This blog post is from Jacob Chakareski, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alabama. Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) hold tremendous potential to advance our society. Together with another pair of emerging technologies, 360° video and holographic video, they can suspend our disbelief of being at a remote location or having remote objects/people present in our immediate surrounding, akin to virtual human/object teleportation. Presently limited to offline operation and synthetic content and targeting gaming and entertainment, VR/AR are expected to reach their potential when deployed online and with real remote scene content, enabling novel applications in disaster relief, the environmental sciences, transportation, and quality of […]

The 6th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum ended with a tour, reception, and lovely dinner at Heidelberg Castle. It was a time for reflection and celebration for an amazing once-in-a-lifetime week for the students. As a journalist, it was fascinating for me to watch the students grow more confident as the week went on. By Friday, they were able to go up to the laureates and strike up a conversation about their work, Heidelberg, or even the dessert that we were eating. The laureates themselves really felt like they knew the students, sometimes referring to them by their first name in the hallway. This is what the HLF does so well. […]

Last Thursday, Politico held an AI Summit: Innovation and Governance as “a global leadership gathering of policymakers, business leaders and experts for solutions-driven conversations on the impact of AI on governments, industries and society.” Some notable government participants included Representative Will Hurd (Texas), France Córdova (National Science Foundation), and Stacy Dixon (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity). In his opening remarks, Hurd said that we need to “double down on basic research.”  The problem with basic research is that “often times it is hard to understand the return on investment of basic research. People believe the government should have the same returns as venture capital, private equity, but that’s just not possible. […]

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 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 […]