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3 weeks ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Neil Savage |Sam Greengard |Mario Antoine Aoun |Gregory Goth
As an undergraduate at Stanford University in the mid-1970s, Richard Sutton pored through the school’s library, trying to read everything he could about learning and machine intelligence. What he found disappointed him, because he did not think it really got to the heart of the matter. “It was mostly pattern recognition. It was mostly learning from examples. And I knew from psychology that animals do very different things,” Sutton said.
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3 weeks ago | 
cacm.acm.org | Leah Hoffmann |Sam Greengard |Mario Antoine Aoun |Gregory Goth
The examples are nothing if not relatable: preparing breakfast, or playing a game of chess or tic-tac-toe. Yet the idea of learning from the environment and taking steps that progress toward a goal apparently was under-studied when ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton took on the topic in the late 1970s. Eventually, their research led to the creation of reinforcement learning algorithms that sought not to recognize patterns but maximize rewards.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | WALID SABA |Alex Williams |Gregory Goth
McCarthy and his Prediction Regarding ‘Scruffy’ AIJohn McCarthy, one of the founders of (and the one who supposedly coined the term) artificial intelligence (AI), stated on several occasions that if we insist on building AI systems based on empirical methods (e.g., neural networks or evolutionary models), we might be successful in building “some kind of an AI,” but even the designers of such systems will not understand how such systems work (see, for an example, [1]).
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Pamela Samuelson |Alex Williams |Gregory Goth |R. Colin Johnson
Fed up with major social media platforms’ frequent decisions to remove or deprioritize postings by Florida and Texas conservatives, their state legislators passed laws forbidding these platforms from “censoring” their users’ online postings.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Dhiren Navani |Alex Williams |Gregory Goth |R. Colin Johnson
Large Language Models (LLMs) have not only fascinated technologists and researchers but have also captivated the general public. Leading the charge, OpenAI ChatGPT has inspired the release of numerous open-source models. In this post, I explore the dynamics that are driving the commoditization of LLMs. Low switching costs are a key factor supporting the commoditization of Large Language Models (LLMs).
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Advait Sarkar |Alex Williams |Gregory Goth |R. Colin Johnson
“How should we evaluate the legacy of Thomas Jefferson?,” asks a professor of American history.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Alex Williams |Gregory Goth |R. Colin Johnson
While C certainly deserves its place on the programming language Mount Rushmore, it is ill-equipped for growing codebases and multicore chips. As a result, Go came to fruition, mainly as a means of simplifying software development. However, as we saw more advancements in cloud tech, Go turned out to be the language that solved many of the issues surrounding modern cloud infrastructure development, from microservices to efficient networking and cross-platform interoperability.
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Gregory Goth |R. Colin Johnson
Beginning in 2021, researchers at Google began piloting an exercise intended to reduce urban traffic congestion called Project Green Light. The premise was fairly simple–the project uses data from Google Maps’ driving trends to create an AI model that measures how traffic flows through an intersection, including patterns of starting and stopping, average wait times at a traffic light, and coordination between adjacent intersections.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Yael Erez |Koby Mike |Orit Hazzan |Gregory Goth
Computational thinking was first introduced by Papert (1980), and a quarter of a century later, was illuminated and elaborated by Wing (2006). In August 2022, the concept of computational thinking was revisited by Mike et al., this time from the data science perspective (Mike et al., 2022). A few months later, in November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which was the first signal of a new storm—Generative AI, or GenAI—that has changed many domains of our lives since then.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
cacm.acm.org | Gregory Goth |Ted Selker |Micah Beck
The phrase “think globally, act locally” may be most associated with environmental activists such as folk singer Pete Seeger, but it is also becoming a watchword in the buttoned-down world of electric power security. The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DoE), through several recent funding rounds, is enabling new collaborations between university researchers, national laboratories, industry research associations, and individual utility companies to strengthen power grid cybersecurity.
