jorge_salazar - Slashdot User

Submission + - 7 Cyberlearning Technologies Transforming Education

Submitted by aarondubrow on Tuesday April 07, 2015 @04:35PM

aarondubrow writes: The National Science Foundation funds basic cyberlearning research and since 2011 has awarded roughly 170 grants, totaling more than $120 million, to EdTech research projects around the country. However, NSF's approach to cyber-learning has been different from other public, private and philanthropic efforts. NSF funds compelling ideas, helps rigorously test them and then assists in transitioning the best ideas from research to practice. A story in the Huffington Post describes 7 examples of leading cyberlearning projects, from artificial intelligence to augmented reality, that are transforming education.

Submission + - Programming safety into self-driving cars (nsf.gov)

Submitted by aarondubrow on Thursday February 05, 2015 @04:45PM

aarondubrow writes: Automakers have presented a vision of the future where the driver can check his or her email, chat with friends or even sleep while shuttling between home and the office. However, to AI experts, it's not clear that this vision is a realistic one. In many areas, including driving, we'll go through a long period where humans act as co-pilots or supervisors before the technology reaches full autonomy (if it ever does). In such a scenario, the car would need to communicate with drivers to alert them when they need to take over control. In cases where the driver is non-responsive, the car must be able to autonomously make the decision to safely move to the side of the road and stop. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed 'fault-tolerant planning' algorithms that allow semi-autonomous machines to devise and enact a "Plan B."

Submission + - Maryam Mirzakhani Is First Woman Fields Medalist (simonsfoundation.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @04:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: Mirzakhani is the first woman to win a Fields Medal. The gender imbalance in mathematics is long-standing and pervasive, and the Fields Medal, in particular, is ill-suited to the career arcs of many female mathematicians. It is restricted to mathematicians younger than 40, focusing on the very years during which many women dial back their careers to raise children.

Mirzakhani feels certain, however, that there will be many more female Fields medalists in the future. “There are really many great female mathematicians doing great things,” she said.

Submission + - How a supercomputer beat the scrap heap and lived on to retire in Africa. (utexas.edu)

Submitted by jorge_salazar on Monday July 14, 2014 @06:14PM

jorge_salazar writes: Pieces of the decommissioned Ranger supercomputer, 40 racks in all, were shipped to researchers in South Africa, Tanzania, and Botswana to help seed their supercomputing aspirations. They say they'll need supercomputers to solve their growing science problems in astronomy, bioinformatics, climate modeling and more. Ranger's own beginnings were described by the co-founder of Sun Microsystems as a "historic moment in petaflop computing."

Comment Interstellar exploration (Score 1) 58

by jorge_salazar on Wednesday May 14, 2014 @12:29PM (#47000115) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Former Director of JPL Edward Stone About Space Exploration

In 2016 the Voyager could become the first interstellar spacecraft. What does this mean to you, and are you hopeful that humans will see for themselves what's out there beyond our solar system space bubble?

Submission + - Making graphene work for real-world devices (nsf.gov)

Submitted by aarondubrow on Thursday April 24, 2014 @11:41AM

aarondubrow writes: Graphene, a one-atom-thick form of the carbon material graphite, is strong, light, nearly transparent and an excellent conductor of electricity and heat, but a number of practical challenges must be overcome before it can emerge as a replacement for silicon in electronics or energy devices. One particular challenge concerns the question of how graphene diffuses heat, in the form of phonons. Thermal conductivity is critical in electronics, especially as components shrink to the nanoscale. Using the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Professor Li Shi simulated how phonons (heat-carrying vibrations in solids) scatter as a function of the thickness of the graphene layers. He also investigated how graphene interacts with substrate materials and how phonon scattering can be controlled. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Applied Physical Letters and Energy and Environmental Science.

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