You live, you learn
19 Jul
Writing a thesis progress report for last year and planning the next.
13 Jul
I think I made a conceptual breakthrough today in my PhD... Let's see how it holds up tomorrow in written form.
12 Jul
NASA RT The countdown has entered a 45-minute hold at T-9 minutes. There are no technical concerns and at this time weather is “go.”
8 Jul
Space Shuttle Atlantis is go for launch in 5 hours, if the weather holds up nasa.gov/shuttle/
8 Jul
"Tem sido bom viver estes tempos felizes e difíceis, porque uma vida boa não é uma boa vida." -- RIP Maria José Nogueira Pinto
7 Jul
Great lunch today. Good company!
7 Jul
2011-07-31
2011-07-24
2011-07-17
2011-07-15
Computer learns language by playing games
In 2009, at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), researchers in the lab of Regina Barzilay, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, took the best-paper award for a system that generated scripts for installing a piece of software on a Windows computer by reviewing instructions posted on Microsoft’s help site. At this year’s ACL meeting, Barzilay, her graduate student S. R. K. Branavan and David Silver of University College London applied a similar approach to a more complicated problem: learning to play “Civilization,” a computer game in which the player guides the development of a city into an empire across centuries of human history. When the researchers augmented a machine-learning system so that it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy, its rate of victory jumped from 46 percent to 79 percent.
Source: MIT News Office via ACM Tech News
2011-07-14
Raspberry Pi, the $25 computer
David Braben has a big idea crammed into a tiny frame. He and fellow members of the British nonprofit Raspberry Pi have designed a rugged computer powerful enough to perhaps inspire a generation of future programmers, yet cheap enough that schools can hand them out free of charge.
Source: CSMonitor.com via ACM Tech News
2011-07-13
Air Power
Researchers have discovered a way to capture and harness energy transmitted by such sources as radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems. By scavenging this ambient energy from the air around us, the technique could provide a new way to power networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.
“There is a large amount of electromagnetic energy all around us, but nobody has been able to tap into it,” said Manos Tentzeris, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who is leading the research. “We are using an ultra-wideband antenna that lets us exploit a variety of signals in different frequency ranges, giving us greatly increased power-gathering capability.”
Source: Georgia Tech via ACM Tech News
2011-07-12
Improving recommendation systems
Devavrat Shah, the Jamieson Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT’s Laboratory of Information and Decisions Systems, thinks that the most common approach to recommendation systems is fundamentally flawed. Shah believes that, instead of asking users to rate products on, say, a five-star scale, as Netflix and Amazon do, recommendation systems should ask users to compare products in pairs. Stitching the pairwise rankings into a master list, Shah argues, will offer a more accurate representation of consumers’ preferences.
Source: MIT News Office via ACM Tech News
2011-07-10
2011-07-03
2011-07-01
World's data will grow 50 times
In 2011 alone, 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion gigabytes) of data will be created, the equivalent to every U.S. citizen writing 3 tweets per minute for 26,976 years. And over the next decade, the number of servers managing the world's data stores will grow by ten times.
Interestingly, the amount of data people create by writing email messages, taking photos, and downloading music and movies is minuscule compared to the amount of data being created about them, the EMC-sponsored study found.
The IDC study predicts that overall data will grow by 50 times by 2020, driven in large part by more embedded systems such as sensors in clothing, medical devices and structures like buildings and bridges.
Source: Computerworld
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)