New Chip Borrows Brain’s Computing Tricks

IBM has unveiled an experimental chip that borrows tricks from brains to power a cognitive computer, or machine able to learn from and adapt to its environment.

New Chip Borrows Brain’s Computing Tricks

Backlink: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/ibm-synapse-cognitive-computer/

Chunghwa Telecom, Inventec Sign MOU on Cloud Computing

Dec. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Chunghwa Telecom Co. signed a memorandum of understanding with Inventec Co. to co-develop and promote cloud-computing services, the Taipei, Taiwan-based company said in an exchange statement today.

Chunghwa Telecom, Inventec Sign MOU on Cloud Computing

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-30/chunghwa-telecom-inventec-sign-mou-on-cloud-computing.html

IceCube Computing Laboratory

Computing Power

A robust computing center (above) sits atop the 86 tubes packed with sensors (below) to process all of IceCube’s data.

IceCube detects 220 neutrino events each day, but its computers must filter out 100 million spurious signals to see them. The unwanted events are caused by high-energy particles (that aren’t neutrinos) slamming into Earth’s atmosphere.

Each legitimate neutrino event’s energy and direction is recorded, then beamed by satellite to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Helzen says the best data often comes from neutrinos traveling through the Earth and hitting the ice from below.

From the 1970s through the early 1990s, physicists thought building a neutrino detector like IceCube in deep ocean water would be less challenging. Yet after several crucial demonstrations, including the AMANDA experiment that's now incorporated into IceCube, Halzen says his colleagues have come around.

"Until we have similar detector in water, it's difficult to compare, but there are efforts underway to build one in the Mediterranean," Halzen says. "Still, there's a deep truth to something I like to say a lot: We can walk on our experiment. Once deployed, you can put a computing center right above the detector on the surface and crunch your data."

Images: IceCube/University of Wisconsin-Madison/NSF

IceCube Computing Laboratory

Backlink: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/wp-content/gallery/icecube-neutrino-detector/icecube-laboratory-antarctica-nsf.jpg

Luring Hollywood to Cloud Computing

New Mexico's Cerelink is providing off-site computing horsepower to DreamWorks Animation for processor-hungry animation and special effects

Luring Hollywood to Cloud Computing

Backlink: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_50/b4207045615966.htm

Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News]

A computing visionary and leader of the movement to define and elucidate the "great principles of computing," Peter J. Denning is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is a former president of the ACM.


""Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers claimed that the mind is a computational process. When they discovered the rules of the process, a computer that followed the same rules would be conscious and intelligent. This claim, often called "strong AI", is not falsifiable. In the past two decades, mainstream AI has focused on falsifiable claims, such as "a neural net can be trained to read handwritten addresses from postal envelopes." In the older terminology, this was called 'weak AI', but it has transformed AI into a strong scientific enterprise.""

Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News]

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AiDepot/~3/Kxl-KDeHvto/