Computer Science News

At the website "21st Century Headlines", I am collecting links to news items about science and technology, especially biomedical sciences, computers and physics. Here I present to you a summary of the most interesting items from January to March 2018.

Written by Claus Volko
Vienna, Austria, Europe

Contact: cdvolko (at) gmail (dot) com
Homepage: www.cdvolko.net

January 2018

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: AI has made progress in creative pursuits; for instance, an AI has written a piece in the style of Bach (link) and an AI bot by Microsoft is supposed to draw any picture based on your description (link). Also, Google's learning software has learned to write learning software itself (link).

Regarding the "man vs machine battle", news has it that an AI by Alibaba has defeated a human in the Stanford reading test (link 1, link 2, link 3). In a computer chess championship, the open-source chess engine Stockfish has won against two strong commercial engines (link).

Concerning science, a mysterious 15th century manuscript has been deocoded by an AI (link) and deep learning has been used for real-time gravitational wave discovery (link).

As regards movies, there has been a report about deep learning technology being used to put Nic Cage in every movie (link).

Geoffrey Hinton stated in 2017 that in his opinion convolutional neural nets are not the right way to achieve AI. In a YouTube talk he has now explained his concerns in more detail (link). Another webpage details with how these capsule networks work (link).

Quantum Computing: This is not totally unrelated to AI, as some authors think that job one for quantum computers is to boost AI (link). What is also interesting that Intel revealed its new 49-qubit superconducting quantum chip at CES 2018 (link).

Other Non-Standard Approaches to Computing: There has been a report about an ultra-thin memory storage device (link), and Microsoft is apparently working on a way to control the PC using just your mind (link).

February 2018

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: AI has been used to recreate images of faces (link), to generate images of dinosaurs composed of plants (link>, to help predict when users may be suicidal (link), to predict heart disease by looking at the patient's eyes (link), and even to write Wikipedia articles (link). DeepMind has created an AI that transfers its learning to new tasks (link).

Furthermore, AI has been used to detect skin cancer (link), diagnose psychosis (link), rule on prisoners (link), and spot criminals (link).

There have also been reports about efforts to further investigate the inner working of AIs (link) and AI in drug discovery (link).

Quantum Computing: According to the news, a new quantum algorithm for the Travelling Salesperson Problem has been developed (link), a new quantum memory stores information for hours (link), and there is a new way of eavesdropping in quantum cryptography (link).

Other Non-Standard Approaches to Computing: There has been a report about a superconducting synapse, which could enable powerful future neuromorphic supercomputers (link).

March 2018

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: There have been reports about China using AI and facial recognition for law enforcement (link) and for diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (link). Moreover, an AI is said to have created a 'child' AI to help it solve problems (link). A tragical accident has made Uber stop its self-driving car program (link).

For those of you who would like to study AI in more detail, a computational linear algebra review has recently been published (link), as well as a list of free e-books related to this field (link) and an AI and DL knowledge base (link).

Quantum Computing: There has been a paper on a new kind of quantum bits in two dimensions (link) as well as a report about the world's allegedly most advanced quantum chip (link).

Other Non-Standard Approaches to Computing: A new computer made by IBM is supposed to be the size of a grain of salt and cost less than ten cents (link).

Claus Volko

The website "21st Century Headlines" can be found at:
http://www.21stcenturyheadlines.com/