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Tag Archives: computer science
Managing scientific data: when bits need babysitters
If a tree falls in a forest, and a microphone picks it up and uploads the recording to an obscure archive where no one ever listens to it, does it make a sound? Philosophical matters aside, questions like this point to one of the central challenges facing the natural sciences in the information age. Thanks to improvements in data collection technologies over the years, scientific data in many fields is being generated at astronomically higher rates than in the past. Although this sounds like good news (and I doubt that the data-starved scientists of yesteryear would be complaining much), researchers often find themselves struggling to keep pace with the deluge of information. The question we must confront is how to design a system in which vast influxes of data can be efficiently accessed, vetted and analyzed by scientists around the globe.
Taking AI to the next level
At the heart of artificial intelligence lies the question of whether we might be able to create artificial systems that behave and compute in the same manner than human beings do. This would obviously be a mind-blowing breakthrough were it ever accomplished – it would give us new applications for computers, change the nature of work in our society, and force us to redefine the very nature of being human. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that such a feat has proven to be incredibly difficult to achieve. While it has grown in complexity and scope, artificial intelligence is still quite far from any kind of accurate human resemblance. However, this may change very soon.
Back in 2008, the world of electronics was abuzz with excitement over a new invention – the memristor. This is an electrical component that behaves very similarly to a resistor, but with one key difference. Memristors impede the flow of electricity, but the amount that they do so is dependent on the current that has passed through the memristor in the past. Now, this might not seem like such a big deal, but think about the implications. Essentially, such a piece of hardware has the ability to store some information about its previous input. It has the electrical equivalent of memory. With that in mind, let’s venture into the realm of cognitive science.
Gaming for good: human thought beats computer algorithms at solving protein structures
Considering my fascination of late with unusual author lists in science papers, you can guess how excited I was to see an article in Nature that credited online gamers. I was especially amused to see that citation services like PubMed abbreviate “Foldit players” as “Players F.”
Now on the the actual story. We all know that playing video games can require serious problem-solving skills. Gamers sometimes spend hours each day solving puzzles and honing their spatial reasoning abilities. Did you ever wonder if those efforts could be applied directly to real-world problems?
Posted in In the news, Research highlights
Tagged artificial intelligence, computer science
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