Today’s definition of what most companies want in a data scientist seems to be something akin to a superhero. Companies are looking for a regular Mister Fantastic (the Marvel Comics’ superhero who was “one of the bravest adventurers and most brilliant scientific minds of his generation”). Chief A.I. Officer at ZIFF, Ben Taylor, has coined the ideal caliber of data scientist as a ‘Type-E’ – a kind of over-achieving, unapologetically ambitious, narcissistic, nerd-on-A.C.I.D, who eats, drinks, sleeps, and is married to data science.

The supercomputing business, the upper stratosphere of the much broader high performance computing segment of the IT industry, is without question one of the most exciting areas in data processing and visualization. It is also one of the most frustrating sectors in which to try to make a profitable living. The customers are the most demanding, the applications are the most complex, the budget pressures are intense, the technical challenges are daunting, the governments behind major efforts can be capricious, and the competition is fierce.

In a recent demonstration project, physicists from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used the Cori supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to reconstruct data collected from a nuclear physics experiment, an advance that could dramatically reduce the time it takes to make detailed data available for scientific discoveries.

Researchers at North Carolina State University are using the Blue Waters Supercomputer to explore graphene’s applications, including its use in nanoscale electronics and electrical DNA sequencing. “We’re looking at what’s beyond Moore’s law, whether one can devise very small transistors based on only one atomic layer, using new methods of making materials,” said Professor Jerry Bernholc.

A new online game puts players in the shoes of an aspiring propagandist to give the public a taste of the techniques and motivations behind the spread of disinformation—potentially "inoculating" them against the influence of so-called fake news in the process. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have already shown that briefly exposing people to tactics used by fake news producers can act as a "psychological vaccine" against bogus anti-science campaigns.

With their insensitivity to decoherence what are known as Majorana particles could become stable building blocks of a quantum computer. The problem is that they only occur under very special circumstances. Now researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have succeeded in manufacturing a component that is able to host the sought-after particles.

The medical profession has an ethic: First, do no harm. Silicon Valley has an ethos: Build it first and ask for forgiveness later. Now, in the wake of fake news and other troubles at tech companies, universities that helped produce some of Silicon Valley’s top technologists are hustling to bring a more medicine-like morality to computer science. This semester, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are jointly offering a new course on the ethics and regulation of artificial intelligence.

Coal country and computer science country used to be different places. But Wyoming, much like Liz Lemon, is trying to show us that we really can have it all. In the next few weeks, the Wyoming State Legislature will vote on Senate File 29, which would add computer science (CS) to the state’s “common core of knowledge”, making it a requirement for K-12 public schools to offer CS education. If it passes, Wyoming would become only the second state in the country to mandate CS education, ahead of neighboring Colorado, ahead of liberal Massachusetts and Vermont, ahead of Silicon Valley’s home state of California.

It’s interesting to note that two career options that are perceived to be the same, are actually very different. Yes, there are overlapping areas in their functioning and training. But their study courses are definitely unique. These roles are: computer science and software engineering. Currently, in 2018, students may fulfill similar roles after studies are completed, but with changes in the industry, their roles may become more defined.

In 1957, the launch of the Sputnik satellite vaulted the Soviet Union to the lead in the space race and galvanized the United States. U.S. supercomputer researchers are today facing their own Sputnik moment—this time with China. After dominating the supercomputing rankings for decades, the United States is now so far behind that the combined power of the top two machines in China easily outpaces that of all 21 supercomputers operated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the country's top supercomputing funder.

Students, male and female, taking their exams in summer 2017 were given 15 minutes extra after dons ruled "female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure”, according to the Daily Telegraph. No changes were made to the length or difficulty of the questions on the paper. They trialed the change in a bid to help women achieve higher results, after just seven female maths final year students getting a first last year, compared to 45 men. Some academics reportedly voiced concerns about the changes calling them sexist.

In a 1981 lecture, the famed physicist Richard Feynman wondered if a computer could ever simulate the entire universe. The difficulty with this task is that, on the smallest scales, the universe operates under strange rules: Particles can be here and there at the same time; objects separated by immense distances can influence each other instantaneously; the simple act of observing can change the outcome of reality.

Japan has a new cafe where customers can enjoy coffee brewed and served by a robot barista. The robot named Sawyer debuted this week at Henna Cafe in Tokyo's downtown business and shopping district of Shibuya. The shop's name in Japanese means "strange cafe."

Computers can beat chess champions, simulate star explosions, and forecast global climate. We are even teaching them to be infallible problem-solvers and fast learners.And now, physicists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their collaborators have demonstrated that computers are ready to tackle the universe's greatest mysteries. The team fed thousands of images from simulated high-energy particle collisions to train computer networks to identify important features.

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed a novel microchip, named EQSCALE, which can capture visual details from video frames at extremely low power consumption. The video feature extractor uses 20 times less power than existing best-in-class chips, and hence requires 20 times smaller battery, and could reduce the size of smart vision systems down to the millimetre range. For example, it can be powered continuously by a millimetre-sized solar cell without the need for battery replacement.

Meltdown and Spectre are qualitatively different from previous computer vulnerabilities. Not only are they effective across a wide class of computer hardware and operating systems from competing vendors. And not only were the vulnerabilities hiding in plain sight for more than a decade. The really shocking realisation is that Meltdown and Spectre do not exploit flaws in the computer hardware or software.

Jane Margolis, senior researcher at UCLA’s Center X, brings her firsthand experience of inequities in a technical field to her work on bringing computer science education to all students. A summer job as a telephone operator shortly after college led her to become one of the first female telephone installers for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph in the 1970s. She went on to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education where she studied gender socialization and gender, race and inequities in education.

In the early 1980s, Sheryl Burgstahler met a 6-year-old boy named Randy who had a congenital condition called Arthrogryposis, which caused the paralysis of both his arms and legs. He wanted to move from a special education first grade class to a general education class but wasn’t allowed to because he was unable to write. Burgstahler began to work with him on learning to write with an Apple II computer. He put a stick in his mouth and used it to hit keys. She worked with an engineering student to create a device that would aid his typing. Needless to say, the educational system and the technology available to aid his learning was failing Randy. Despite these challenges, he still works with computers to this day.

These days, it's easy to overlook the fact that the World Wide Web was created nearly 30 years ago primarily to help researchers access and share scientific data. Over the years, the web has evolved into a tool that helps us eat, shop, travel, watch movies and even monitor our homes. Meanwhile, scientific instruments have become much more powerful, generating massive datasets, and international collaborations have proliferated In this new era, the web has become an essential part of the scientific process, but the most common method of sharing research data remains firmly attached to the earliest days of the web. This can be a huge impediment to scientific discovery.

Three-dimensional printing has come a long way since the first "rapid prototyping" patent was rejected in 1980. We've evolved from basic designs to a wide range of highly-customizable objects. Still, there's a big issue: once objects are printed, they're final. If you need a change, you'll need a reprint. But imagine if that weren't the case -- if, for example, you could recolor your iPhone case or earrings to match whatever outfit you're wearing.

The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution security vulnerabilities fall into the category of “low probability, but very high impact” potential exploits. The holes that Spectre and Meltdown open up into systems might enable any application to read the data of any other app, when running on the same server in the same pool of system memory – bypassing any and all security permissions. These potential exploits apply to every IT shop, from single-tenant servers potentially exposed to malware to apps running in a virtual machine (VM) framework in an enterprise datacenter to apps running in a multi-tenant public cloud instance.

In 1978 a young woman named Maria Klawe arrived at the University of Toronto to pursue a doctorate in computer science. She had never used a computer—much less written a line of code—but she had a PhD in math and a drive to succeed in a male-dominated field. She was so good that, nine months later, the university asked her to be a professor.

Artificial intelligence has allowed scientists to make significant progress in cracking a mysterious ancient text, the meaning of which has eluded scholars for centuries. Dated to the 15th century, the Voynich manuscript is a hand-written text in an unknown script, accompanied by pictures of plants, astronomical observations and nude figures.

Clemson faculty researchers are using a near $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help computer science teachers across South Carolina develop teaching methods that better serve the state’s diverse population. The research aims to broaden participation in computer science by improving teaching methods and discovering what does and doesn’t work in computer science classrooms for different student audiences.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built a superconducting switch that "learns" like a biological system and could connect processors and store memories in future computers operating like the human brain. The NIST switch, described in Science Advances, is called a synapse, like its biological counterpart, and it supplies a missing piece for so-called neuromorphic computers.