Careers, People•
on January 21st, 2010•
From analyzing the contours of the ocean floor to protecting our financial systems from hackers, software is a vital part of the global economy. The men and women who understand the science of computers — computer scientists — will be critical to every industry for the foreseeable future. The career of computer scientist is crosscutting. Computer scientists can work across any of the in-demand fields, from biology to space science.
The general public sometimes confuses computer science with vocational areas that deal with computers (such as information technology), or think that it relates to their own experience of computers, which typically involves activities such as gaming, web-browsing, and word-processing. However, the focus of computer science is more on understanding the properties of the programs used to implement software such as games and web-browsers, and using that understanding to create new programs or improve existing ones.
Computer science deals with the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application. Computer science has many sub-fields; some, such as computer graphics, emphasize the computation of specific results, while others, such as computational complexity theory, study the properties of computational problems. Still others focus on the challenges in implementing computations. For example, programming language theory studies approaches to describing computations, while computer programming applies specific programming languages to solve specific computational problems, and human-computer interaction focuses on the challenges in making computers and computations useful, usable, and universally accessible to people.
While some computer scientists work for universities, pushing the theoretical boundaries of the science, others become Master Coders. Master Coders write software code with grace and beauty, mastering languages no less elegant than Chinese or Russian. They rule a world that is beyond the imagination of most. Their code and algorithms power all of the hardware that we touch: cars, smartphones and computers. It is their code that brings the greatest animated movies to life and makes our video games seem so real. Even floating digital clouds are brought to life by elegant algorithms.
When I was in high school, we had two choices if we wanted to study a “foreign” language: French and Spanish. Today, there is a new set of languages that should be studied by all students. “Students need to study programming languages to be literate in our increasingly technological society” commented Roderick Weldon Woodruff, Executive Director of the Urban Video Game Academy. Certainly not all students will become Master Coders, but some will be inspired at an early age and go on to push the boundaries of the science, protect us from hackers, and design the software that communicates with life across galaxies. It is a good idea to get your son or daughter involved in a digital arts, video game or computer-oriented summer camp at an early age.
If it isn’t obvious, I am humbled by what Master Coders can do. This article was inspired by a few Master Coders, who I am fortunate to count as friends: Alan Zander of TomoTherapy and Bill T. Becker of SiTEL. In the months to come, I will be interviewing each of them as they are role models for future generations of Master Coders.
If you want to get a glimpse into how they think, there is a great book that was published a few years ago by O’Reilly Media. Beautiful Code answers the question, “How do Master Coders solve difficult problems in software development?” In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts as they work through their project’s architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.
Written by Todd Borghesani
Internet, People•
on December 28th, 2009•
This generation of high school and college students — The Gamer Generation — stands to have the greatest impact on our society. At more than 90 million people, the “gamer generation” is already bigger than the baby boom.
They are already aware of the extraordinary problems of 21st century: feeding a growing population with a limited amount of arable land; the green revolution and alternative energy, managing the impacts of global warming and greater energy demands; and the spread of health threats that respect no national borders.
Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. It is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.
They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, Playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.
The gamer generation will dominate the workforce and they are already changing the rules of business. All the hours immersed in game culture have created masses of employees with unique attributes: bold but measured risk taking, amazing ability to multitask, and unexpected leadership skills: 21st century skills that employers want.
The Gamer Generation innately understands the nature of online life.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is a spring chicken in the history of philosophy, living and working from 1925 to 1995. Yet his influence has surged in the last 20 years, vying today with the most prominent philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. He established a different definition of “virtual” that speaks to games and online experience in particular.
The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.
Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: “Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”; and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension.” – Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Deleuze opposed essentialism, that is, the notion that existences, such as human beings, could be distilled into a single common identity. Instead, he saw existence in terms of multiplicity in all its forms – that, for instance, we as human beings are not single selves but multiple selves spread out in time, that life itself exists in a continuum and state of alchemical flow and information exchange.
What we think of as “virtual” is in fact very real and important, accessed on a parallel dimension rife with meaning.
He lifts the virtual up above the “actual,” or the material manifestation of what we observe in metaspace. Deleuze’s virtual is neither intrinsically inferior nor superior to the material, but it is on an incomparably different plane of existence. This is a concept that would resonate with many World of Warcraft players. When we explore worlds online and connect with other players across vast physical distances, we do not become less real. Arguably, for those who have experienced this life, we feel more real – our physical masks pulled down, revealing the structure of ideas, passions and contemplations beneath.
Next time you start to castigate your son or daughter for spending so much time friending on Facebook, playing games, and socializing in Second Life, think about their play as pioneering work.
Excerpted, in part, from Erin Hoffman’s feature article, “Ditching The V-Word,” in Escapist.
Engineering, People, Science•
on December 20th, 2009•
Guess what’s on the U.S. Air Force’s wish list this holiday season. Sony’s popular PlayStation 3 gaming console. Thousands of them. The Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., recently issued a request for proposal indicating its intention to purchase 2,200 PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles.
But the military researchers don’t plan to play “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ or any of the season’s other blockbuster games. They plan to string the consoles together into a massive supercomputer and study how well they can enhance the military’s high-performance computing systems.
Once the researchers configured the hardware, they installed the Linux operating system on them, turning the gaming consoles into a military-grade supercomputer. Linderman said their first PS3 cluster was used in applications such as high-definition video processing and “neuromorphic” computing, which mimics the way the human brain perceives and processes images and information. When the new cluster of 2,200 PS3 consoles arrive in the next month or so, he said they will likely be used for similar projects.
Researchers Across the Country Harness Power of PlayStation 3. David Bader, a professor and executive director of high performance computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been involved in a number of projects involving PlayStation clusters.
When the PlayStation launched in 2006, he said, its processor far surpassed those of its generation. “Sony wanted a processor that they could use inside a game box that would be able to render the games but also incorporate real-world physics, emotion and really new aspects to game playing,” Bader said.
The same chip that enabled high-octane game play also powered Toshiba’s high-end HD TVs and technology created by IBM for oil and gas exploration.
At Georgia Tech, Bader has researched the possibility of using PS3 clusters in aircraft monitoring and financial risk assessment.
One project proposed using PlayStation 3 consoles on board commercial airplanes, he said. Consoles would not only provide in-flight entertainment for each passenger, but also serve as sensors around the aircraft that would alert the pilot to potential problems and failures.
Astrophysicists at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth are using a cluster of PS3 consoles to research gravitational waves and black holes. And even the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Cyber Crimes Center has used linked PS3s to solve Internet crimes.
Biology•
on December 3rd, 2009•
This is a quick look at the state-of-the-art of network visualization in systems biology. It’s an interesting topic on its own (and my day job at the moment), and also as it relates to the visualization of other types of networks, such as social networks (think Facebook). Systems biology is all about looking at proteins, pathogens, and more, within the contexts in which they interact. Naturally, then, the visualizations that tend to be particularly useful are those such as network visualizations that can provide macro understanding of the interactions. Questions such visualizations help with include those of the form “if a drug affects protein X, what else will it affect?”
Quite a bit of interesting complexity is present in these interaction networks (the data). They are often small-world, disassociative (unlike social networks), scale-free, and exhibit modularity. Biologists are usually either interested in looking at larger scale cell level networks, or meaningful sub-networks called pathways, which typically are in the range of 50-500 nodes.
Making life interesting, duplicate nodes representing different states are often included. The edges are directed, and may be hyperedges when multiple nodes necessarily interact together. And, in truth, the edges are often approximations of the actual interactions in the underlying network. These approximations come from experimental findings published in journals.
by A BEAUTIFUL WWW