Category: Computer Science

The perfect game Back in the 1980s, a high school friend and I created Excalibur, a computer othello program that I’ve posted about before. Even on an OG IBM PC we could play a perfect endgame from 14 moves out. There’s been a lot of Moore’s law since then and I’ve wondered if it could […]

A swanky restaurant in San Francisco isn’t my usual haunt for reporting on climate and energy. But I recently paid a visit to Bar Crenn, a Michelin-starred spot and one of two restaurants in the US currently serving up lab-grown meat. The two morsels on the plate in front of me were what I’d come […]

The day after his conviction, I was at Hong Kong FinTech Week 2023, a new annual conference hosted by the local government. Unlike people in the US, where the SBF trial is just one more episode in the prolonged crypto winter, those in Hong Kong were feeling much more optimistic about all things Web3.  The […]

There is no quick-fix to closing this expectation-reality gap, but the first step is to foster honest dialogue between teams. Then, business leaders can begin to democratize ML across the organization. Democratization means both technical and non-technical teams have access to powerful ML tools and are supported with continuous learning and training. Non-technical teams get […]

The museum building houses the largest reference library for Gandhian philosophy in the state of Karnataka, and over the next year, these workers will undertake the giant task of digitizing these books and recording their metadata on the Internet Archive: a searchable library of books, speeches, magazines, and other documents and media. It’s an effort […]

C2PA focuses primarily on content authentication through a protocol it calls Content Credentials, though the group says its technology can be coupled with watermarking. It is “an open-source protocol that relies on cryptography to encode details about the origins of a piece of content,” as I wrote back in July. “This means that an image, […]

The news: A man with Parkinson’s disease has regained the ability to walk after physicians implanted a small device into his spinal cord that sends signals to his legs. How they did it: Marc, who has had Parkinson’s for around three decades, is the first and only person to have received the new spinal neuroprosthesis, […]

By Marc Rotenberg November 6, 2023Comments It is conventional wisdom that technology typically outpaces the law. But the last week of October in the year 2023 may be remembered as the week when lawmakers made a real effort to outpace technology. To be sure, there were a lot of high-level meetings and a lot of […]

For as little as $0.12 per record, data brokers in the US are selling sensitive private data about both active-duty military members and veterans, including their names, addresses, geolocation, net worth, and religion, and information about their children and health conditions.  In an unsettling study published today, researchers from Duke University approached 12 data brokers […]

BLOG@CACM Social Protest, War, and the Organizational Culture of the Israeli Science and Engineering Academia By Orit Hazzan and Ronit Lis-Hacohen November 6, 2023Comments PrologueThis blog was written prior to October 7th, the day on which Israel’s war on Hamas broke out, the day on which reality in Israel changed significantly. On that day, not […]