, while proving to be affordable.

Burton Smith, who played an instrumental role in advancing the development of high-performance computing at Cray and Microsoft, died Tuesday at the age of 77 in Burien, Wash. Microsoft announced his death in a blog post Wednesday morning. The company described him as “a kind man always willing to help and give advice who shared generously of his deep stores of knowledge and also an innovator who consistently came up with completely new ideas for designing hardware.”

Procuring digital learning tools and technology to help educate students with special needs are two of 10 “hotspots” in government contracting for 2018, according to an analysis of bids and RFPs conducted by GovWin+Onvia from Deltek.

For Mira Baliga, a sophomore computer science major at the University of Maryland, the lack of gender diversity in her major-related classes is sometimes "uncomfortable."

Artificial intelligence systems and machine-learning algorithms have come under fire recently because they can pick up and reinforce existing biases in our society, depending on what data they are programmed with.

Bioinformatics professors Anthony Gitter and Casey Greene set out in summer 2016 to write a paper about biomedical applications for deep learning, a hot new artificial intelligence field striving to mimic the neural networks of the human brain. They completed the paper, but also triggered an intriguing case of academic crowdsourcing. Today, the paper has been massively written and revised with the help of more than 40 online collaborators, most of whom contributed enough to become co-authors.

As part of an effort to identify distant planets hospitable to life, NASA has established a crowdsourcing project in which volunteers search telescopic images for evidence of debris disks around stars, which are good indicators of exoplanets. Using the results of that project, researchers at MIT have now trained a machine-learning system to search for debris disks itself.

As we generate more and more data, the need for high-density data storage that remains stable over time is becoming critical. New nanoparticle-based films that are more than 80 times thinner than a human hair may help to fill this need by providing materials that can holographically archive more than 1000 times more data than a DVD in a 10-by-10-centimeter piece of film. The new technology could one day enable tiny wearable devices that capture and store 3-D images of objects or people.

The Super Mario Bros. jingle seems to have almost as many fans as the classic video game itself. The theme song has inspired innumerable covers on YouTube – some with millions of views – performed with instruments as varied as the marimba and four calculators. Yet, while songs and effects are an important part of gameplay, few programmers can write music as well as they write code.

With two years left at Rockhurst High School, sophomore Tanner Helton is building websites for pay, and his Advanced Placement computer science class is starting an “Internet of Things” project. Rockhurst last year began requiring freshmen to take computer science. Helton said he thought it was important for young people to have tech skills, and he appreciated the way the internet connects the globe.

As our demand for powerful processors rises, our need for a solution outside classical computing mounts. Quantum computing could help solve some of the more complex problems plaguing us. With quantum computers, we could map complex climate systems, solve impossibly complex encryption puzzles, and simulate advanced chemical processes. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

If the history of high performance computing has taught us anything, it is that we cannot focus too much on compute at the expense of storage and networking. Having all of the compute in the world doesn’t mean diddlysquat if the storage can’t get data to the compute elements – whatever they might be – in a timely fashion with good sustained performance.

As Robert Oppenheimer watched a mushroom cloud from the first nuclear detonation bloom over a New Mexico test site, he repeated a line from the Hindu epic Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The scientist who helped build the world’s most lethal weapon saw how physicists would forever confront the consequences of their discoveries.

As high-profile data breaches continue to make headlines, CISOs have been thrust under the microscope as their work histories, educational backgrounds and qualifications are scrutinized. That scrutiny has sparked a debate over whether or not information security professionals, particularly CISOs, should be required to have computer science degrees. One of the most recent examples involves Equifax, which suffered a catastrophic breach last year; the credit rating agency's CSO, Susan Mauldin, came under fire for reportedly having a degree in music rather than computer science.

Historically, the College Board has been the sole designer and provider of Advanced Placement, or AP, frameworks in high schools across the country. When considering the AP Computer Science Principles course for a 2016 launch, however, Maureen Reyes, executive director of the AP Program, knew that something different had to be done.

In this Let’s Talk Exascale podcast, Lois Curfman McInnes from Argonne National Laboratory describes the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (xSDK) for ECP, which is working toward a software ecosystem for high-performance numerical libraries. She also partners with Michael Heroux of Sandia National Laboratories to lead the IDEAS scientific software productivity project.

"It's not that a white male can't lead. I've done it," says John Hennessy, the 65-year-old president emeritus of Stanford University, long-time Google board member and new non-executive chair of its parent company, Alphabet. "It's that we all benefit by being exposed to a diverse cohort of people, working in a diverse community. Because if you're in a leadership position, you're not leading just people who look like you."

The growth in technology in absolutely every business is driving a dramatic change in the way that data in processed and used. Until relatively recently, intense data crunching was the privilege of computer science labs, research institutes, government departments and defense facilities. Today however, data is becoming the new currency, as it is used increasingly to create competitive edge and drive new business models.

Two physicists at ETH Zurich and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a novel machine-learning algorithm that analyses large data sets describing a physical system and extract from them the essential information needed to understand the underlying physics.

IF YOU FEEL like you keep reading about diversity in tech, well, that’s because there is still not enough ... diversity in tech. The juggernauts of the first computing revolution like HP and IBM actually had reasonable gender diversity, and IBM had its first female VP back in 1943. But fast forward to 2014 and just 31 percent of Facebook’s employees are women.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, recipients of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. Hennessy and Patterson created a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessors.

My head is turned to the stars quite often these days. The main reason, of course, is that we’re now seven months into the year-long mission of HPE’s Spaceborne supercomputer on the International Space Station (ISS). The first high performance commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computer system ever sent into space, the Spaceborne mission is to see if an onboard supercomputer can support astronauts on a lengthy journey to Mars someday.

An increasing number of High-Performance Computing (HPC) users are combining HPC with big data and cloud infrastructure to apply common management platforms and paradigms across them. In response to this demand, the EU-funded BRIGHT-BEYOND HPC project expanded Bright Computing’s capabilities. This Dutch company provides comprehensive software solutions for the provision and management of HPC clusters and OpenStack private clouds.