Last November, NASA's Voyager 1 sent home garbled data, and engineers traced the problem to the flight data subsystem (FDS). The problem turned out to be a single chip in the FDS memory. They couldn't repair the chip but could move the affected code into sections and store them in different parts of the FDS system. They tested the new system this week, sending signals to the Voyager 1, 22.5 light-hours away. It worked, and Voyager 1 is back.
Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize.
For #ArtAdventCalendar Day 10: Happy birthday to Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who published the first computer program. She worked together with Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine (the first - analogue! - #computers), correcting his notes on how to calculate Bernoulli Numbers with the Analytical Engine. 🧵1/n
I am increasingly worried about the current AI hype cycle taking down all of computer science with it. The more I think about it, the field is on the verge of a legitimacy crisis from several root-causes.
I've seen some AI/ML people (Timnit, etc) talk about the need for an anti-AGI movement. I think that applies to #CS generally. If the public at large comes to equate CS with AGI, it will kill the whole field for a decade when AGI implodes.
Someone with a Ph.D.[1] in Computer Science (or something similar) who is interested in a job at a German university (ruhr area)?
The focus would be on teaching (fluent German required) and running the department's IT systems.
Initially limited to three years, but transition to permanent is planned.
Quite a lot of independence, I'd say the colleagues are ok (but might be biased 😇).
If interested, please drop me a DM for more information.
[1]: Or on the track getting the Phd in the next months
Finally getting around to my new year’s resolution… I’m looking for PhD opportunities! I’m enjoying myself doing professional software dev right now, but I promised myself after my master’s that I’d try going back to academia eventually; this is the year I want to set that up. So I’m wondering if anyone on here knows of anything that's available. :>
Generally I’d love to do work involving programming languages in the broadest sense of the word, but also involving something that's not traditionally PL theory. For example:
Human factors in PL design: learnability, cognitive processing, etc.
Going beyond plain text for programming: graphical languages, alternative ways of storing & editing code (e.g. Unison), etc.
Applying proof assistants / type theories outside of pure mathematics: natural language semantics, experiment design, etc.
I am legitimately saddened by how many graduate students, postdocs, and university professors altered their research direction to encompass large language models because of the attention they've been receiving in other areas of life outside of academia. Whether it's to critique them, enhance them, use them, or something else, I view it as a sign that as a research discipline, computer science is unhealthy. We call them "research disciplines" because they're meant to be disciplined about this sort of buffeting.
Diversity of ideas is important. Sticking with a research program long enough to see it through is also important. Changing up what you're working on every time Silicon Valley ejects a new artifact that gets news coverage endangers both of those values.
And holy hell is the monotony boring. Computer science is an interesting, sprawling field with a lot going on! Let's keep it that way!
I'm aware that over the last year or so I've been a critic of #LLM hype so I too am reacting to it. Lately I've been considering changing that up.
I'm Jin (he/him), a staff data scientist and occasional #ml engineer in #fintech, and #compsci researcher specialising in hashing and anomaly detection, with an interest in graph networks.
Does anyone here have experience with procedural text generation? I want to implement procedural descriptions for the planets in my game which are not toooo repetitive to read :o I read about Markov chains but I'm not sure how I can incorporate the different planet parameters, features, etc. And I'm also wondering what other methods there are^^ #computerscience#python#gamedev#gamedevelopment#coding#development#compsci
My name is Alessio, I have a PhD in computer science and work as a Research Software Engineer at the Netherlands eScience Center. My expertise is high-performance computing, and in particular acceleration of scientific software using GPUs and accelerators, and auto-tuning.
☢️ What John von Neumann really did at Los Alamos
—3 Quarks Daily
「 Johnny von Neumann was the multifaceted intellectual diamond of the 20th century. He contributed so many seminal ideas to so many fields so quickly that it would be impossible for any one person to summarize, let alone understand them. He may have been the last universalist in mathematics, having almost complete command of both pure and applied mathematics 」
「 CakeML is a functional programming language and an ecosystem of proofs and tools built around the language. The ecosystem includes a proven-correct compiler that can bootstrap itself 」