The 2017 Turing Award winner, Dave Patterson, from the University of California, Berkeley, presented on Thursday morning of the HLF a talk called “The Past is Prologue: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture.” He went through the fascinating history of computer architecture. While a lot has already been accomplished, there are new discoveries waiting to be made for the next generation of computer architects.

On behalf of the National Science and Technology Council’s Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office has released a Request for Information (RFI) on updates to the 2016 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan. The 2016 National Artificial Intelligence Research & Development Strategic Plan focused on research areas that industry is considered unlikely to address and identified 7 strategies for Federally-funded AI research: Strategy 1: Make long-term investments in AI research. Prioritize investments in the next generation of AI that will drive discovery and insight and enable the United States to remain a world leader in AI. Strategy 2: Develop […]

On Wednesday afternoon, HLF got out of the lecture halls and cruised down the Neckar River. I decided to spend my time listening in on conversations and jumping in when I could by asking “what do you think is going to be the most exciting thing in computing in the next 10 years?” I thought I would get a consensus or at least have duplicated answers, but after talking to a number of different students none of their answers were the same. In fact, some of them didn’t even say that their research would be the most exciting thing in computing in ten years (although a few of them did- […]

Only day two of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum and the term machine learning or “ML” has been popping up throughout talks and in conversations with young researchers and the laureates. Machine learning uses statistical techniques to give computers the ability to learn without them having to be explicitly programmed. The goal is for a program to learn by itself without any human intervention. In a discussion with Jeffrey A. Dean, the winner of ACM’s 2012 Prize in Computing and the current head of Google’s AI Division, he repeatedly mentioned and stressed the importance of machine learning. Google AI currently has an open source machine learning platform called TensorFlow which Dean said […]

Is your 2-year-old smarter than your computer? Yes, simply because she is human. While she might not know how to read or do simple addition, she has the uniquely human ability to rationalize. She can take a small piece of information and abstract it. That is what makes her smarter than a computer. And that is what we need to train computers to do. This was one of the big topics of discussion on the first day of the 6th Heidelberg Laureate Forum. John E. Hopcroft, from Cornell University, presented a talked called “An Introduction to AI and Deep Learning.” Hopcroft started with a simple example. He recalls reading a […]

The 6th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) has begun! Two hundred young researchers from 60 different countries have come to Heidelberg to learn from 33 Laureates. The event kicked off last night with a welcoming ceremony and dinner. The buzz on Twitter this morning, if you missed it, was about whether Sir. Michael Francis Atiyah had solved the Riemann Hypothesis (one of the Millennium Problems). Atiyah presented the Hypothesis and then in one brief slide showed his proof, which he claims solved the Hypothesis. Whether or not he did solve it, is up to our mathematician colleagues to tell us. None-the-less it was exciting to see a famous mathematician in his element. See the full video […]