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Between 1986 and 1988, the jazz musician and experimental music pioneer George Lewis created the first version of Voyager. After spending some time making work that involved compositional programmes in Paris, Lewis returned to the US and began work on Voyager. His aspiration was not simply to use computers as a tool or raw material, but to create software that could take an equal improvisational role to the other (human) musicians in the performance.

The post Art in the age of digital production appeared first on OUPblog.

Oxford University Press is excited to be welcoming Professor Steve Furber as the new Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal. In an interview between Justin Richards of BCS, The Chartered Institute of IT and Steve, we get to know more about the SpiNNaker project, ethical issues around Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the future of the IT industry.

The post Conversations in computing: Q&A with Editor-in-Chief, Professor Steve Furber appeared first on OUPblog.

Once again, searching for unconventional computing methods as well as for a neurocomputational theory of cognition requires knowing what does and does not count as computing. A question that may appear of purely philosophical interest — which physical systems perform which computations — shows up at the cutting edge of computer technology as well as neuroscience.

The post The philosophical computer store appeared first on OUPblog.

Are you worried about catching the flu, or perhaps even Ebola? Just how worried should you be? Well, that depends on how fast a disease will spread over social and transportation networks, so it’s obviously important to obtain good estimates of the speed of disease transmission and to figure out good containment strategies to combat disease spread.

Diseases, rumors, memes, and other information all spread over networks. A lot of research has explored the effects of network structure on such spreading. Unfortunately, most of this research has a major issue: it considers networks that are not realistic enough, and this can lead to incorrect predictions of transmission speeds, which people are most important in a network, and so on. So how does one address this problem?

Traditionally, most studies of propagation on networks assume a very simple network structure that is static and only includes one type of connection between people. By contrast, real networks change in time — one contacts different people during weekdays and on weekends, one (hopefully) stays home when one is sick, new University students arrive from all parts of the world every autumn to settle into new cities. They also include multiple types of social ties (Facebook, Twitter, and – gasp – even face-to-face friendships), multiple modes of transportation, and so on. That is, we consume and communicate information through all sorts of channels. To consider a network with only one type of social tie ignores these facts and can potentially lead to incorrect predictions of which memes go viral and how fast information spreads. It also fails to allow differentiation between people who are important in one medium from people who are important in a different medium (or across multiple media). In fact, most real networks include a far richer “multilayer” structure. Collapsing such structures to obtain and then study a simpler network representation can yield incorrect answers for how fast diseases or ideas spread, the robustness level of infrastructures, how long it takes for interaction oscillators to synchronize, and more.

Recently, an increasingly large number of researchers are studying mathematical objects called “multilayer networks”. These generalize ordinary networks and allow one to incorporate time-dependence, multiple modes of connection, and other complexities. Work on multilayer networks dates back many decades in fields like sociology and engineering, and of course it is well-known that networks don’t exist in isolation but rather are coupled to other networks. The last few years have seen a rapid explosion of new theoretical tools to study multilayer networks.

And what types of things do researchers need to figure out? For one thing, it is known that multilayer structures induce correlations that are invisible if one collapses multilayer networks into simpler representations, so it is essential to figure out when and by how much such correlations increase or decrease the propagation of diseases and information, how they change the ability of oscillators to synchronize, and so on. From the standpoint of theory, it is necessary to develop better methods to measure multilayer structures, as a large majority of the tools that have been used thus far to study multilayer networks are mostly just more complicated versions of existing diagnostic and models. We need to do better. It is also necessary to systematically examine the effects of multilayer structures, such as correlations between different layers (e.g., perhaps a person who is important for the social network that is encapsulated in one layer also tends to be important in other layers?), on different types of dynamical processes. In these efforts, it is crucial to consider not only simplistic (“toy”) models — as in most of the work on multilayer networks thus far — but to move the field towards the examination of ever more realistic and diverse models and to estimate the parameters of these models from empirical data. As our review article illustrates, multilayer networks are both exciting and important to study, but the increasingly large community that is studying them still has a long way to go. We hope that our article will help steer these efforts, which promise to be very fruitful.

The post What do rumors, diseases, and memes have in common? appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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It finally feels like autumn is here and if you don’t mind us saying, we’ve been “fall-ing” for all the diversity-related stories that have been in the news recently! Here are a few that we were especially excited to read:

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen who was shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating for girls’ rights to education, and Indian children’s right activist Kailash Satyarthi, both won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for their fight against the oppression of children and young people, and for the right of all children to education. In light of the recent violence that has broken out between India and Pakistan along the border of the disputed, mainly Muslim region of Kashmir, the Nobel Peace Prize committee said it was an “important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.”

In the entertainment industry, we’ve been seeing more positive changes when it comes to representation and diversity in television and movies. Shonda Rhimes, creator of the popular TV shows Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, and Scandal, was featured on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter, where she talked about her success and what she’s learned from previous on-set controversies. Rhimes is also executive producer of the new TV show, How to Get Away with Murder, which just recently got a full season order from ABC along with Black-ish. Sullivan & Son, a TV show that is written by and stars Steve Byrne, is also renewed for its second season. Steven Byrne is an Irish-Korean American, one of a handful of writers of color that has found success in Hollywood. The fall television programming this year has been great for diverse representation, which is a breath of fresh air considering an infographic we did on the Emmy Awards.

On the movie front, Lionsgate is teaming up with Women in Film to create a series of short films based on the Twilight franchise. According to the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media and USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, only 7% of major film directors around the world are women. Whether you’re a fan of the Twilight series or not, we love the fact that an effort to get more female directors out there is a good thing!

There’s no denying the fact that computer science is a popular field to get into; however, Google recently looked over their annual diversity reports and found that 70% of their workforce is male, with 61% being white. In an effort to get more women to take an interest in coding, Google announced that they were launching a new program called Made with Code that “includes a mix of coding projects, partnerships with youth organizations, and $50 million in funding Google says will help get more females involved in the field of computer science.”

See any stories that we missed? Feel free to share them in the comments! Happy Friday everyone!

By Peter J Bentley

What better way to spend an afternoon than having a friendly chat? My three friends are online chatbots – Artificial Intelligence software designed to analyse my sentences and respond accordingly. All I do is visit a specific webpage, then type into a box in my Internet browser and they reply, just like chatting online to a human. These three (jabberwacky, iGod and ALICE) are some of the more advanced chatbots out there, the result of decades of research by computer scientists to try and achieve intelligence in a computer. From the birth of computers until now, we’ve been trying to make a digital brain that’s clever enough to have a conversation with us. The best we can manage is really nothing more than a database of facts, some basic knowledge of grammar, and a lot of symbol-processing – shuffling of words around in an attempt to find some kind of coherent response. Here’s what we said to each other this afternoon.

Conversation 1:

Me: Hello.

Jabberwacky: Hello, how are you?

Me: I would like to have a chat with you about your parents. Would that be OK?

Jabberwacky: What would you like to chat about?

Me: Did you know that Alan Turing would be 100 years old this year, had he lived?

Jabberwacky: That is very interesting. Do you know that the Philippines has 7100 islands?

Me: I did not know that. However, let’s talk about Turing a little more. You know that Turing suggested something called the Turing Test?

Jabberwacky: No, I did not know that the cat was red…

Me: Right. Well, this was Turing’s way of thinking about how we might judge whether we were talking to an intelligent computer. If we can’t tell the difference between chatting to a computer and chatting to a person, the computer passes the Turing Test. It is intelligent, so Turing suggested.

Jabberwacky: We could all be a figment of imagination of some old guy living in an insane asylum if you think about it.

Me: Yes, I guess that might be true. Anyway, the foresight shown by Turing is remarkable. He was thinking of these ideas at the time that computers were still the size of a large room, and could perform just basic computations compared to today’s machines.

Jabberwacky: Well this must be the part of the film where the noted inception noise comes in.

Me: That might be an appropriate soundtrack for this conversation, you are right. But this is not science fiction, this is computer science fact. It’s a little sad that Turing predicted: “I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

Jabberwacky: Why do you think Jesus is not your savior?

Me: Uh. Anyway, my point is that Turing, for all his genius, did not get this one right. He was not the only one to be overambitious – other pioneers also thought Artificial Intelligence would be achievable much more easily.

Jabberwacky: Who told you that.

Me: Well, recently I wrote a book called Digitized. It’s about the history of computers and I was lucky enough to interview many pioneers for the book. They told me.

Jabberwacky: And what is their history?

Me: I interviewed John Holland – he worked with his supervisor on John von Neumann’s final papers. Holland also got the first PhD in computer science and invented the genetic algorithm. I also spoke to Dave Patterson, the creator of the RAID architecture

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By Darrel Ince

I’m typing this blog entry on a desktop computer. It’s two years old, but I’m already looking at it and my laptop wondering how long they will be around in their current form. There are three fast-moving trends that may change computing over the next five years, affect the way that we use computers, and perhaps make desktop and laptop computers the computing equivalent of the now almost defunct record player.

The first trend is that the computer and the mobile phone are converging. If you use one of the new generation of smartphones—an iPhone for example— you are not only able to send and receive phone calls, but also carry out computer-related tasks such as reading email and browsing the web. This convergence has also embraced a new generation of computers known as tablet computers. These are light, thin, contain a relatively small amount of memory and, again, implement many of the facilities that are on my desktop and laptop computers.

The second trend is that the use of the computer is changing. New generations of users are accessing web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg. These social networking sites have become either a substitute or an add-on to normal interaction. Moreover recent figures indicate that there has been a major shift in the use of email facilities from the home computer to the smartphone and tablet computer.
The third trend is that data and software are moving from the computer on the desk or on the lap to the Internet. A commercial example is the company Salesforce.com. This is a successful company whose main business is customer relationship management: the process of keeping in touch with a customer; for example, tracking their orders and ensuring that they are happy with the service they are receiving. Salesforce.com keep much of their data and software on a number of Internet-based servers and their customers use the web to run their business. In the past customer relationship systems had to be bought as software, installed on a local computer, and then maintained by the buyer. This new model of doing business (something known as cloud computing) overturns this idea.

The third trend, cloud computing, is also infiltrating the home use of computing. Google Inc. has implemented a series of office products such as a word processor, a calendar program and a spread-sheet program that can only be accessed over the Internet, with documents stored remotely—not on the computer that accesses the documents.

So, the future looks to be configured around users employing smart-phones and tablets to access the Internet for all their needs, with desktop and laptop computers being confined to specialist areas such as systems development, film editing, games programming and financial number crunching. Technically there are few obstacles in the way of this: the cost of computer circuits drops every year; and the inexorable increase in broadband speeds and advances in silicon technology mean that more and more electronics can be packed into smaller and smaller spaces.

There is, however, a major issue that has been explored by three writers: Nicholas Carr, Tim Wu and Jonathan Zittrain. Carr, in his book The Big Switch, uses a series of elegant analogies to show that computing is heading towards becoming a utility. The book first provides a history of the electrical generation industry where, in the early days, companies had their own generator; however, eventually due to the efforts of Thomas Edison and Samuel Insull, power become centralised with utility companies delivering electricity to consumers over a grid. The book then describes how this is happening with the Internet. It describes the birth of cloud computing, where all software and data is stored on the Internet and where the computer could be downgraded to a simple consumer device with little if any storage and only the ability to access the World Wide Web.

Zittrain, in his book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It

Today's Ypulse Guest Post comes from Chase Straight, a recent Youth Advisory Board alumni and online community moderation professional who reports back to us from the Game Developer's Conference Online held last week in Austin, TX. If you work in... Read the rest of this post

Guest blogger Molly Cooney is a Lockheed Martin Engineering Leadership Development Program employee.

After 5 years at Lockheed Martin, my experiences have been varied and fascinating. I never would have imagined that upon graduating college as a Computer Science major from Villanova University, my jobs would include driving Humvees^® or guiding satellite launches. But in fact, I have done all of those things and have had many other experiences that allow me to use my education in ways that make significant impacts on the world around us.

While learning on the job, I was also able to broaden my STEM foundation with a Master’s degree in Information Systems and Technology from The Johns Hopkins University. Thanks to both my foundational education and a Lockheed Martin leadership development program, I have been able to take rotational assignments in Maryland, Arizona, California and Virginia, which not only allow me to grow my skills in managing software programs, but allow me to learn about different cultures, lifestyles, and about what I want in my career and life.