Microsoft, which to me is that big collection of buildings across the lake where I yell when Vista bogs down my laptop, has announced a new Research Lab to be located in Cambridge, MA. It will be run by mathematical physicist turned comptuer scientist Jennifer Tour Chayes who was the manager for Mathematics, Theoretical Computer Science and Cryptography at Microsoft Research in Redmond.
For some strange reason I get the feeling that Microsoft and Google are playing a large game of Risk with the pieces being replaced by offices, and the countries being replaced by top teir university towns.
ACM Turing Award 2007
The Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing (but really how can we fault Nobel for not having a computing prize when computers for Nobel would have been people), has been won by Edmund Clarke (CMU), E. Allen Emerson (UT at Austin) and Joseh Sifakis (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/CARNOT Institute) for research on Model Checking. The citation reads
For their role in developing Model-Checking into a highly effective
verification technology, widely adopted in the hardware and software
industries.
The winners will share a $250,000 prize ($150,000 more this year due to the sponser ship of the Googlemonster.)
Happenings in the Quantum World: February 1,2008
Colorado State scores Keck money, D-Wave scores venture money, QICIQ 2008, Reversible computation tutorial, and a review of “Quantum Hoops.”
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What Is an Uncomputer?
Sean watches a panel discussion on whether the universe is a computer, looks up the definition of a computer, and decides that instead the universe is a calculation. If thinking about the universe as a computer is designed to make computer scientists feel important, thinking about the universe as a calculation seems designed to make theoretical physicists feel important 🙂 But what I find interesting is that Sean points to a question asked by Tony Leggett: “What kind of process does not count as a computation?”
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Computer Modern
Is This a Mathematica Bug?
Miguel Pais points to an interesting behavior of Mathematica, where he plots the function which is the square of the square root of x. Now, if the domain of x is taken to be complex numbers, Mathematica’s behavior seems to me to be fine. But can anyone explain this behavior
as anything other than a bug?
Update: Oops. That wasn’t the one I was trying to paste. See what happens when I disconnect from the intertubes for a few days. How about this one:
More Computer Jobs, No Way!
Since I got into trouble for posting about the need for more, not less, funding for science and engineering, (and, I might add, a reengineering of our approach to what it means to produce a successful Ph.D.), I thought I’d continue the trouble by linking to a post over at the Computing Research Policy Blog, “Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations Expected to Grow Quickest Over the Next Decade.”
What a Canadian STOC Deadline Looks Like
Here is a picture I call “STOC 2008 deadline”:
STOC 2008 will be in Victoria, British Columbia. I was just across the border in Surey, BC, and shot this picture which I call “Crazy Canadian Fireplace Channel”:
Cryptosystem Insecurity Season
Seems it ’tis the season for warnings about the security of cryptosystems. The New York Times has an article on the latest issue here. It seems that Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) has a note out describing how faults in chip hardware could render cryptosystems insecure. It’s not at all clear to me how this differs from analysis where the faults are injected into the hardware (such as described here) because the article doesn’t contain any real details.
A Backdoor in a NIST Pseudorandom Number Generator?
Is there a backdoor in NIST’s SP800-90 Dual Ec pseudorandom number generator?
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