In T minus 8,760 hours, or roughly one year, the Space Test Program-Houston 6 (STP-H6) hybrid and reconfigurable space supercomputer will board the International Space Station. The newest mission to the ISS featuring research and technology from the University of Pittsburgh's NSF Center for Space, High-performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC) will bring an unprecedented amount of computing power into space and invaluable research opportunities from the ground station on Pitt's Oakland campus.

Cambridge Analytica built a weapon. They did so understanding what uses its buyers had for it, and it worked exactly as intended. To help clients manipulate voters, the company built psychological profiles from data that it surreptitiously harvested from the accounts of 50 million Facebook users. But what Cambridge Analytica did was hardly unique or unusual in recent years: a week rarely goes by when some part of the Internet, working as intended, doesn’t cause appreciable harm.

Five years ago the Georgia Institute of Technology began a bold experiment -- to take a high-profile graduate program, put it online and offer it to students at a fraction of the cost of the in-person degree. Working with the massive open online course provider Udacity, and armed with a $2 million corporate investment from AT&T, Georgia Tech launched its online master of science in computer science in spring 2014. The tuition was $6,630 -- about a sixth of the cost of an on-campus degree.

When it came to choosing a graduate program, 36-year-old Babak Keyvani wanted a degree that would lead to a high salary and good career prospects. "I was thinking of obtaining an MBA after my bachelor's, since I was working as a project manager at some point in my life. But I think I've always been more passionate about computers," says Keyvani, who is pursuing an online master's degree in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Parents and teachers are concerned about young kids getting too much screen time. Should they allow any? Will kids fall behind if they aren’t allowed much screen time? How and when should youngsters learn how to use computers, learn about computer science, and start developing skills that eventually lead to coding? These are all valuable competencies that will serve them well in the high-tech workplace someday. But do kids really need to start getting prepared for the jobs of the future as early as kindergarten?

A new lightweight, low-cost agricultural robot could transform data collection and field scouting for agronomists, seed companies and farmers. The TerraSentia crop phenotyping robot, developed by a team of scientists at the University of Illinois, will be featured at the 2018 Energy Innovation Summit Technology Showcase in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 14.

Researchers at ESnet are working on new algorithms to identify network problems and find solutions on the fly so information moves quickly and on time. Like other complex systems, computer networks can break down and suffer bottlenecks. Keeping such systems running requires algorithms that can identify problems and find solutions on the fly so information moves quickly and on time.

The truth is finally out about Cambridge Analytic. In a series of eye-popping articles for the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr and her colleagues have detailed the full story of how research linking Facebook demographic data to personality traits apparently ended up in the hands of Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, and the Donald Trump campaign.

Assistant Professor Zhou Yu of the Department of Computer Science was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30” in the field of science for 2018. Holding a doctorate from the Language Technology Institute from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as undergraduate degrees in computer science and English, Yu’s research is interested in the intersection of language and machine learning. Beyond receiving the accolade, Yu is excited about the possibilities it will bring her.

The hyperscalers of the world have to deal with dataset sizes – both streaming and at rest – and real-time processing requirements that put them into an entirely different class of computing. They are constantly inventing and reinventing what they do in compute, storage, and networking not just because they enjoy the intellectual challenge, but because they have swelling customer bases that hammer on their systems so hard they can break them.

Since the ’50s, scientists have chased the promise of clean energy from sun-like reactions between deuterium and tritium, the plentiful isotopes of hydrogen. This carbon-free energy, achieved at temperatures of 360 million degrees Fahrenheit, would offer a great way to heat water and, in turn, spin turbines to create countless kilowatts of electricity.

While the large majority of business leaders agree that AI capabilities provide businesses with a distinct advantage over the competition, many of the smaller businesses are still holding back. After all, AI comes with a big price tag and requires a specific skill-set and job training that small businesses simply do not have the funds for.

The last couple of years have seen cloud computing gradually build some legitimacy within the HPC world, but still the HPC industry lies far behind enterprise IT in its willingness to outsource computational power. The most often touted reason for this is cost – but such a simple description hides a series of more interesting causes for the lukewarm relationship the HPC community has with public cloud providers. Here, we explore how things stand in 2018 – and more importantly, what the cloud vendors need to do if they want to make their services competitive with on-premise HPC.

High-bandwidth memory can improve a computer's performance. On-package memory (OPM) is a popular option in many commercial systems. Before this effort, little was known about OPM's implications on speed and power use. The team experimentally characterized and analyzed modern OPM storage. They provided guidelines on tuning the memory to speed up high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

In biology, similar graph-clustering algorithms can be used to understand the proteins that perform most of life's functions. It is estimated that the human body alone contains about 100,000 different protein types, and almost all biological tasks -- from digestion to immunity -- occur when these microorganisms interact with each other.

As AI's role in society continues to expand, J B Brown of the Graduate School of Medicine reports on a new evaluation method for the type of AI that predicts yes/positive/true or no/negative/false answers. Brown's paper, published in Molecular Informatics, deconstructs the utilization of AI and analyzes the nature of the statistics used to report an AI program's ability.

Stephen Hawking passed away at his home in Cambridge, England, in the early morning of March 14; he was 76. Born on January 8, 1942, Hawking was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. A brilliant scientist and visionary, Hawking advanced cosmology as a computational science and led the launch of several UK supercomputers dedicated to cosmology and particle physics.

In an upper-level seminar on artificial intelligence, Occidental College professor Justin Li started a discussion outside the realm of a typical computer science class. Should a self-driving car, if unable to brake in time, be programmed to steer into a wall to avoid crashing into pedestrians — perhaps killing a single person in the vehicle in order to save five on the street?

About 20% of all IoT enabled devices shall have basic level Blockchain services enabled in them in 2019. That said, there would be more devices that will be will be able to send data to private ledgers. This is an obvious hint at how the two most futuristic technologies have started converging, and most importantly, heralding a new world where companies are introducing new blockchain-based initiatives left, right and center!

The first step in rolling out a massive supercomputer installed at a government sponsored HPC laboratory is to figure out when you want to get it installed and doing useful work. The second is consider the different technologies that will be available to reach performance and power envelope goals. And the third is to give it a cool name.

2017 was not necessarily the best year to build a large HPC system for life sciences say Ari Berman, VP and GM of consulting services, and Aaron Gardner, director of technology, for research computing consultancy, BioTeam. Perhaps that’s true more generally as well. The reason is there were enough new technology options entering or expected soon to market – think AMD’s EPYC processor line, Intel Skylake, and IBM’s Power9 chip – that choosing wisely among them could seem premature.

Richard Childress Racing (RCR) is hoping to improve racing times through a multi-year partnership with ANSYS. RCR will use ANSYS Pervasive Engineering Simulation software to more accurately predict machine performance and enhance vehicle speed on the race track. A fraction of a second on the race track can determine which team takes the trophy, so NASCAR Monster Energy Cup Series teams must constantly improve speeds to stay competitive.

More institutions — including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, among others — are offering courses targeting ethical use of data and computer science, writes the New York Times. Accrediting group ABET even requires that ethics be apart of its institutions' computer science programs.

As the technology sector works to solve its diversity problem it must grapple with a puzzle: why fewer women studying computer science? Today, less than 20 per cent of computer science graduates in the US are female, compared with more than a third in the mid-1980s. “You don’t see the same gender disparity in other in other sciences as you do in computer science,” says Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, a non-profit organisation that runs after-school clubs across the US for girls up to 12th grade (age 18).

Joining different kinds of materials can lead to all kinds of breakthroughs. It's an essential skill that allowed humans to make everything from skyscrapers (by reinforcing concrete with steel) to solar cells (by layering materials to herd along electrons).