It is often said that women are absent from the sciences. But this is not true. Not anymore. Although a gender gap remains in the sciences overall, the gap is closing. Women are now more likely than men to earn undergraduate degrees in biology, and they are almost as likely as men to earn undergraduate degrees in chemistry and math. There are, however, several scientific disciplines that women are still much less likely than men to choose to study: computer science, engineering and physics.

After an election year marked by heated exchanges and the distribution of fake news, Twitter bots earned a bad reputation -- but not all bots are bad, suggests a new study co-authored by Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences Institute computer scientist and a research assistant professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Computer Science. In a large-scale experiment designed to analyze the spread of information on social networks, Ferrara and a team from the Technical University of Denmark deployed a network of algorithm-driven Twitter accounts, or social bots, programmed to spread positive messages on Twitter.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have solved a long-standing issue in the creation of untethered soft robots whose actions and movements can help mimic natural biological systems. A group in the Creative Machines lab led by Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical engineering, has developed a 3D-printable synthetic soft muscle, a one-of-a-kind artificial active tissue with intrinsic expansion ability that does not require an external compressor or high voltage equipment as previous muscles required. The new material has a strain density (expansion per gram) that is 15 times larger than natural muscle, and can lift 1000 times its own weight.

From security to self-driving cars, computer vision is becoming an important part of society, and the information technology industry is ramping up efforts in the area to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Vassilis Athitsos, an associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington, is working with a $59,463 grant from Macnica Americas to evaluate existing deep learning methods for face detection and facial recognition to determine how the company could improve performance or reduce computational load and make better technology available to the company's customers.

In June, for the first time in two decades, the United States did not operate one of the top three most powerful computers in the world. Instead, China took the highest two slots, and Switzerland came in third, according to the Top500 list, a global ranking of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. The two fastest supercomputers from China clock in at 93 and 33 petaflops. A petaflop is a unit of measuring computer performance that translates to 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second. But even China’s 93 petaflop machine is slower than the supercomputer that the U.S., Japan, and other competing nations want to build—because what these countries really want is to build the world’s first exascale computer.

Humans make a lot of noise. The riffs of heavy metal bands like Metallica and Kiss have soared to levels in the 130-decibel range, levels sure to lead to auditory damage. But try as they might, bands just can’t compete with the decibel ranges produced by jet engines. They are, said Joe Nichols, among the loudest sources of human-made noise that exist. An assistant professor of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota, Nichols is fascinated by sound and its ability to find order in chaos – and by applying that understanding to the development of new technologies that can reduce noise in aircraft.

Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry announced a new high-performance computing initiative that will help U.S. industry accelerate the development of new or improved materials for use in severe environments. The HPC4Mtls initiative will initially focus on challenges facing industry as they work to develop new or improved materials that can sustain extreme conditions—including extreme pressure, radiation, and temperature, corrosion, chemical environment, vibration, fatigue, or stress states. It will focus on developing improved lightweight material technologies, as well.

Scientists at The University of Manchester have created the world's first 'molecular robot' that is capable of performing basic tasks including building other molecules. The tiny robots, which are a millionth of a millimeter in size, can be programmed to move and build molecular cargo, using a tiny robotic arm.

A new imaging technique makes it possible to precisely digitize clear objects and their surroundings, an achievement that has eluded current state-of-the-art 3D rendering methods. The ability to create detailed, 3D digital versions of real-world objects and scenes can be useful for movie production, creating virtual reality experiences, improving design or quality assurance in the production of clear products and even for preserving rare or culturally significant objects.

Data released by Stack Overflow earlier this morning suggests that obtaining a computer science degree only translates into a modest pay bump. Stack Overflow’s 2017 Developer Ecosystem report shows those with Computer Science degrees only earn £3,000 more per annum compared to those without. On average, developers without a university education reported earning £35,000 ($47,500) yearly. Those with a bachelors degree reported yearly average earnings of £38,000 ($51,500). For context, tuition fees in the UK typically hover around the £9,000 ($12,200) mark.

Devshi Mehrotra couldn’t speak highly enough of her three-month internship with Google’s artificial intelligence project, Google Brain, this summer. “Oh, it was so great,” says Mehrotra, a 19-year-old computer-science major at the University of Chicago. “It was this program tailored to people with my background — women, people of color— and it was an environment that really pushed me to work as hard as I possibly could.”

Brain-computer interfaces, known as BCI, can replace bodily functions to a certain degree. Thanks to BCI, physically impaired persons can control special prostheses through the power of their minds, surf in internet and write emails.

The latest versions of most smartphones contain at least two and sometimes three built-in cameras. Researchers at the University of Illinois would like to sell mobile device manufactures on the idea of adding yet another image sensor as a built-in capability for health diagnostic, environmental monitoring, and general-purpose color sensing applications.

On nights that Kshetrapal Singh, 17, worked his part-time job as a night watchman, he dreamed of computer science. "Of everything taught in school, the only subject that can get me a proper job is computers," said Kshetrapal, a student in class 12 at Sangam Vihar's Government Boys Senior Secondary School, known locally as the pahadi school. "And that's the one thing they aren't teaching me."

In this video from the HPC User Forum in Milwaukee, Arno Kolster from Providentia Worldwide presents: Machine & Deep Learning: Practical Deployments and Best Practices for the Next Two Years.

Major leap for practical building blocks of a quantum internet: New research demonstrates how to dramatically improve the storage time of a telecom-compatible quantum memory, a vital component of a global quantum network. The technology operates in the same 1550 nanometer band as today's telecommunications infrastructure. It can also be operated as a quantum light source or used as an optical link for solid-state quantum computing devices such as superconducting qubits and silicon qubits.

IBM scientists have developed a new approach to simulate molecules on a quantum computer that may one day help revolutionize chemistry and materials science. The scientists successfully used a seven-qubit quantum processor to address the molecular structure problem for beryllium hydride (BeH2) – the largest molecule simulated on a quantum computer to date. The results demonstrate a path of exploration for near-term quantum systems to enhance our understanding of complex chemical reactions that could lead to practical applications.

I’m starting up to solve a problem I care deeply about…. Should I learn how to code to build out a prototype? Should I outsource development initially? Should I study computer science? These are questions that every first-time entrepreneur asks. Back in 2014, my vehement answer in an article called “Should We Require Computer Science Classes?” was to learn computer science or at least be able to program yourself.

Artificial-intelligence research has been transformed by machine-learning systems called neural networks, which learn how to perform tasks by analyzing huge volumes of training data. During training, a neural net continually readjusts thousands of internal parameters until it can reliably perform some task, such as identifying objects in digital images or translating text from one language to another. But on their own, the final values of those parameters say very little about how the neural net does what it does.

By listening to the acoustic signal emitted by a laboratory-created earthquake, a computer science approach using machine learning can predict the time remaining before the fault fails. “At any given instant, the noise coming from the lab fault zone provides quantitative information on when the fault will slip,” said Paul Johnson, a Los Alamos National Laboratory fellow and lead investigator on the research, which was published today in Geophysical Research Letters.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) jointly announced today that Shaden Smith of the University of Minnesota and Yang You of the University of California, Berkeley are the recipients of the 2017 ACM/IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. Smith is being recognized for his work on efficient and parallel large-scale sparse tensor factorization for machine learning applications. You is being recognized for his work on designing accurate, fast, and scalable machine learning algorithms on distributed systems.

Human skin must flex and stretch to accommodate the body's every move. Anything worn tight on the body must also be able to flex around muscles and joints, which helps explain why synthetic fabrics like spandex are popular in active wear. Wearable electronic devices that aim to track and measure the body's movements must possess similar properties, yet integrating rigid electrical components on or within skin-mimicking matrix materials has proven to be challenging. Such components cannot stretch and dissipate forces like soft materials can, and this mismatch in flexibility concentrates stress at the junction between the hard and soft elements, frequently causing wearable devices to fail.

In August Google employee James Damore made the news and even Wikipedia by publishing his speculation that female software engineers are underrepresented due to inherent biological differences. Although he admitted that implicit bias and explicit bias may exist, Damore wrote, “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

Despite what you might see in movies, today's robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests. For example, if you put a specific tool in a toolbox and ask a robot to "pick it up," it would be completely lost.

Google is calling on Hollywood to give equal screen time to women and minorities after a new study the Internet giant funded found that most computer scientists on television shows and in the movies are played by white men. The problem with the hackneyed stereotype of the socially inept, hoodie-clad white male coder? It does not inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in computer science, says Daraiha Greene, Google CS in Media program manager, multicultural strategy.