Category: Computer Science

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Humor as a Guide to Research

Over at the optimizer’s blog, quantum computing’s younger clown discusses some pointers for giving funny talks. I can still vividly remember the joke I told in my very first scientific talk. I spent the summer of 1995 in Boston at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (photo of us interns) working on disproving a theory about the diffuse interstellar absorption bands by calculating various two photon cross sections in H2 and H2+ (which was rather challenging considering I’d only taken one quarter of intro to quantum mechanics at the time!) At the end of the summer all the interns gave talks about their work. I was last to go. In my talk, I drew (transparencies, you know) a cartoon of “photon man” (wavy line stick figure) who explained the difference between two photon absorption and absorbing two photons. No one reacted to these cartoons during the talk. But at the end of the talk, one of the other interns, trying to be cute asked me “So, what does photon man think about all of this?” I paused. Thought for a second. And replied “He was very enlightened by the whole thing!” The simultaneous groan emitted by the audience (who had sat through 8 straight talks) was, I must say, awesome. I have a vivid memory of my adviser in the back of the room giving a hearty actual laugh! And I have been hooked on trying to insert at least one bad joke in every talk I have given ever since.
Since I enjoy humor in talks, lately I’ve been wondering if there isn’t an easier way to make funnier talks. The optimizers list is a good start, but I’m lazy. Which led me to the idea: maybe I can make funnier talks by simply basing my research on things that are inherently funny? I mean, you try taking How a Clebsch-Gordan Transform Helps to Solve the Heisenberg Hidden Subgroup Problem and making a funny talk! On the other hand it is, without a question, nearly impossible to give a talk about Time Travel without (purposefully or not) uttering really awesome (and well timed) jokes.
Continue reading “Humor as a Guide to Research”

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New DARPA Director

DARPA, you know the people who invented the internet (“100 geniuses connected by a travel agent”), has a new director:

The Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the appointment of Regina E. Dugan as the 19th director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is the principal agency within the DoD for research, development, and demonstration of concepts, devices, and systems that provide highly advanced military capabilities for the current and future combat force. In this role of developing high-risk, high-payoff projects, DARPA compliments and balances the overall science and technology program of the DoD.

Go MechE’s from Caltech! DARPA’s last director Tony Tether ruffled a lot of feathers as it was widely perceived that the agency was shifting to short term research at the expense of the kind of groundbreaking work that had been funded in the past (See Peter Lee for details and recommendations for changes at DARPA.) Hopefully Dr. Dugan will take a different tack. That would certainly make a lot of computer science researchers a lot happier.

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New CS PhD Grad? Funding Opportunity: CIFellows

Via the CCC Blog, an announcement concerning an NSF funded opportunity for new PhDs in Computer Science, CIFellows (http://cifellows.org):

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), with funding from the National Science Foundation, are pleased to announce an opportunity for new PhD graduates in computer science and closely related fields to obtain one-to-two year positions at host organizations including universities, industrial research laboratories, and other organizations that advance the field of computing and its positive impact on society.
The Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Project will fund as many as 60 such positions. Applications are due very soon: June 9, 2009. Awards are expected to be announced by July 10. Positions will commence in Autumn 2009.
Go to http://cifellows.org to apply to be a CIFellow.
Also: Go to http://cifellows.org to advertise your interest in hosting a CIFellow at your organization.
Individuals who received their PhD from a U.S. institution between May 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009 in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Science, or a closely related field are eligible to apply. Applicants must obtain commitments from between one and three prospective hosts/mentors. Hosts/mentors must not be at the same institution as the one granting the PhD. The CIFellows website provides resources for both prospective applicants and host/mentors to announce their interests and availability.
– Ed Lazowska, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium Council
– Peter Lee, Incoming Chair of the Computing Research Association

Any new grads interested in some quantum computing theory in Seattle? Shoot me a buzz.
Update: More info for the motivation for the program at Peter Lee’s blog.

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Reducing Computer Power Consumption

Wow, this is a very cool result:

Researchers at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkstown, NY have announced a breakthrough which they feel could revolutionize power consumption in computers. Today’s computers are power hungry: a typical computer consumes hundreds of watts of power. Not only does this power consumption add up to a lot of wasted power, but increasingly the amount of heat generated by the machines is a significant barrier to building faster more powerful computers. The researchers at IBM say they’ve made a breakthrough in how computers consume power which will dramatically lower power consumption at the cost of only slightly longer time to perform computations.
“Computation is inherently a power consuming process. Every time a transistor performs a calculation in your computer, you generate a little bit of heat. Want to add two plus two? That will cost you some energy,” said lead researcher Charlie Tennett in explaining the teams new approach. “But what we realized was, that this is a two way street. What happens if, instead of adding two plus two, you take four and break it up into two twos?”
The heart of the IBM researchers breakthrough is the observation that if “computing” costs energy then “uncomputing” can be used to generate energy. “By performing a computation, copying the answer, and then unperforming the computation, we only consume power during the copying procees” says Dr. Tennett. “Since that copying doesn’t consume much energy we get huge efficiencies in power consumption.”
As a demonstration of this breakthrough, Dr. Tennett showed a prototype computer built by team members John Swolin and Barbara Shareal. “We took an ordinary laptop and changed its programming. Every time we execute a program on the computer, the program copies over the answer and then does the same program, but running backward. We then hooked up our laptop to a power meter, and watched, in amazement, as almost all of the power consumed by the program was fed back into the electrical system when we ran the program backward!”
The team believes that there is a great potential for the use of their technology even in fields outside of computation. “Think of all the vast amounts of computation that has been performed over the last few decades,” dreams Dr. Tennett, “if we could just undo all of those computations, we could easily ween America off of its oil addition.”

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CRA Taulbee Survey

The New York Times has an article about the CRA Taulbee Survey, which is a survey of computer science enrollments in the United States. (The survey isn’t up on the CRA’s website, but when it does I’m guessing it will be here.)

For the first time in six years, enrollment in computer science programs in the United States increased last year, according to an annual report that tracks trends in the academic discipline.

I call bottom! Oops, a bit late.

He noted that seven or eight years ago, few students would think about the possibility of a computer science graduate education, and that it was all about wealth.
“The ability to make a billion dollars by the time you are 30 years old is a huge motivation,” he said.

With the added benefit that it’s hard to have clawbacks for a startup?

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Quantum Sloan Winners

Congrats to the quantum tenure odds booster award winners Sloan award winners:

Robert Raussendorf, UBC
Hartmut Häffner, UC Berkeley (Go Bears!)
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Haavard
Scott Aaronson, MIT (that other Tech school)
Andrew Houck, Princeton
Subhadeep Gupta, University of Washington

Lance lists the theoretical computer scientist winners.

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Fault Tolerance – It's No LAFTing Matter

Conference of interest to the fault-tolerant crowd (hm, wording not quite right):

Event Title: Workshop on Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT)
(affiliated with LICS 2009)
Date: 08/15/2009
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Description:
We are soliciting papers on logical aspects of fault tolerance. The concept of
“fault” underlies essentially all computational systems that have any goal.
Loosely speaking, a fault is an unintended event that can have an unintended
effect on the attainment of that goal. “Fault tolerance” is the term given to a
system’s ability to cope in some way with a fault, either inherently or through
design. Fault tolerance has been studied for its application to circuits, and then
branching out to distributed systems and more recently to quantum computers, where
the concern with fault tolerance is almost the paramount issue. The relevance to
biological computation is also obvious. Papers must be concerned with mathematical
logical approaches to fault tolerance, not simply fault tolerance.
Selected papers will appear in Logic Journal of the IGPL (Oxford U. Press).
IMPORTANT DATES:
Papers due: April 17, 2009
Notification: May 22, 2009
Final papers: July 10, 2009
Workshop: August 15, 2009