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3 weeks ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Sam Greengard |Bennie Mols
The ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through mountains of information and deliver useful results is rapidly reshaping the way people learn, work, and handle numerous tasks. Yet, for all the convenience and value Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) deliver, they have a problem. Despite delivering text, video, and images that appear accurate and convincing, they sometimes hallucinate.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
scilogs.spektrum.de | Bennie Mols
How do the learning processes of humans and machines differ? What impact will AI systems like ChatGPT have on future education? These were two of the core questions at the Hot Topic panel discussion, ‘The Paradox of Artificial Intelligence’, at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). AI has surpassed top human players in board games like chess and go, it can learn from much more data than any human on earth and it sometimes recognizes patterns that elude experts.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Jake Widman |Doug Meil |Bennie Mols |Herbert Bruderer
Conventional wisdom has consigned the facsimile to the dustbin of obsolete technology, along with answering machines and Rolodexes. One tech observer summed up this view in 2020, writing that “the rise of personal computing, the Internet, specifically email, and the advent of the PDF file format all colluded to kill the fax machine.”As it turns out, reports of faxing’s death are greatly exaggerated.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Neil Savage |Doug Meil |Bennie Mols |Herbert Bruderer
In the nearly two years since its release, ChatGPT has shown some remarkably human-like behavior, from trying to seduce a journalist to acing the bar exam. That has left some people wondering whether computers are approaching human levels of intelligence. Most computer scientists do not think machines are the intellectual equals of people yet, but they have not developed a consensus on how to measure intelligence, or what exactly to measure.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Doug Meil |Bennie Mols |Herbert Bruderer
I have been drawing versions of this picture for at least 15 years… Credit: Doug MeilThe picture represents the related but distinct use-cases of operational and analytic data systems, and I use this picture to frame conversations describing what the circles represent, the relationship between the two systems, and most importantly the challenges in implementation and management.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Moshe Vardi |Bennie Mols |Herbert Bruderer |David Geer
As one gains seniority, there is a presumption—dubious, perhaps—that one also gains wisdom. Thus, I find myself asked, not infrequently, to share some wisdom with junior researchers who seek insight that can foster success in their careers or life in general. I offer one cautionary bit of advice: “Life is not linear.”Linearity is one of the greatest success stories in mathematics.
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Aug 7, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Bennie Mols |Herbert Bruderer |David Geer
“It’s not hard to collect a bunch of insects,” said evolutionary biologist Josef Uyeda, an associate professor at Virginia Tech. “I can put a little trap in the rainforest, some insects will fall in, I put them in a jar, and maybe I have some new species in there. “But what is the bottleneck? It’s getting expert eyes on all those specimens. That is such a huge bottleneck that the pace of discovering new species is very slow.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Alex Williams |R. Colin Johnson |Bennie Mols
As hubs of computing power, datacenters are essential for powering the digital services we rely on daily, from cloud computing to artificial intelligence. However, this surge in datacenter operations has also resulted in a significant spike in energy consumption and environmental impact. Traditional cooling methods have proven to be energy-intensive and inefficient in meeting the escalating cooling demands of modern datacenters.
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Apr 24, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Sukyoung Ryu |Jihyeok Park |R. Colin Johnson |Bennie Mols
Key InsightsJavaScript is the first programming language for which each change to its prose language specification is both “type checked” and “tested” to identify bugs and inconsistencies. The primary enabler is the automatic extraction of a “mechanized specification” from a language specification written in prose, which allows the generation of a reference implementation of the language from the specification.
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Apr 22, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Paul Chow |Bennie Mols |Herbert Bruderer |Shaoshan Liu
With performance and power limitations becoming the greatest challenges in today’s datacenters, there is significant interest in using more application-specific computing devices, often called “accelerators.” The Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is one such device demonstrated to significantly address both challenges. An FPGA is a programmable device that can implement hardware circuits.
